{"id":692538,"date":"2026-07-15T06:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T06:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/692538\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T06:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T06:48:10","slug":"xbox-layoffs-whats-next-for-the-video-game-giant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/692538\/","title":{"rendered":"Xbox layoffs: What’s next for the video game giant?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Layoffs in the video game industry have been commonplace since 2022, with estimates suggesting nearly 58,000 roles have been cut , external<\/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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Layoffs in the video game industry have been commonplace since 2022, with estimates suggesting nearly 58,000 roles have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692539,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-692538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}