Like 2023 before it, 2024 has been a year full of disastrous cuts in the gaming industry — and the problem only continues to get worse. This morning, it was revealed that Microsoft is closing three developers under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, including Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Prey, Redfall), Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Hi-Fi Rush), and Alpha Dog Games (best known for Mighty DOOM). To put it lightly, this news is devastating, and also completely beyond the pale for a company that's ripping past earnings expectations with a $21.9 billion net income and the highest market cap in the world.
To absolutely nobody's surprise, pretty much everyone is (rightfully) pissed off about this, especially since Microsoft just finished a $69 billion Activision Blizzard King acquisition in October and already cut roughly 2,000 gaming jobs earlier this year (a "reprioritization of titles and resources" was necessary, apparently, but take a look at those stats in the first paragraph again). As my colleague Zachary Body writes, Xbox likes to position itself as "a safe place for developers to take risks and explore creative games," but apparently even something as successful and acclaimed as Hi-Fi Rush isn't good enough to save you from layoffs if your games aren't optimized for maximum long-term shareholder value.
