Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox and Activision Blizzard divisions.
First reported by The Verge, the layoffs mostly come from Activision Blizzard, although some Xbox and ZeniMax (the parent company of Bethesda) workers have also been cut. Overall, these layoffs amount to eight percent of Microsoft’s total gaming wing, which employs roughly 22,000 people worldwide.
It’s unclear exactly which studios within each of these divisions have been affected. Microsoft owns several Canadian studios, including Vancouver’s The Coalition (Gears of War), Montreal’s Compulsion Games (We Happy Few), Quebec City’s Beenox (Call of Duty), Halifax’s Alpha Dog (Mighty Doom), Sledgehammer (a California-based Call of Duty developer with an office in Toronto) and software developer Demonware (an Irish company with a location in Vancouver). U.S.-based Bethesda Game Studios, the team behind last year’s Starfield, also has an office in Montreal.
Xbox Canada declined to comment at this time on whether any of the company’s Canadian studios have been affected by the layoffs. We’ll update this story should we learn more.
In a Microsoft memo obtained by The Verge, the company confirmed that Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft, has decided to leave. Alongside his departure, Ybarra confirmed that a long-gestating Blizzard survival game was also cancelled, leading those developers to be shifted to “one of several promising new projects” within the company.
Microsoft closed its $69 billion USD (about $93.1 billion CAD) acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October. As a result, there were expectations that some layoffs would happen, as is common following mergers and acquisitions. However, people likely weren’t expecting this many. Adding further salt to the wound: the cuts come the same week that Microsoft was revealed to be the second company in history to reach trillion-dollar valuation, following Apple.
On social media, many Activision Blizzard developers also noted that they hadn’t even been informed of the layoffs and instead learned about them following The Verge‘s report. Therefore, this led to a great deal of anxiety as people awaited confirmation of their employment status.
These layoffs are the latest in a massive string of job cuts within the gaming industry. Last year, more than 10,000 workers were laid off, including those at PlayStation’s Bungie, Xbox’s Coalition, Epic Games, EA’s BioWare Edmonton and Amazon’s Twitch. As shared by indie game maker Rami Ismail, more than 5,000 developers have already lost their jobs just this month, putting the industry on pace to far exceed 2024’s total number of cuts in a much shorter time.
So far this year, layoffs have happened at the likes of Twitch, Discord, Unity, League of Legends maker Riot and Montreal-based Dead by Daylight studio Behaviour Interactive. It remains to be seen whether these layoffs will slow down, but it renews conversations about developer unionization and overpaid CEOs.
Update 25/01/2024 2:15pm ET: MobileSyrup can confirm that there have been layoffs at Beenox, an Activision-owned developer based out of Quebec. It’s unclear exactly how many were let go, but one Beenox developer says it was “quite a few.”
Image credit: Xbox
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