Xbox Resets Studios

Cuts here, there and everywhere

With all the furore over Playstation and Sony’s terrible decision to end physical game releases in the coming years, it’s easy to forget that the story before that was the earthquakes over at Microsoft. Many of the illusions over at Xbox have faded away, and terrible management decisions have led to lots of people losing their jobs. Whether those jobs should have existed as they did in the first place is another matter, but regardless of that, Xbox has managed themselves into a real mess.

One of the most recent reports on Xbox’s ‘reset’ (should be read as cuts to make us profitable) has seen more that a hundred people fired from Id Software, as it’s been reported. Id Software is the studio behind Doom – if you weren’t aware – and the recent firings has left Id a skeleton of a studio. Then there’s Bethesda, of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, with the massive studio losing their own share of staff.

There seems to have been something of a hands-off approach to game development at Xbox, but that is certainly changing, and there will likely be more firings in the coming days and maybe even months.

Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Returning to Turok with the collection on Switch.