Back in July, Microsoft's reset landed hard: around 3,200 jobs cut across the fiscal year, 1,600 of them gone on July 6, and four studios pushed out of Xbox's orbit. The framing at the time was that some of these were being divested, sold on to new owners, rather than simply closed. Two months later, that promise is looking thinner.
Where things actually stand
Ninja Theory, the Hellblade studio, and Undead Labs, the State of Decay team, were both earmarked to be sold. As of now, neither has a publicly named buyer. Compulsion Games and Double Fine are going independent instead of being sold, which is its own kind of limbo. And Arkane's French labour consultation still hasn't produced a confirmed outcome.
"Being divested" sounds tidier than "being laid off." But a studio with no buyer, months after the announcement, is a studio full of people waiting to find out whether they still have jobs.
The bigger pattern
This is the part that should worry anyone who makes games for a living. As we noted when Bethesda staff described annual layoffs as the new normal, the cuts under Microsoft have stopped feeling like one-off corrections and started feeling like a schedule. Record Game Pass numbers and a strong first-party slate haven't changed that.
Good games and good years, it turns out, don't protect the people who make them.
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