Xbox is still pressing the reset button, as it is “continuing our reset” which first started earlier this year. The euphemism for layoffs and firings for this wave, with the internal memo by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma shared straight to Xbox Wire, unfortunately affected more than 268 jobs across Xbox Game Studios and in particular, Halo Studios.
Halo Studios, the development team previously dubbed 343 Industries, was on their own reset journey of their own with a rebrand, a switch to Unreal Engine 5 and a new remake of Halo: Combat Evolved on Xbox and PlayStation. The reset is short-lived, as Halo Studios will be left to only a “small team” to support the currently available games.
The next Halo game will be developed under Activision. It will be by “a new, purpose-built team” i.e. not any of the studios involved in the annual Call Of Duty games. In fact, the memo specify this new team making Halo will be seperate from COD. Whatever Master Chief’s next fight is, it will under the Activision banner instead of Xbox Game Studios, which still means said fight can will likely continue to go multi-platform.
Rare (Sea Of Thieves) and World’s Edge (Age Of Empires) are now being placed under Activision instead of Xbox Game Studios. It is unclear why these two specific teams are being moved, though Rare could be an instance of it having a multi-platform success and is being moved out of Xbox which is going to publish more console exclusive titles moving forward.
Another big blow of consolidation is the merging of Turn 10 and Playground Games. The original developer of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10, hasn’t been performing well, its “build from the ground up” 2023 title was lacking and post-launch supported ended last year. It’s likely that Playground, the team formed to create the spin-off Forza Horizon and now developing Fable, will be the one standing. Whether there will be another Forza Motorsport or the series will continue on as an open world racer remains to be seen.
Another “makes business sense” change that may not make sense at all to gamers is moving Obsidian out of Xbox Game Studios and into Bethesda.
Obsidian and Bethesda Game Studios have been making the games that serve the same audience for the most part, first-person open world RPGs. Though Obsidian’s portfolio expands more beyond RPG of the first-person and isometric perspectives. Plus, Obsidian was the most productive of the Xbox Game Studios, with last year releasing Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, plus the ongoing support for survival game Grounded 2. Obsidian is working with Bethesda again on a Fallout game, so now the collaboration is technically an internal one among development studios under the same publisher.
The one last merger in this round of the “reset” is having Microsoft Casual Games rolled into King. King was part of the Activision Blizzard acquisition and still is the leader of casual games.
The memo also unfortunately revealed the closure of Ninja Theory, which failed to find a buyer.
Compulsion and Double Fine are back to being indies. Undead Labs are also operating independently with State Of Decay 3 to be published by a new publisher but will still be coming Day 1 on Game Pass.
The situation with Arkane Studios is still ongoing, as consultations are expected to continue through the end of the year. The fate of one of the most prolific immersive sim developers of the last decade, which already lost one a whole separate team earlier this decade, remains to be seen.
This round of layoffs and studio reshuffling brings the expected layoffs to “roughly three-quarters of the way” so there should be at least another round coming.