It seems there is truly no end to the stories of Xbox messing up their hard workers with letting them go or changing things around to try and make things more profitable, and apparently they aren’t even fully done yet!
This time around a total of approximately 268 more employees have been laid off and studios have been merged together. Obsidian are now only a team working within Bethesda, clearly an attempt to get them to focus only on Fallout games much to the detriment of their other titles. Halo Studios has had a lot of their employees cut, with Activision of all companies now spearheading the next Halo game, much to many people’s dismay. Developers ‘King’, the Candy Crush guys, are being folded into the ‘Xbox Casual Games’ brand and there are even talks of fully closing down the studio Ninja Theory.
All very sad news, and especially worrying that it seems Xbox and Microsoft want to focus on just combining all their studios as much as possible, ruining the diversity of what made these studios special. Obsidian especially, as now they’re just going to churn out Fallout games as they clearly want to capture the lightning in a bottle that was New Vegas. Maybe Double Fine did the best thing and got away as early as they could… Regardless, these are people’s livelihoods and I wish them all the best in the future.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.