I feel like I’m grieving’: staff on the devastating fallout of widespread

What the report says

Last month, Microsoft’s gaming division told its workforce it was cutting 3,200 jobs, which some say will have big ramifications for game development – as well as taking a huge personal tollOn the morning of 6 July, an email went out from Asha Sharma, the chief executive of Xbox, to all of the division’s employees around the world. Under the headline “Resetting Xbox”, it announced the most significant restructuring in the history of Microsoft’s console business: 3,200 staff would be laid off throughout the financial year to 2027, and 1,600 of those roles would be eliminated immediately.An hour later, at studios throughout company, the Teams meeting invites started arriving.

“It was a virtual call with our studio manager,” says Anne Barrett, who was laid off from Bethesda Game Studios Austin. “All of our cameras and microphones were turned off so we weren’t able to say anything or react to anything. We were just brought in, told the news and it was like: ‘You guys are going to lose access to your Slack channel.’ So you saw a flurry of goodbye messages before everything was just shut off.”This, it seems, was the routine, at least at studios in North America: a Teams call with a studio head, a prepared statement read, then a warning about Slack (the group messaging app widely used at game development studios).

Emails, the staff were told, would be turned off a few days later. “We’re primarily a remote studio, so Slack is the main mode of conversation with our teammates,” says Morgan Goin, who worked at ZeniMax Online Studios. “All through the morning, everyone was sending their goodbyes … ‘Hey, it’s been great working with you. Here’s my contact information. I’ve loved working here. I will miss all of you.’” Then silence.Bethesda Games Studios and Zenimax Online Studios were unionised in 2024 and both Goin and Barrett are on the bargaining committees for their respective studios, currently in talks with Microsoft.

Key details

In the US, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act is a federal law that requires companies with 100 or more employees to give its workers 60 days’ notice before major closures or mass staff layoffs. Consequently, affected staff at US studios will be paid until 4 September. Union reps at Bethesda are undertaking a bargaining process with Microsoft to negotiate severance packages and any benefits owed, and is attempting to get at least some affected members re-employed. Rallies are taking place outside studio buildings across North America, with the Bethesda union seeking support from gamers via social media.Staff say rumours had been circulating about a new wave of lay-offs for several weeks, and that they saw the Bloomberg article on 10 June warning of coming job cuts.

“There was an impending sense of doom, and it was like, man, is it going to be us?” says Barrett. “We thought we were safe. I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.”“I remember, I laughed the whole day because I was in complete disbelief,” Barrett adds.

“I was like, there’s no way they’re doing this. That’s how I processed it. Some of my co-workers were just devastated. I mean, breaking down. They did not understand what was going on. We had people who were just in really dark places. I think it hit me probably the next day. I felt like, wow – I just spent seven years doing all this. In college, people called me Bethesda because it was my dream to work here. And that was just … gone.”This is what doesn’t get reported with the statistics of mass redundancies: the sheer human cost of it.

More from the announcement

“I’m very tired, my sleep schedule is all kinds of messed up, my eating has not been great,” says Goin. “I have to ask myself daily: have you had enough food and water? Have you had enough sunlight? When was the last time you took a shower? We’re doing the depression symptoms, that’s what’s happening. I feel like I’m grieving.”Simon Préfontaine has a similar story. Previously a designer at Bethesda Game Studios Montreal, he is a single father concerned about the future without work, and without the health insurance his job came with.

“It’s very stressful,” he says. “I’ve heard of other people who have been laid off for over a year and haven’t been able to find work.