World of Warcraft: Forever, in case you missed the wild news that came out of BlizzCon over the weekend, is essentially Classic+. A reimagining of vanilla WoW with updated talent trees, new raids and dungeons, more horizontal progression, and some shiny, glossic graphics thrown over the top of the whole thing.

Given it's aping a more friction-filled time in history, you might be wondering if it'll be offering a Hardcore mode: The answer, per the "What's Next" panel, is a resounding yes. Production director Clayton Stone, who was the associate production director on Classic itself, took to the stage to profess his love of the hardcore mode:

"Hardcore represented a turning point for us as a team. We had tried a few things before it, and as [Ian Hazzikostas] covered, we have absolutely tried new things since. But hardcore represented the moment when Blizzard and the community came together, and showed not only why World of Warcraft is one of the greatest games ever made, but why that original adventure still holds so much promise for where we could go in the future.

"Which," he continues, "Is why I am also so proud to announce that Hardcore will be coming to WoW Forever as well."

While this isn't all too surprising on the face of it—Classic Hardcore proved to be incredibly popular—it will be interesting. One of the reasons why Hardocre mode became so popular was because, well, Classic is a "solved" game at this point. Chances are if you're going for a hardcore run, you already know every nook and cranny of Azeroth, which is 20 years old at this point. And if you don't, you can open a guide somewhere to maximise your chances.

But Forever will be adding new dungeons and raids, new quests—surprise encounters around every corner that could kill a Hardcore run deader than dirt. Which is likely why it's not coming out on the game's launch this November—instead reserved for the winter season.

That'll give more time for Hardcore aficionados to map out every inch of Forever's alternate-reality Azeroth and plan the best strats. And we know how WoW players love their min-maxing.

World of Warcraft has a long-standing tradition of datamining and min-maxing. So it should come as no surprise that, despite only just being shown at Blizzcon, World of Warcraft: Forever now already has online talent calculators available, assembled from a delightful tapestry of streams and ravenous info-gatherers.

There's the old reliable that is WoWHead, but I want to shout out Reddit user Baldwinbuilds for their version, which not only collects all of the currently-known info about the Classic revamp's talents, but also has a handy button that tells you exactly how they were changed. It's a tremendous bit of work.

I've had a skim through, and assembled a list of some of the wildest additions—now, keep in mind, WoW Forever's not coming until November, so all of these are likely to change between now and its debut. But it still gives you an idea of the sorts of design philosophies that Blizzard's gearing up to apply:

• Arms warriors get a new ability called Searing Strike, which does an 80% extra damage against Giants, Dragonkin, and mounted targets—knocking them off their steed to boot.
• Retribution paladins have an interesting talent called Holy Twist. This debuffs an enemy whenever you replace your current seal on them with an echo, which then re-triggers it on your next melee attack. Basically, you'll be cycling through your seals.
• Survival hunters seem to be dual wielders now with Predator's Edge, which increases your offhand damage by 10% per point, along with a bunch of new abilities that make your Mongoose Bite more effective.
• Combat rogues borrow some tricks from retail's outlaw with Relentless Blades, which reduces their cooldowns whenever they use a finisher. This is a pretty big change, given it changes the flow of combat rogues completely.
• Shamans get Totemic Projection, a huge quality of life buff, letting them take their totems with them on the move—as well as Call of the Elements, which lets you drop a full set of totems in one cast.

Other than that, it's a lot of popular snags from retail. Mages, for instance, get talents like Hot Streak, Arcane Blast, and Ice Lance, destruction warlocks get immolation, restoration shamans get Water Shield and druid healers get Wild Growth, and so on. Honestly, while it's early days, I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't gotten weirder.

But the Blizzcon demos only went up to level 38, and these are by no means finished. Searing Strike, in particular, feels like a stand-out to me, given how weirdly niche it is. And given how Blizzard's already bragged about Forever's unique, hyper-specific gear items, I'm looking forward to seeing how the studio experiments.

