Today Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took a trip to Bethesda Game Studios in Rockville, Maryland. She was welcomed with open arms, of a sort.
Those arms belonged to a giant inflatable version of Scabby, a rat unions often install near locations where they’re protesting against poor labor practices. This is relevant because Microsoft recently took its shearing scissors to Xbox, laying off 1,600 workers last month with another 1,600 to come at some currently undefined point (or points) in the future. Developers also planted red flags outside the studio, one to represent each laid-off Bethesda worker.
“We heard that Microsoft leadership was coming to our office this week, and decided to make our presence visible at the office to show how our developers have been impacted by these devastating layoffs,” technical producer and union member Nathan Hahn said in a statement provided to Aftermath by CWA (first posted by Game Developer's Chris Kerr).
“To show our presence," Hahn continued, "we put up posters around the office, but we were immediately told by management we couldn't have posters facing the outside of our cubes. Then, we brought in balloons so that they could see we were here, but inside our cubes this time. A separate team of laid off developers planted flags outside, one flag for each laid off dev. Each flag was a public reminder of how many people management cut from our teams—not just our colleagues and coworkers, but our friends at the end of the day.”
Previously, Bethesda workers were forced to take down an in-office memorial to their unceremoniously dismissed colleagues. Since then, workers at Bethesda's Rockville location and other Microsoft-owned studios around the country have demonstrated against the company's callous actions, with another set of rallies to come on August 18.
Sharma, who’s spent basically her entire tenure at Xbox jingling keys in audiences’ faces and imploring them to remember that thing they used to like, responded to all of this pretty much exactly as you’d expect.
“Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls VI: ******** this morning,” she wrote on Twitter. “The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater.”
All the flags planted by workers (Credit: CWA)
This continues what has quickly been established as a strategy: Lean on nostalgia-friendly franchises so heavily that they creak under the strain and hope that fans just move on from the part where numerous beloved video game studios with decades of history have been hollowed out. (All the nostalgia, of course, also serves as a convenient distraction from Microsoft's complicity in an ongoing genocide.) Last weekend’s annual QuakeCon in Grapevine, Texas was another attempt at playing the hits as loudly as possible, even though half the band is gone.
Meanwhile, during a recent podcast appearance, Chris Hays, lead services programmer at Doom and Quake developer id Software, gave his appraisal of how things feel behind the scenes, saying that “morale has never been lower.”
"It is hard to make a game that is triple-A—that is like we've done before—with half the people. And by hard, I mean impossible,” Hays said. “We're not the same id. We're half the same id. It was the people; what made us special was the people and the relationships that we have. It's not the IP. Our name doesn't matter. It was the relationships we built and the experience that we had together."
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Mikhail Klimentov
