In a week when Xbox fans were hoping to hear a response from Microsoft to the PS5 Pro, the software giant is making a third round of gaming layoffs instead. 650 employees at Microsoft’s gaming business are being laid off, part of continued cuts at Xbox after Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft cut 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox jobs earlier this year and then shuttered four studios it acquired as part of its $7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition in May. Thankfully, Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks was eventually saved from Microsoft’s shutdown after Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds and The Callisto Protocol, acquired the Japanese studio from Microsoft instead.
Pretty crazy how they botched the success they had with the 360 so badly. Exclusives was what always mattered to me when it came to consoles and they just haven’t impressed in that department since then. Many quality triple a titles have come out every year but Xbox just couldn’t manage to come up with any new IPs that caught people’s eyes and missed on existing ones even with all that money.