Comic for 2026-07-08
Not to be outdone by Sony shooting themselves in the foot, Xbox has announced 3200 layoffs as well as the departure or closure of a handful of studios because what they've been doing is... not working.
If you ask me, things started going south the moment they shelled out such astronomical amounts to acquire Activision and Bethesda, putting more pressure on GamePass to keep bringing in subscribers. When that growth was slowing, Xbox panicked and started increasing the price of GamePass, basically killing its value in the process. So I'm not surprised they have to make some changes.
On the surface, cutting some of these studios loose struck me as drastic... Arkane, Ninja Theory and Double Fine are well-known studios responsible for some incredible content so we think of them with that value in mind. The flip side of that, I guess is... what have they brought to the table lately? They haven't really been moving the needle in a big way since joining Microsoft. And I'm excited about State of Decay 3 from Undead Labs, but they announced that in 2020, and it still isn't out yet. So that one is maybe easier to understand from a "cut your losses" standpoint.
Still, a bunch of studios and over three-thousand jobs is quite a bloodbath, and it's hard to see Xbox doing much from here aside from shrinking down to focus on their handful of well-trod franchises. Just pumping out the incremental installments of Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, etc that they know will bring in money with little risk.
And with so much senior talent laid off, the cynic in my expects they're assuming they can lean on AI to shoulder more of the work, so the downward spiral of quality is likely to continue.
Comments (8)
Telling stories as only Tim can
I'll never understand why Xbox and PlayStation go out of their way to acquire studios like Bethesda, when we all know they're just gonna fire most of the people who made it worth acquiring, and interfere with their development decisions until the studio becomes worthless. But if they can bully Bethesda into finally making a new Elder Scrolls, it might be worth it. Even if the game ends up sucking due to their influence, at least we'll be able to stop waiting. At this point, a bad Elder Scrolls VI would be better than constantly edging us with a game they probably have no intention of ever making.
This comic feels like it needs another 2 panels where the last arm comes off with a final panel being a recreation of the black knight in monty python's quest for the holy grail. 'Tis but a scratch. This is kind of the same old gaming churn we've seen for decades though isn't it? Small studio creates gaming sensation. Megalith corp buys studio, studio creatives get huge payout, megalith wrecks IP, lays off staff. Studio creatives with big $$ start new studio, create new IP, lather rinse repeat.
At least for Halo they appear to be "going back to their roots" and are apparently already working on four or five different titles.
Gutting id Software is what makes the least sense to me, what makes Xbox feel so utterly hopeless. If making a great engine that powers great games doesn't keep you safe, what does? And what does the next Doom game look like now? GenAI slop in Unreal Engine? PlayStation and Xbox are destroying themselves. I have never been so unexcited for an upcoming new generation.
It’s really awful. Post-COVID, after investors had put millions in the gaming industry and suddenly decided to stop financing gaming studios, there was massive layoffs. After that, Microsoft did the same as private investors and bought studios after studios, just for laying them off now. If I were working in the gaming industry, I’d pray whomever to not be bought, because it almost never goes well.
So what I'm reading is, buying an xbox now makes even less sense.
To be fair, most of the bought up studios got restrictions in budget and creative freedom, causing all sorts of delays or cancellations because the mothership didn't like what they did with they're limited possibilities. And to then cut them loose or terminate because they didn't bring enough to the table is blaming the wrong way. But that is just my opinion, as I'm not in any way near those tables anyway to know what they really did or didn't do after they got those restrictions set.