World of Warcraft: Forever looks—well, pretty interesting, all told. Rather than just being a Season of Discovery-style reimagining of Classic, Forever promises to be a full-on remake of classic-era WoW. Reimagined class trees, new raids, and $30 elves. Don't think about the $30 elves too hard.

But it does beg the question, why is Blizzard doing this rather than, say, developing WoW 2? It worked out swimmingly for ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, after all. Speaking to IGN, Forever's principal designer Kris Zierhut says: "I think one of the things that's singularly great about WoW is we have this game and this world and this design that has been continuously developed for the last 25 years.

"And we keep making it better. We made the graphics better, we made the rendering better, we made the lighting better; all that new stuff we showed on stage today."

That is, in fairness, true—and true of retail, as well. Part of the reason why Classic works as a concept is because modern WoW is almost straight-up a different game—new models, animations, completely reimagined class designs, and a visual aesthetic that still holds up. Forever looks to be taking full advantage of retail's steady march of progress.

Zierhut says as much: "We've also made the way the engine draws things move more efficiently. The way the server runs, handling players and moving them around, and all the things that handle spells and combat, all of that's been made more efficient and better over the years. We have this incredible engine and server infrastructure driving the game that is second to none. Why would you throw that away and start over?"

I maintain that a WoW 2 wouldn't be superfluous. With all of that progress comes a lot of technical debt (see: player housing getting borked by fixing an elevator in a 13-year old raid), as well as a ton of design choices. A direct sequel's a chance to start over and challenge basic assumptions about the game's design—the Guild Wars series becoming an increasingly action-focused game, for instance.

There's also a second argument—and this, I feel more torn on—that Forever is trying to re-capture an outdated design. On the one hand, the cynic in me understands that modern MMOs are a hell of a lot different for good reason. We datamine new information about new patches weeks ahead of when they come out, we optimise everything down to the last, minute detail. We hug these games so hard that we wring all mystery out of them.

On the other hand, there has been a yearning, a rumbling. Our own Lincoln Carpenter said as much in our MMO column: "It's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical." If Forever offers an alt-history not just of WoW, but of modern MMO design in general? Then I'm on board.

Warcraft 3: Reforged got a hefty 3.0 patch alongside its new Forsaken Kingdom expansion, but not all of the changes are for the better. Amid bugfixes and new features, Reforged now requires an internet connection to play, even in singleplayer, and it also removed the game's local area network (LAN) functionality. Blizzard did not provide a reason for these changes in the patch notes.

Blizzard does mention that LAN support and offline play are still offered by the legacy Warcraft 3 client included with purchase of Reforged. The company has a Battle.net support page with instructions on how to install this legacy client.

But it's still a frustrating, confounding change: Reforged was an embattled remaster that had to claw back support from the fanbase. The Forsaken Kingdom expansion and 3.0 patch were the perfect opportunity to complete a redemption arc and lock in Reforged as the definitive version of the 2002 RTS. But as much as things have improved, it's taken a stumble in its victory lap.

Always-online requirements have been a sore spot in gaming since they first started cropping up in the 2010s, and depending on where you live, reliable high-speed internet isn't always a guarantee. Even in the big city, outages aren't unheard of, and always-online requirements for singleplayer games remain an odious imposition on players.

The LAN removal makes even less sense to me: LAN party and tournament play have always struck me as an essential part of Warcraft 3's legacy. Why concede this ground to the original game when the remaster's reputation has been so contested since its release? You can check out the full Warcraft 3: Reforged patch notes over on the Blizzard forums. More positive changes include a new graphics mode and a doubling of the unit selection cap from 12 to 24.

As noted by MMORPG.com, World of Warcraft: Forever is coming with a peculiar economic proposition: Most of the new fork of the MMO is included in your normal WoW subscription (rad), but the new Skyborne Elf race (and its corresponding starter zone experience) is gated behind a separate, $30 purchase (sad).

While "$30 elf" might be a somewhat uncharitable characterization, there's not much else that really lights my fire in the $29.99 "Skyborne Hero Pack." In addition to the titular elves, it comes with a mount, cosmetics, housing decorations, and early name reservation.

