The wave hit hard. Over 9,000 people were laid off across Microsoft. A big chunk of that? From the Xbox gaming teams. Studios like ZeniMax Online, The Initiative, and Rare were gutted. The Elder Scrolls Online team? Hit especially hard.
Now, ZeniMax developers are calling out the company’s top brass for how poorly it was handled using words like “inhumane,” “disgusting,” and “chaotic” to describe the entire process. And honestly, it’s hard to blame them.
Sudden logouts, zero warning, total silence
One dev told Game Developer they were locked out of everything, email, Slack, work account, without even being told they were laid off. Hours passed with no answers. Just silence.
Page Branson, part of the ZeniMax Workers United union, said the whole thing was a mess. “People didn’t know if they’d still have a job by the end of the day,” they said. “There was no structure. No plan. Just fear.”
And when the dust started to settle, they realised something worse: people who were core to ESO were gone. Not just support roles. Not juniors. People who knew the game inside out.
“They made it feel normal. It wasn’t.”
Senior QA dev Autumn Mitchell summed it up: “This wasn’t normal. It’s not okay. And no matter how many times they do it, it doesn’t make it normal.”
She talked about devs who gave 15 years to the company, suddenly being cut off and forced to type goodbye messages into Slack before they lost access. “That’s disgusting,” she said. “These people made your company money for over a decade. And you just pulled the plug.”
Years of knowledge wiped out
That’s the part that hits the hardest: what Microsoft lost that it can’t just hire back.
“Practical knowledge disappeared overnight,” said Branson. “Now, the rest of us are trying to pick up the pieces. But the people who knew how everything worked are gone.”
Mitchell estimated a third of ZeniMax’s institutional memory is just… gone. And she’s not sure how they’re supposed to keep making games at the same quality. In some cases, she said, it might not even be possible.
No roadmap. No trust.
These weren’t just cuts; they were cracks in the foundation. Microsoft might’ve saved money short-term, but it torched a decade of experience in the process. And what’s left? Fewer people. Low morale. A future that looks uncertain.
If this is how Xbox treats the people building its biggest games, it’s fair to ask what’s next. Can they recover from this? And more importantly, why should players or devs trust them again?
Right now, a lot of people at ZeniMax are still picking up the pieces. And the rest of us? We’re still watching this unfold.
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