Forum - View topicNEWS: Xbox Announces Layoffs Amid 'Reset' of Video Game Division
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Yugi12
 Posts: 50 |
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Rare didn't really fall off at the end of their tenure with Nintendo. At the time their final games(Donkey Kong 64, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Tooie, and Conker's Bad Fur Day) were well liked and got good reviews. Yes that's right DK64 was well liked when it came out, and got good reviews. The hate that it gets nowadays is retroactive. Also the rumor that all the "good people" at Rare had already left prior to the Microsoft buyout is false. At the time that Microsoft bought Rare, six people from the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark team had left. That's it. All the other people at Rare were still there. There was no mass exodus at the time. Also since you bought up Yooka-Laylee you should play Yooka-Replaylee. |
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Slop Slop no Mi
 Posts: 64 |
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It's 2026 and people are still riding that anti-Fallout 76 bandwagon? Bethesda is on record stating that game is making money hand over fist through and pretty much their bread and butter money maker akin to Final Fantasy 14 is for Square-Enix while the rest of their stuff performs middling or outright terrible. If you don't like it that's fine but there's clearly a reason Fallout 76 is still going strong 8 years later while so many other games and studios got the axe in under a year especially the games like Avowed. Sure New Vegas 2 could be just as bad as Obsidians other stuff but just the announcement alone does a lot of good will. We'll all cross the bridge of the game being bad when it comes out. For now people are just happy it's finally happening.
I'm not a console fanboy unless you count PC because I play most of my stuff on PC. I was just pointing out how Sony keeps stepping on rakes while Microsoft is getting praise. If pointing that out makes me a Microsoft console fanboy then eh ok I guess. I don't even own a current gen Xbox though. I'm genuinely not seeing the big deal here on the second point? Most people have to be productive at their job or they'll lose it either by being fired or the company going under. How do you keep paying employees if a business doesn't make any money because they're not making things that sell? Pull it out of thin air? |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 15229 |
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For context, here's the staff count at Obsidian:
So under Xbox, Obsidian hired 105-115 people. This layoff cut 60-70 people, thus leaving 215-225 people. Obsidian is still more than 20% bigger than it started.
Compulsion went from 40 to 100 people - Xbox grew them to 2.5x the original size. Now they're an independent studio, larger than ever Ya guys only hear about the firings but not the hirings. Where's the celebration when people were hired? |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7251 |
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It’s 2026 and people are still disregarding the fact the game had a launch that if not for the original version of Final Fantasy 14 would probably be the worst launch for a major online game? The game is good now but it wasn’t at first. So no one was hating on the game for clout and engagement the game was simply ass.
The only notable release Bethesda had within the time since 76 launched was Starfield whose traditional copies sold numbers at least on the Xbox are unknown as the game was released on Game Pass day one so we don’t yet know how successful or how much of a failure the game was in spite of mixed reviews. A bunch of Elder Scrolls spinoffs no one has heard of. And a remaster of Oblivion which did alright.
Aside from the fact Microsoft is poorly run and overshot sales estimation for these games? You’re also willfully ignoring them canceling games that were in development at various stages that were never released.
No it doesn’t. Again the game could easily be canceled as Microsoft has shown a willingness to cancel games they already sunk money into that fans want. Remember Scalebound? If you want to carry water for Microsoft that’s fine but let’s not overlook the fact that the companies past decision making over the last decade or so is presently starting to catch up to them. To the point there’s been talks of spinning off the games division.
Which blatantly ignores the influx of criticism they’ve been getting for years and the last few months from cannibalizing the sales of games with gamepass, raising the price of Game Pass which they’ve recently dropped while rolling back some perks, the loss of subscribers from those aforementioned price hikes, laying people off, buying up studios to then shutter them, announcing games to then cancel them, Terrible brand promotion, hiking the prices of the X/S which they’ve done twice, making their IPs available on the Playstation 5. Keep in mind many of the things you alluded to Sony stepping on rakes doing. Microsoft has been doing in parallel.
So like I asked this before and I’ll ask this again with likely the question going unanswered again. What happens when the company asks you to do something that is objectively a terrible idea you do it and your product suffers primarily or in part from this. In addition to the company you work for over-investing/over expanding, and over estimating in their products they’re producing expecting things to happen that inevitably won’t. Is it fair to fire the employees that did what you told them to do supposedly to save costs while you continue doing the same exact shit you did that lead to these cuts in the first place? Not to mention neither Microsoft or their gaming division is in danger of going under but if it were factually speaking that would primarily be the the fault of the people at the top making decisions not the grunts doing what they’re told. Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Sat Jul 11, 2026 2:01 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Nionel
 Posts: 635 Location: Nebraska |
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This is the Internet. Sony can do no wrong and anyone who is seen as defending Microsoft is the greatest enemy of gaming. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7251 |
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Maybe I must’ve not been paying attention to the public discourse the last 20 years.
