Yesterday, Xbox game developers held coordinated "Save Our Devs" rallies across nine cities in the United States and Canada on August 18, organized by the OneBGS union (representing Bethesda Game Studios) alongside the Communications Workers of America (CWA), in protest of the wave of layoffs that recently swept through Microsoft's gaming division like a whirlwind. The Scale of the Cuts The rallies respond to Microsoft's announcement of roughly 3,200 planned Xbox job cuts, with the first phase already having eliminated 1,600 positions and the remaining cuts expected to hit before the middle of 2027. CWA-represented Xbox workers now total nearly […]

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ZeniMax Online Studios was among the first-party studios most affected by the Xbox layoffs in both July 2025 and 2026. Last year, the team saw its sci-fi online game Project Blackbird (with related layoffs of a few hundred employees who had been working on it for years) canceled despite then-Xbox CEO Phil Spencer reportedly loving it. The end of Project Blackbird also directly led to the resignation of ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor, who would later label it as a missed opportunity for Xbox. Following the cancellation of Blackbird, ZOS refocused on its prize jewel, the popular MMORPG The […]

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