Xbox rocked the games industry world in the wrong way by closing down several Bethesda studios, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. And according to Bloomberg, the game publisher and console maker is still not done with its job cutting.
Xbox is offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, parent company which Bethesda is under.
The Bloomberg report also mentioned that Arkane and Tango were in the midst of pitching their next game and are looking to hire more staff before being shut down. Tango was pitching for a sequel to Hi-Fi Rush, their recent character action hit with critical acclaim. Arkane Austin, after releasing the mess that was Redfall, seeked a return to making an immersive sim, possibly the next Dishonored.
In a town hall meeting with staff at ZeniMax/Bethesda, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty mentioned that the studios are spread too thin. Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios said, in the same town hall meeting that “it’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do”.
Xbox made two huge acquisitions in the form of ZeniMax (the parent company of Bethesda Softworks) in 2020 for $7.5 billion USD and then Activision Blizzard last year for $68.7 billion USD.
Microsoft then laid off 1,900 staff in February, most of them coming from Activision Blizzard.
The gloom news of Xbox shutting down their recently acquired studios is looming over the upcoming release of Xbox Game Studio’s first game release of the year, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, set to launch later this month.
Hellblade II is a smaller-scale game length-wise (the game length is under 10 hours) and can only exist in a world where a publisher is okay with smaller, well-crafted experiences. But if the award-winning studio behind Hi-Fi Rush got the axe, or the studio the restarted a new wave of immersive sim with almost a perfect record of great game releases until recently, what makes any of these other studios under Xbox safe?
As long as they have another project in the works the won’t requiring hiring more staff, apparently.
Source: Bloomberg