In an all-timer of a candid photo, team green’s big leadership triumvirate sit, after a tour of the Play Days show floor, huddled together on camping chairs. Toy fishing rods aloft, their focus set intently on a tiny blue paddling pool of plastic fish, the setup here is a Fallout 76 fishing expansion booth-slash-photo-op at the behind-closed doors part of Summer Game Fest last month.
The result is Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, and Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, squished into that kind of mystically flowing composition found in classic portraiture. A portrait in this case of perfect subversive humour: three studies in body language cringe. The kind of scenario that feels straight from an Armando Iannucci production where very serious people try to maintain gravitas while holding brightly coloured children’s tat.
It’s unfortunate – fortunate? – timing that we get a picture like this, from what is really just them trying to have a bit of fun, just before the latest of a truly exhausting sequence of Xbox debacles. It was taken a month ago – but look at it now, in the light of yet more studio closures, cancelled games, and hundreds if not thousands of gaming division layoffs at Microsoft – and it takes on new meaning. The three of them here, at the village fête Fallout fishing stand, seem trapped, almost. A little helpless. Cornered against the sagging canvas of one of their once-tentpole studios, amidst the searing radioactive cloud of what has undoubtedly become their own true, weapons-grade, fully-enriched incompetence.
But also, perhaps, amongst something bigger and stronger. Xbox’s bosses ultimately report to Microsoft’s supreme overlord of course, Emperor Satya Nadella – we’ll come to him later! – but there’s also no denying it. As much as this latest, stunning round of cuts will have originated from above their heads, together this leadership team has – oh, how can I make this brand-safe? – biffed it.
It might not be a stretch to suggest there’s a large amount of video game developers, video game company employees, video game players and video game fans who might also wish they could just biff off. The vibe has shifted. We’ve had enough of the disasters now – more than enough – where the attempts at providing reasonable business cases for “organizational shifts”, or whatever the latest placative, idiomatic glibness from this lot is, don’t so much ring hollow as they do sound a great summoning bell of absolute white-hot rage.
Maybe we didn’t absolutely need another Zenimax MMO, to pick one, very unfairly, of a seemingly endless array of examples. And maybe it really was quite likely to struggle on release, because we’ve seen this more than enough times now, with all the other expensive, ultimately failed live-service punts from the big dogs in recent years, to know how it probably goes (even with its reportedly cool traversal mechanics and likelihood of, given the talent involved, actually being really quite good).
But maybe also people don’t care? Maybe people think we’ve about had it, actually, with the excuses and the rational business cases, and we’d rather Xbox and their fellow megapublishers figured this out many years ago, when they were greenlighting these games, funding them, hiring people who moved their families across continents and oceans to dedicate years of their lives to work on them.
Maybe the hundreds of developers who are now scrambling to figure out how they’ll pay their mortgages, rent or, heaven forbid, medical bills might want to hear less about how the winds have changed and more about how the person whose job is to predict the wind’s direction got it so spectacularly wrong – and how they’re somehow still in that job. Maybe, being good at the job of Person Who Is In Charge of Making Video Games Well includes not making decisions which involve waiting until the absolute last, most painful second to get the cutting knife out and shank everyone who actually makes them.
Zenimax’s project Blackbird, which really did sound cool and which I have written off incredibly unfairly for dramatic purposes here, is also only the start of it. As our extraordinarily bleak roundup summarises, Microsoft’s dripping axe has also swung for the Perfect Dark reboot, the entire Forza Motorsport series, hundreds of people at mobile megastudio King, potentially the whole studio of Romero Games, and most ludicrously of all, Everwild.
Everwild’s case is ludicrous not because it was cancelled but because it was allowed to continue unaided for so long. As my new colleague Alex Donaldson wisely pointed out, projects like Everwild – and similarly Perfect Dark, and I’m sure many more – have floundered for years. It’s not unfeasible to suggest Everwild might have been cancelled, shelved, or reworked much earlier, when trouble started to show and when jobs could be far more easily saved. This game was announced six years ago and was reportedly in development for over a decade. A decade! What has Xbox, its publisher, been doing all this time?
The circumstances which have led to the likes of Everwild and Perfect Dark being cancelled are not sudden occurrences, not surprise market shifts, headwinds, pandemic hangovers or minor miscalculations. This is a publisher utterly failing in its duty. It’s worth just reminding ourselves what publishers actually do for a second – stare at Xbox too long and it’s easy to forget. The job here is to not just fund, but attentively, sensitively, and intelligently nurture these games to fruition. It is to stabilise, encourage, and guide. At the most basic level: to help them succeed. This isn’t fantasy; it is what the good publishers – and there are some out there! – genuinely seek and often manage to do.
Instead Xbox has done the opposite, seemingly so fearful of being an overbearing landlord that it’s allowed itself to become a totally absent one, allowing its studios to struggle and wheeze as bricks crumbled and blew in the winter, as their windows started to condensate and their walls filled with mould.
