About three weeks following the announcement that Microsoft was laying off over 9,000 workers across its entire business, including many under the Xbox umbrella, a number of ZeniMax staff have talked to Game Developer about the fallout of those decisions. It seems that virtually across the board, all of the developers are currently dealing with a ton of emotional distress seeing so many of their colleagues unceremoniously ousted. Some of those laid off workers were with the studio for decades, and the remaining people say that these cuts will have a negative impact on their productivity going forward.
How the Microsoft Layoffs are Affecting ZeniMax Staff Today and Going Forward
In the linked article above, Page Branson, who remains on staff for ZeniMax and is a member of the ZWU-CWA union, described that day as “one of the worst days at a job I’ve ever had in my entire life.” Later on, she says that the former worst was when Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin were closed down last year during another mass layoff that saw thousands of workers lose their jobs.
Included in the numbers of people let go were some who were “absolutely crucial” to how the studio performed as a whole, but also on the continued development of MMO The Elder Scrolls Online. Another MMO that was in development (and reportedly loved by Xbox boss Phil Spencer), Blackbird, was outright canceled on that day. According to senior QA tester and union member Autumn Mitchell, about a third of the institutional knowledge that helped ZeniMax run for the past 15 years is just gone. She says she doesn’t see a way for the studio to keep shipping award-winning games in the future while looking at a studio that now feels like a “graveyard” of past colleagues with decades of experience.
Overall, it seems that the recent layoffs of hundreds of staff members at ZeniMax will have a lasting impact on the team and games made for the foreseeable future. Going forward, players shouldn’t expect any kind of new games from the studio anytime soon with Blackbird being cut, and the big expansions that The Elder Scrolls Online usually get will likely be smaller and come out a little slower in the future.
Right now, the numerous layoffs we have seen, not just at Xbox, but the entire game industry, makes it really hard to see a bright future. How can people be expected to put creative passion into games when they are constantly looking over their back for executives and shareholders to lead to them being unemployed at any moment?
