Xbox promised that it wasn’t done with its “reset” after its first round of layoffs earlier this year, and well, it wasn’t lying. Around 300 more Xbox employees lost their jobs this week in a move that focused on merging some of the studios that remain under the Xbox banner. That means there are now just 12 Xbox-owned studios left, almost half the total that resided under the platform’s banner five years ago.
In 2021, 23 studios operated under the Xbox banner. After various departures, closures, and this week’s mergers, only 12 remain. It would have been even fewer than that too had Xbox not bought a studio between 2021 and now, completing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023 for close to $70 billion.
Activision Blizzard is one of the 12 studios that remain under Xbox. One of the biggest updates from this week’s Xbox news is that Activision will develop the next Halo game. Halo Studios has survived closure, but barely, with most of its team laid off. It will be kept open to support the Halo community, whatever that might mean.
Halo Studios came and went without developing a single original new Halo game.
Rare has also survived, likely thanks to the ongoing success of Sea of Thieves, but will also now operate under Activision. Unlike Halo, there was no note on what that might mean for the studio’s future projects. The fear among Rare fans is that it will be turned into a Call of Duty support studio while also continuing to update Sea of Thieves.
Other mergers confirmed this week include Obsidian moving under Bethesda to continue work on its new Fallout game, and Turn 10 joining forces with Playground Games to help with future Forza and Fable titles. All moves that have continued to condense the number of studios under Xbox to almost half of where it was just half a decade ago.
Most of those studios mentioned already are the lucky ones. The studios that, despite mass layoffs, still exist. Four of the 23 studios Xbox owned in 2021 have been shut down - Alpha Dog, Tango, The Initiative, and Arkane Austin. Tango was lucky enough to be revived and acquired by Krafton, and Alpha Dog has since returned as an indie studio.
Other studios that have managed to make it out alive by regaining their independence include Double Fine, Compulsion Games, and Undead Labs. Senua studio Ninja Theory was hoping to do the same thing. However, after multiple deals have fallen through, it too now looks like it might be shut down, meaning that Xbox's total could be reduced to 11 relatively soon.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/xbox-12-studios-left-23-in-2021/
