If you follow the video game industry at all, then unless you've been living under a rock for the month of July, you've heard about Microsoft enacting its latest mass layoff, which cut 9,000+ people across the company, a large chunk of those cuts hitting its Xbox and gaming division. It was an awful way to start the month, as we learned, and are still learning, how those cuts impacted studios like The Initiative, ZeniMax Online, Rare, and King, to name a few.
In an interview with Game Developer, several ZeniMax Media developers, some of whom are still with the studio and others who were impacted in the layoffs, called out Microsoft and Xbox executive leadership for how poorly the mass layoff was handled, the chaos it caused, and the execution of the whole situation, which some called "inhumane" and "disgusting."
One former employee described to Game Developer how they were booted out of their work email, Slack, everything, without any proper notice that they'd been laid off, and were left for hours without any communication from Microsoft. Member of the ZWU-CWA union, Page Branson, said the lack of any process to the layoffs left people "distraught and confused and not knowing if they would have a job by the end of the day, or even if the layoffs were done by the end of the day."
When Branson and others started to get a better picture of who was impacted and who wasn't, Branson said that some of those who were cut were "absolutely crucial" and "integral" members of staff, specifically for The Elder Scrolls Online. Autumn Mitchell, a senior QA developer and also a member of the ZWU-CWA union, added, "It's not okay. It wasn't normal. I don't care how many times they do it to try and make it seem normal—it's not. The way they do it is inhumane. I don't care how much they say that it's dignified or they want to do it in a respectful way—it's not."
"Some people were here for 15 years and cut out. Making it so that people have to rush to type a goodbye message into Slack to their colleagues that they've been working with on various projects, that have been making your corporation money for 15 years, is disgusting. It's disgusting. If I could get any message to any executive right now it would be review this process because it's not normal and it's not okay."
Branson also spoke about what is perhaps the most significant long-term impact of mass layoffs like this: the sudden disappearance of institutional knowledge that developers who had been working at the studio for years had. "A lot of practical knowledge just disappeared overnight. Everyone left now has to pick up the pieces as best they can. The [dwindling] morale and general confusion of it all has extended into our general workflow. We used to have very, very reliable people working on things and they're no longer there. They were integral. I feel like they were numbers on a sheet that got cut, but the real application of what they were doing was integral to making everything run correctly."
Mitchell added that they estimated a third of ZeniMax Media's institutional knowledge is now gone thanks to the layoffs, and that they "don't really know" how those left standing are supposed to continue making games at the same quality they did before. They also added that they don't see how moving forward in some cases is even possible without critical members of the team who were impacted in the layoffs getting brought back.
Every story from the Microsoft layoffs is upsetting, and these details only compound the sadness for the developers and the frustration towards Microsoft and Xbox leadership for their carelessness in how things were handled. The short-term financial benefit that comes with having fewer people on the payroll only digs a deeper debt when it comes to the lack of experiential knowledge left behind, and the inability to properly train and mentor a new class of workers to take the place of the developers who players praise for creating the games we love in the first place.
These kinds of cuts, and the careless ways in which they're handled, are what make it difficult to see any real future for Xbox and Microsoft in the video game industry beyond that of a third-party publishing house. And even then, it's worth asking why anyone in the video game industry should place their trust in Microsoft, if the company is going to cut whatever it wants to cut, just to chase the latest trends in tech.
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