{"id":56783,"date":"2026-07-16T17:43:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T17:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/xbox-layoffs-whats-next-for-the-video-game-giant\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T17:43:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T17:43:30","slug":"xbox-layoffs-whats-next-for-the-video-game-giant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/xbox-layoffs-whats-next-for-the-video-game-giant\/","title":{"rendered":"Xbox layoffs: What’s next for the video game giant?"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Layoffs in the video game industry have been commonplace since 2022, with estimates suggesting nearly 58,000 roles have been cut , external<\/span><\/a>worldwide.<\/p>\n

Much of this is down to over-hiring and aggressive expansion around 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic sparked a massive boom in player numbers and spending.<\/p>\n

During this period, Xbox bought up multiple studios and publishers.<\/p>\n

Among its biggest purchases were ZeniMax\/Bethesda, owner of the hugely popular The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, and Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard, which it purchased for $69bn (\u00a356bn) in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Video games remain profitable, but the cost of producing them has skyrocketed.<\/p>\n

Cost-of-living crises, customer habits and rising hardware costs blamed on massive investment in AI have all had an effect on the market<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Sharma’s memo landed in early June, some staff, including Autumn Mitchell, started to worry.<\/p>\n

“People are reading in between the lines’,” says the former senior quality assurance tester at ZeniMax.<\/p>\n

“Does it mean me? Does it mean them? Does it mean my project? Does it mean my studio?”<\/p>\n

Mitchell is one of four Xbox developers BBC Newsbeat spoke to who lost their jobs in the latest cuts.<\/p>\n

All of them are members of studio unions affiliated with the Communication Workers of America union (CWA).<\/p>\n

They say requests for information were met with a “deafening silence” in the weeks between Sharma’s original memo and the eventual layoffs.<\/p>\n

“What we were left with was just a lot of uncertainty for about a month,” says Goin, who sits on ZOS’ bargaining committee – a panel of union members that represents workers at the studio.<\/p>\n

Simon Prefontaine, a game designer at Bethesda Game Studios’ Montreal office, says his studio works on “core franchises” such as Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.<\/p>\n

“We’re expecting maybe a few of us might get hit, we’re probably pretty safe,” he says.<\/p>\n

“We did not expect the scale of layoffs that we have here.<\/p>\n

“We’re stunned.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Layoffs in the video game industry have been commonplace since 2022, with estimates suggesting nearly 58,000 roles have been cut , externalworldwide. Much of this is down to over-hiring and aggressive expansion around 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic sparked a massive boom in player numbers and spending. During this period, Xbox bought up multiple studios […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[279],"tags":[155,306,11463,1264,645,2071],"class_list":["post-56783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsbeat","tag-game","tag-giant","tag-layoffs","tag-video","tag-whats","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56785,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56783\/revisions\/56785"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}