The popular fantasy MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) has been running for a full 12 years now, and still enjoys new expansions and frequent content updates from developer ZeniMax Online Studios. In addition to supporting the long-running mass-multiplayer take on ZeniMax and Bethesda's legendary IP, though, the studio was also planning to release a new MMO codenamed Project Blackbird.
We know work on Blackbird began as early as 2018, with ZeniMax building a new engine for it. As of 2022, over 200 developers were working on the unannounced game; 300 were contributing to the project by March 2025, just a few months before Xbox canceled the game alongside Rare's Everwild and Perfect Dark, and shuttered its developer The Initiative as well.
The closures and cancelations came as part of deep, wide cuts at Microsoft overall, with many let go from Xbox and others opting to leave their positions in the aftermath. One of the latter individuals is former ZeniMax Online Studios director Matt Firor, who's explained he left because of Project Blackbird's death.
Firor has now reflected on the cancelation in a new interview, saying he understands why it was axed and doesn't feel the decision was personal but still ultimately disagrees with the decision.
"Making games is always a heartbreaking business. Like, no matter what happens, you could be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people," he told Ben Hanson of MinnMax. "I didn’t agree with what happened, but I understood the reasoning behind it. It is just financial. We’re a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say, and that number was always large."
Firor went on to explain that while the bespoke engine they were making for Blackbird was intended to help its developers maintain a steady and healthy cadence of quality content updates for the MMO, its high upfront cost made it a glaring target for Microsoft when it began looking for ways to cut Xbox costs following its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
"A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them, right? They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount," he said. "And this isn’t Xbox. This is like all public companies. They want reliable forecastable business. And the entertainment, like the video game industry, just doesn’t work that way sometimes."
"And so you can say 'Xbox,' but you could say 'EA 2008' or 'Activision 2004,'" he continued. "It’s a business, and it’s terrible sometimes. And I don’t agree with some of the decisions obviously, but the reasoning behind them makes sense on a ledger somewhere."
Still, for Firor, it was "a pretty devastating blow," especially since in many ways, Blackbird was his project as much as it was ZeniMax's as a whole. "It’s like, this is the game I came up with the concept for. I came up with the world design for. Obviously, people took it and ran with it and made it a thousand times better. But I’ve been kicking this idea around for a long time," he noted.
He added that while the game had a long way to go and needed significantly more work, it was "much different than anything else out there," and very fun to play. "The world probably would have been a better place with that game in it as far as I’m concerned," Firor asserted.
Were you sad to see ZeniMax Online Studios' new MMO get canceled last year? Were you excited to see more of it, or not really? Share your thoughts in the comments, and by voting in our poll.
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
