The craterous impact of last week’s Xbox layoffs continues to ripple outward, sending shockwaves through numerous sectors of the industry. Microsoft executives, for now, are standing firm in their haphazard decision making while workers, unions, and increasingly, fans beg them to reconsider. It’s not just thousands of game makers who found themselves on the chopping block, either; it’s also many of those behind the platform itself.
Current employees speaking to Aftermath on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak publicly, noted that internal Xbox product teams were also hit hard by last week’s layoffs, with some losing 30-40 percent of their staff. This includes, one current employee said, “people who were responsible for the original Xbox and Xbox 360.”
“Xbox in general had a lot of incredible people who stuck around for a very long time,” the current employee told Aftermath. “It’s the only way that we’ve been able to ship consoles which work well despite us always being on a shoestring budget. Tons of institutional knowledge, people stretched thin, and not enough time to properly document things, and Asha and her new leadership team have no trust in or respect [for] the value those people brought to the business. While they correctly diagnosed a shitshow, they don’t know or care to learn about why it’s so bad, and so they’re wildly blowing everything up since they’re too lazy or uncurious to actually listen to the teams who have struggled under the previous incompetent leadership teams.”
Aftermath reached out to Microsoft for more details but did not receive a reply as of this publishing.
A WARN notice from last week specifies that Microsoft eliminated 493 positions at its Redmond headquarters, along with 112 remote roles tied to the same location. Many, according to current employees, worked in gaming, and recent LinkedIn posts bear that idea out.
“I will add my name to the list of people who were laid off today at Xbox,” former Xbox platform VP Kevin LaChapelle wrote last week. “This ends my 37 years at Microsoft. I have worked in many different parts of the company, and I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program. Sitting in the auditorium when Phil announced the program at E3 2015 was incredible. The audience's reaction was unbelievable.”
“‘20 years I’ve been doing this, and I’ve seen a lotta other games come and go.’ A favorite Wreck It Ralph quote; OK, I changed it from 30 to 20, and now it’s my turn too—first layoff in 20 years,” wrote former principal product manager lead Brian Hudson. “It’s really hard to work in chaos, and sometimes change is needed for the business to survive, yet that’s little consolation for the folks who were let go along with me.”
Many engineers also lost their jobs, some with multiple decades of experience at Microsoft.
“Well, after 21 years of time invested, working hard, shipping great products, and pouring my heart and soul into Xbox, Xbox has decided that is a good number to stop at,” wrote former lead principal software engineer Matthew LeClair.
“This month marked my 12-year anniversary at Xbox, and today I learned my role was eliminated,” wrote software engineering manager Christian Macedo. “Twelve years is a long time, and I mean that in the best way. There were hard moments, proud ones, and everything in between. But what I'll carry with me most isn't a title or a project, it's the people. The team I had the privilege of leading for the past eight years. The mentors and colleagues who challenged me, believed in me, and made me a better engineer and a better leader.”
While these people were crucial to making Xbox, well, Xbox, they're not so visible to fans, who largely remain fixated on layoffs across studios that make the games they play. The current top trending post on Xbox’s player voice feedback portal is titled “End studio closures and stop the cycle of layoffs.” It reads:
The layoff of 3,200 workers at XBOX (across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, Obsidian, id Software, and XBOX Game Studios) is unacceptable. This continues a pattern that has led to 10,000+ layoffs at XBOX in as little as two years. Multiple studios have been closed or had their futures jeopardized (Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios) and numerous games have been cancelled. The developers and players agree that This Can Not Continue. A true reset that meets the needs of the XBOX community looks like the following:
Transparency for Players - Showcasing games from studios they intend to sell or close weeks later feels bad for players.
Keep Teams Together - No layoffs for the next 2 years and end studio closures. Studio closures hurt the fans of that studio.
XBOX is already profitable without reaching a billion people every day - Stop constraining XBOX by the unrealistic profit expectations of the Microsoft Accountability Margin.
Trust the Developers - Negotiate in good faith with unions and developers, so they can better represent the needs of both developers and gamers.
Layoffs are a Failure of Leadership - No executive bonuses when there is a layoff.
Invest in the Future of Gaming - Invest in the future generation of video game developers instead of unpopular technologies like AI that players don’t want. Game development expertise is the biggest asset of a video game company.
Those still working for Xbox agree that this cycle needs to end.
“In general what we saw [last] week is emblematic of Xbox history for decades,” said a current employee. “Leadership will spend billions on marketing, or content, or acquisitions, or other things they think will attract customers, but completely neglect the actual people building the products. Hardware, software, features, etc continually beg and plead for more people, and meanwhile they spend millions on a confusing marketing campaign to try to sell people on a vision that they won’t hire people to actually build.”
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Nathan Grayson