But I vividly remember Sony’s gaming division catching flak for things like - The Launch prices of the PS3 along with shortages - Removing the ability to play PS1 & PS2 discs from the PS3 - The PSN Hack of 2011 - Their lack of support for the PSVita - The PSPGo - The PSOne mini - Putting Japan Studio out to pasture - Causing the cancellation of the American Release Of Omega Labryrinth Z eventhough not even the Australian and British were cool with it. - Moving their headquarters from Japan to the U.S. - The first attempt to shutter the PS3 and Vita’s PSN stores - Them (along with Nintendo & Microsoft) using sticks in their game controllers that ar prone to stick drift - Limited PS5 availability at launch - Hiking the prices of PS Plus - Catching Heat for the first batch of layoffs at Bungie eventhough the company themselves were responsible for those layoffs Feel free to add anything I missed The problem with defending Microsoft is that you have decades of questionable things they’ve done for which there isn’t much to excuse or defend them for. |
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2987 |
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I have not seen a single word of praise toward Microsoft for the Fallout rumor. If anything it's being derided as jangling keys to distract from all their nonsense. Which it is. And that's before getting into how it might not even see the light of day if it ever even enters production due to MS' mercurial behavior. They might change their minds in six months anyway and then decide they want to sell Obsidian or spin off Zenimax because Nadella and Sharma got some prompt from ChatGPT. These people do not know what they're doing
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thievingdude
 Posts: 14 |
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Every gaming company gets flak it's just people choose to ignore or downplay it when it comes to their favorite company by saying it's not a big deal. I see some posts here trying to insinuate Nintendo is doing just fine as if they didn't start the whole trend of killing of physical games with game-key cards, normalize $80 games, or rely heavily on full-price remakes and remasters that are inferior to the originals, or their infamous history of litigation against fan projects and smaller studios like the Palworld lawsuit they recently lost and basically ruined their own reputation and goodwill beyond repair as a result.
BadNewsBlues covered a lot of issues with Sony but the one I always hear the most about and care the most about is them moving their headquarters to California and killing off the Japanese side of their company. People tried to hype up Astrobot but it was just a glorified IP museum to me. I don't wanna see Dartz as a robot costume I want a new Legend of Dragoon game, dangnabbit. Even Steam gets some hate because of the way they treat anime games randomly ban certain titles. I'm not that familiar with Microsoft but I know they have their own list of complaints like how a lot of their modern games aren't very good like recent Halo and Gears of War games. Maybe I'm just too unfamiliar with them but something like this seems like a cause of trying to fix that problem. If they're laying off the studios and people who made all those bad games then that should be seen as a step in the right direction rather than a negative unless you're one of the people who got laid off for making bad games then yes I can see why it's bad to you. Will they make actually good games from now? Who can say? |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2783 Location: Germany |
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Asha Sharma, ascended from Microsoft´s failing AI division, is basically the Zaslav of gaming. He was fattening WB up for another sale while strategically offloading the debt of the newly joined AT&T division. I smell nothing good here.
Nintendo is on a high and I ain´t happy with what Sony is doing atm but at least they have a vision. To be an anti-consumer Steam competitor with strong exclusives. That´s... something. Xbox, on the other hand, is in such a freefall that Digital Foundry basically wrote off its future in this week´s podcast. None of the 3 hosts had anything positive to say about current developments or what they know of the Series successor. They never go that negative. 90s Sega wasn´t this suicidal and the One generation now looks like a winner. I still have mine, never upgraded, and never will, as all their games are on PC and even competitors. RIP Xbox: 2001-2020. PS: Xbox "Original" emulation is in a good place now. |
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2987 |
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Definitely a possibility, right down to the "glass cliff" situation it feels like. Wouldn't be surprised if this is part of a winding down of the whole division and MS doing it in stages just because the whole thing is too big to shutter all at once. They've effectively just walked back the whole 2018 acquisition spree, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them do the same for the 2021 acquisition of Zenimax. Eventually all this is gonna be scattered to the winds at best |
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