It’s another day in the darkest timeline: Microsoft announced today that it’s closing four Bethesda studios, following on the heels of wider layoffs in January. According to an email from head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty, obtained by IGN, Bethesda studios Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Studios, Tango Gameworks, and Roundhouse Games will shutter, with some employees moving to other Bethesda studios and others–including at Bethesda more broadly–losing their jobs.
Booty writes that
These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades. To double down on these franchises and invest to build new ones requires us to look across the business to identify the opportunities that are best positioned for success.
What is “success” here? It’s not Redfall, sure, or maybe even Ghostwire: Tokyo. But apparently it isn’t Prey, Dishonored, or Hi-Fi Rush either. It isn’t, in Booty’s words, nurturing beloved worlds for decades. It isn’t, as Booty writes of Arkane Austin, having “a history of making impactful and innovative games.” It isn’t “the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things.”
In other words, success isn’t making games that people love, games that do interesting new things in their genres and are, by all measures, good. It isn’t coming to work to dedicate yourself to making those games alongside your colleagues. It isn’t living here in the world most of us live in: where you show up to your job and do it the best you can, where some things you do are great and some things miss the mark, but you learn from all of them and get to try again.
Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
— Dinga Bakaba (@DBakaba) May 7, 2024
If success as a game developer is defined by making great games that people like, the folks at these Bethesda studios were pretty successful. If success as an executive like Booty is defined by making the numbers go up, that’s happening too. But apparently being successful at your job doesn't earn you the right to keep it, because developers are losing their jobs today and executives aren’t.
