Elder Scrolls Online devs detail “inhumane” Microsoft layoffs as Xbox expects the “carcass of workers” to “keep shipping award-winning games”

The recent run of Microsoft layoffs saw 9,100 workers struck from the trillion-dollar company, the cancellation of games like Rare’s Everwild and the closure of entire studios such as Perfect Dark developer The Initiative.

One of the biggest offending incidents was the ravaging of Elder Scrolls Online developer Zenimax Online Studios. Despite incredibly positive playtests within and outside of Xbox, the studio’s in-development MMO Project Blackbird was shut down after eight years of work.

In the weeks since, a number of developers have commented on the project’s closure and Microsoft’s layoffs in general. However, in a lengthy interview with Game Developer, numerous developers have discussed the “inhumane” layoffs and the stress of continued expectations from Xbox.

Elder Scrolls Online devs on Microsoft layoffs

In the interview, numerous Zenimax workers described themselves as being blindsided by the decision to shut down Project Blackbird and fire a significant number of workers. Employees who were still working at the company “lost access to literally everything”, and no one knew who was being cut and who wasn’t.

“No Slack, email, nothing is working,” the anonymous developer explained. “We have an off-work Discord, but it’s all people freaking out with no real verifiable info… Considering we don’t have email now, I don’t know how they’re even supposed to contact us—I don’t know if they even have my personal email.”

“This carcass of workers that remains is somehow supposed to keep shipping award-winning games.”

Despite the massive cut to its workforce, Xbox’s expectations of the Elder Scrolls Online studio haven’t wavered. It’s alleged that a third of the workers that were keeping its project running smoothly were cut, according to ZeniMax Media senior QA tester and ZWU-CWA union member Autumn Mitchell.

“This carcass of workers that remains is somehow supposed to keep shipping award-winning games,” Mitchell said. “I don’t really know [how that works]. It looks like a lot of people moving between projects to fill in the position of someone who was laid off—and it probably took them a good six months to figure out [how to do that role effectively].”

Mitchell described the studio as “decimated” by Microsoft’s savage cuts to staff. Massive plans for Elder Scrolls Online that were in place to satiate player demands may now take much longer to bring into reality as “it’s going to take a lot of time to regroup and get those projects running smoothly again”.

“Morale is terrible,” Mitchell stated. “It’s grotesque. People are stressed. They’re crying. For a lot of us, those were some of our best friends. They’re our roommates. In my case it was my partner—my partner and I worked together and he was laid off. And I’m not a unique story.”

The developer explained that many employees had “to rush to type a goodbye message into Slack to their colleagues” that had been working at the studio for fifteen years. Page Branson, another ZWU-CWA member and ESO developer explained that Microsoft will likely never be able to regain the trust of its employees.

“I continue to think back to Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin—watching that happen is now the second worst day of my career,” they said. “We used to have very, very reliable people working on things and they’re no longer there. They were integral. I feel like they were numbers on a sheet that got cut, but the real application of what they were doing was integral to making everything run correctly.”

Microsoft’s latest rounds of layoffs are just one of many. Since acquiring studios left-and-right, the tech giant has bought and shut studios, purchased and gutted others, and even founded entire developers only to close them before releasing a single project.

Over the last few weeks, there have been reports from numerous studios about the horrifying morale throughout Microsoft’s entire portfolio of studios. Halo Studios, the team behind Xbox’s flagship series, has suffered, and Microsoft’s actions have even caused the closure of teams they don’t even directly own.