These are not cursed projects or impossible ideas, nor wild, incompetent, untamable studios. They’re games being made by people who are profoundly experienced and in many cases genuinely revered. Gregg Mayles, Rare’s longest-serving developer, out in the latest bloodbath, had been there since 1989, joining the studio at 18 years old. Matt Firor, also gone – reportedly in protest at his team’s widely-praised project getting canned – founded Zenimax Online Studios and had been there as its head for 18 years, overseeing the incredibly rare feat of running an actually successful MMO into 2025 with conviction and vision. These are instead creative projects that hit obstacles – maybe impassable obstacles – and were then simply left to continue banging their heads against them while their supposed custodians and ultimate bosses were busy buying more studios, turning the video game funding model on its head, and fighting the FTC, EU, and Competition Markets Authority to assemble their industry-gobbling megapublisher.
And the likes of Everwild sting, too, because this has happened before. In fact it’s not just happened before, it’s happened before that too! To the point where I’ve already done the article going “this has happened before” just last year. The echoes thrown up by the nightmare at Rare and co. here in 2025 harken back to fellow British development institution Lionhead, of course (via Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks and the many more inbetween). A closure that happened in 2016, two years after Everwild’s development got started and a year before it was revealed. Phil Spencer was there, at Lionhead, in 2014. He was part of Xbox’s senior team when it was shuttered. That was his big lesson. The one do-over. The tortuous but, they say, necessary call that led he and Sarah Bond put out a video vowing never again.
Now, not just Firor and Mayles, or the Romeros, or even the old experts of Lionhead are out of a job. It’s hundreds and hundreds more, career professionals from Zenimax, King, The Initiative, Turn 10, Blizzard, Halo Studios, Bethesda Softworks, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, High Moon Studios, Infinity Ward, Demonware and probably more. Those on top of Microsoft and Xbox’s hefty share of the more than 17,000 developers laid off last year, the 8,000 the year before and 7,000 the year before that who are all out too. It’s the many thousands of these breathing human beings who, one way or another, after years-long job searches or painfully collapsed new studios or just being sick and tired of this utter quagmire, are forced to take their irreplaceable expertise and do something else.
Measuring the impact of this on games – and by dint of that their audience – almost feels crass in the context of the vast human cost, but it bears emphasising nonetheless. That impact will be profound. It will take time to filter through, but this is precisely what we mean when we say the old way of doing things is over. When developers of conviction and expertise leave, at this extraordinary scale, video games only get worse.
What all this proves beyond the games meanwhile is, one, that there are no lessons learned here – at least not by the people who count. Which really leads straight on to the second point: that these decisions always come right down from the very top.
Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft on a desperate crusade to the promised land of AI, by any and all means necessary, will always bear ultimate responsibility. Which is why it’s always tempting to offer some sympathy for those like Xbox’s undynamic trio and their business accomplices, whose job in these moments is often merely to be the mouth of evil, the king’s executioner. But then that sympathy is soon extinguished when you keep doing it. That goes double when you open a contemptible letter to those affected with boasts of “more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before” and a gaming business roadmap that has “never looked stronger”. And when you set it against a share price at an all time high.
That price, of course, comes in large part from Nadella’s unrestrained riding of the environmentally destructive, plagiaristic, disinformation-fuelling generative AI bubble (don’t come for me about calling it a bubble: I’m just echoing what this Goldman Sachs AI analyst said!). This may seem like a sudden gear-shift, but if we’re scratching heads for a true driving force here beyond the many other, still-present factors impacting gaming’s business malaise – from the hangover of Covid-induced investor overoptimism, to shifts in the attention economy – it’s this. The big boss has a big idea, that big idea is awfully expensive, and when that happens the margins of everything else tend to suddenly get much finer. The impact of those tight margins is then magnified a thousand times when said boss runs a company that owns such vast waves of a creative industry.
But it’s also a signifier of something else. Namely Microsoft leadership’s apparent, deeply concerning inability to think about anything like a normal human. More than that actually, it’s the utter contempt for humanity itself (all of this putting its mealy-mouthed denial of its AI and cloud software’s involvement in any “harm” in Palestine aside, of course). It’s trite to go for the whole, “these people are just like the horrible thing they make” analogy here. Typically I really do try to avoid it. But sometimes it’s unavoidable. Just take Matt Turnbull, executive producer at Xbox Game Studios, who put out an excruciating, now-deleted LinkedIn post earlier this week – excruciating even by LinkedIn standards! – responding to the news of his company Death Starring more than 9,000 careers out of existence, and in doing so really wrapping this all up so nicely that it’s just impossible to resist.
“These are really challenging times,” Turnbull nodded sagely. “I’d be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances,” before the punchline: “I’ve been experimenting with ways to use LLM AI tools (Like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss.”
Bravo, Matt. You win. I’ll take your big, yawning open goal and reluctantly oblige. These people are just like the horrible thing they make. This kind of force-fed, mass-scale generative AI is crass, cruel, damaging, destructive, robotic, anti-artist, anti-creative, anti-video game, anti-developer, anti-human. It’s a mind-killer. An obliterator of experience, institutional knowledge and the ineffable nous of true expertise.
And, as even AI’s biggest proponents will usually admit, it is fundamentally incapable of actually learning anything. Creative industries such as video games are human ones, existing because of deeply human urges, irrepressible natures and drives. Drives which run in direct opposition to the horrifying inhumanity of the people who run them.
