The future of Age of Empires dev World’s Edge appears to be hanging in the balance.
The studio – which has released Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, Age of Empires 4: Anniversary Edition, and Age of Mythology: Retold all on the PS5 – was part of the latest round of Xbox redundancies, which saw the company cut another 268 jobs. (In addition to the 1,600 earlier in the year.)
According to former employees, the dev has lost roughly half of its team, and now sits under the Activision umbrella. Its latest unannounced project, thought to be Age of Empires 5, has been cancelled.
Senior software engineer Andrew Martz is among the staff who’s detailed the fall out on LinkedIn.
“Our studio was reorganised to be under the Activision umbrella. As part of that reorg, our next project was cancelled and a large chunk of our studio was laid off. I was part of that layoff.”
While I broadly understand what Microsoft’s trying to do with its restructuring, I’m not really sure how World’s Edge makes sense under Activision. Surely it would have been a better fit for Blizzard?
Either way, with half its team gone, I imagine its future projects will involve continued support for its previously released games, like the new vikings DLC released for Age of Empires 2 on the PS5 earlier this week.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/09/age-of-empires-dev-has-half-of-studio-slashed-project-cancelled-amid-xbox-layoffs
