Xbox’s latest wave of layoffs led to around 9,000 direct job losses, but this doesn’t give us the full picture. Alongside job cuts, it’s also come out that Xbox has pulled its funding from smaller studios that had publishing deals with the gaming giant, and the knock-on effect is leading to even further job losses.
As a result of this, it’s now being reported that the gaming industry across Europe is in panic, as studios that either had deals with Xbox or were part of outsourcing teams helping on larger Xbox projects are now having to suddenly adapt to losing a great deal of work and funding.
This comes from Ireland-based journalist Lex Luddy, who explained what she had heard from sources across Europe on the Rewinder podcast.
Xbox Has Caused Even More Job Cuts Than Are Being Reported, It’s Claimed
“The story here really is that these layoffs are way bigger than the number that Microsoft is reporting, because there’s a lot more indirect layoffs happening than are being reported,” says Luddy (at around the 1:02:00 mark). “It was described to me as people are at panic stations.”
As Luddy explains, this is because many companies rely on work being outsourced to them by publishers like Xbox. “Look at Iron Galaxy being farmed out for Tony Hawk, or Virtuos being hired to do the Oblivion remake,” she says. “Studios like that, who contract work primarily, a lot of them have had huge swaths of work pulled from the schedule, and there’s no one to fill it in. As a result, there have been layoffs.”
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We’re already aware of at least one instance of this happening, as around the same time as the Xbox layoffs, it was revealed that Romero Games had the funding for its unannounced game pulled. It has been widely reported that it was Xbox who pulled the funding, and Romero Games all but confirmed this when its own statement read that we could infer the publisher’s identity from “public information”.
While the knock-on effect of these layoffs is still being felt, some in the industry are speaking out about Xbox’s impact at large. Most recently, it was the Game Pass model in the line of fire.
- Date Founded
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April 4, 1975
- CEO
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Satya Nadella
- Headquarters
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Redmond, Washington, United States
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