Shitload of jobs getting cut at Microsoft, dunno if they’ve said how many at Xbox in particular, but 9000+ overall.
Everwild canned, a new MMO from the ESO folks canned, Rare getting cuts. I guess more will come out throughout the day.
Phil Spencer out there saying Xbox has never been stronger etc etc etc. Punt these C-suite goons into the sun.
Isn’t this fucking company worth like $2.5 trillion?
friend of mine tipped me off to this last night. also in the last round of cuts made told every studio to cut 10% or some arbitrary number. dunno if it’s the same thing this time.
Phil Spencer’s statement explicitly says the company is doing better than ever, and it’s only thanks to all of the work of the people being addressed in the letter, but that to keep growing those profits they need to get rid of the people they said were responsible for said profits.
Perfect Dark cancelled and The Initiative, a “AAAA” studio, to close. that thing was in the oven for 7 years
We will protect what is thriving and concentrate effort on areas with the greatest potential, while delivering on the expectations the company has for our business.
He’s right about that, this is what I expect from Microsoft.
someone in a discord i’m in was very recently posting about how they were excited for people to finally get to play it ;_;
edit:
fucking RIP
i was talking to someone the other day and apparently they had lost their job recently because they finally finished outsourcing their xbox platform certification department to like costa rica or somewhere
heartbreaking 
I guess 50% of turn 10 is gone
What do you wanna bet none of the people making evil civilian-killing AI software for Israel got laid off? Or those pushing “Copilot” into every fucking application on Windows? Infinite money for genocide, and the street for people who just wanna make the computer make funny noises and pictures. Allowing the ActiBlizzard and Bethesda acquisitions to go through was one of the most industry-damaging decisions in recent memory.
This is a world for shareholders, the days of making a product to sell to customers for profits are gone. YOu make a product to sell at a loss so eventually a bigger sucker comes along and buys you, then they make it worse to get more money out of it, eventually the company is dead and the employees are laid off and the value of the thing is transferred to a massive bank account where it never goes anywhere again. Shareholders want AI in everything because they read something in Bloomberg or whatever the fuck. Companies are pushing AI because it’s the only way to get shareholder money, because selling products people want for money is a bust buisness. I don’t know what will happen when we all have no money, can’t work in industries that no longer exist, and everything gets more expensive.
yes! it’s been there a couple months and i’ve been meaning to go! tragically (?) i just no longer really end up in Williamsburg or Greenpoint as much these days
Field trip??
anyway, in industry news, it really feels like the games industry spent several decades building up the idea of auteurship and that the individual, unique people who work on games matter.
and they’ve spent the most-recent decade trying to convince everyone otherwise
they have my favorite pinball table - World Soccer 94. I can tell from the sliver of the side of this machine it’s the same one.
Unknown Worlds leadership dismissed so they could put the head of notable flop “The Callisto Protocol” in charge of Subnautica 2. Not looking great. Idk why they’re shocked it kinda takes a while to go from an open world crafting game to a bigger open world crafting game in a new engine with multiplayer.
Matthewmatosis made a game
Perfect Dark was the only AAA video game that looked remotely interesting to me, so of course it gets cancelled. The imsim curse continues…
sure but just remember how much actually good stuff got released in the past decade! it was a little golden era