Compared to the bleeding edge of Overwatch, League of Legends, and Diablo premium cosmetic pricing, this is just keeping pace. But with many of the best new games on Steam coming in at $20 or less, I'm feeling sticker shock.

$30, for my money, is the cost of an expansion pack under normal economic conditions, though WoW's most recent retailed for $50 MSRP. Speaking to my WoW consultant and on-the-ground BlizzCon contact, PCG contributor Tyler Colp, he wagered that any new classes coming down the line in Forever will likely be similarly monetized, and argued that this sort of monetization is less in the spirit of classic WoW than the rest of the Forever project.

Looking at it from the outside, getting so much of the rest of Forever with a normal WoW subscription strikes me as an excellent bargain, but it only throws the $30 elf into even sharper relief as a consequence. Personally, I'd be more amenable to a $15 elf as a matter of principle, but I've been out of the MMO/live service game for some time. Do you think this is a fair market value for an elf? Sound off in the comments.

As was revealed in today's Blizzcon opening ceremony, Overwatch's newest hero is on the way: Doctrine, a vampire with a cyborg arm and mechanical bats. He was debuted via a story trailer that reveals a connection to Doomfist, the game's resident punch man.

A hero trial is active now, in case you want to try him out, and it will remain live through the weekend. While his exact release date has not been announced, the game is keeping up a rapid pace for the addition of new heroes—D. Mon released just last month on August 11.

That's not all Blizzard teased, though. Reworks are on the way for two of the game's prickliest characters, Sombra and Roadhog, both of whom have already received countless tweaks since they joined the game. Precise details weren't shared during the opening ceremony, but Sombra's going to become a support and Roadhog should be less "frustrating" to deal with.

The new act of the game's year-long story will bring a new map as well—Grímsvötn—and the next Overwatch Spotlight teasing what's to follow is scheduled for Feb. 2027. The last time one of those happened, five heroes were revealed and released all in one go. Time will tell if something that huge is set to happen again.

You can keep up with the rest of today's Blizzcon news via our live blog.

For the first time since its Frozen Throne expansion in 2003, Warcraft 3 is getting a new campaign. Or got one, more accurately: Blizzard just announced at BlizzCon that it's dropping the expansion today.

In a pre-brief before BlizzCon's opening ceremony, we learned that Warcraft 3: Forsaken Kingdom is a two-part campaign for Warcraft 3: Reforged, the 2020 remaster of the 2002 RTS. It begins with a prologue covering the story of Arthas, the primary antagonist in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The main portion of the campaign following that prologue regards the Undercity, the capital of the undead Forsaken Kingdom, where we'll find the likes of Sylvanas, Putress, and the Scarlet Crusade.

Alongside the new expansion, Warcraft 3 Reforged is getting a free 3.0 update. Forsaken Kingdom is available now for $30 on Battle.net.

Reforged was not a popular remaster of Warcraft 3 when it first launched in 2020, but a new update and surprise expansion could go a long way toward rehabilitating the project. 2026 is now firmly the year of the surprise expansion to an old game: Forsaken Kingdom joins Thief Remastered: The Tarnished Mirror, Quake: Dawn of the Machine, and The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past in this strange new category.

At today's Blizzcon opening ceremony, it was announced that Hearthstone will receive a third post-launch class—the game's first since the Death Knight released in 2022. It's none other than the Monk, a class with origins you can trace all the way back to Warcraft 3's pandaren brewmaster.

Represented by the playable Chen Stormstout, the Monk will get a full reveal next year. While not World of Warcraft's most popular class, it is perhaps its silliest, which fits Hearthstone's cartoonish sensibilities to a T. After this point, the Evoker will be the only class from Blizzard's titan MMO that isn't represented in card game form (unless you count the Night Elf Mohawk).

The expansion coming in the meantime, Reign of the Black Empire, is another old god-themed extravaganza, complete with bouncy electronic grooves all over the trailer. No goofy lyrics this time around, but what can you do?

It also comes with a new keyword, "assemble," which allows players to merge cards for ludicrous combos. It sounds like the sort of shenanigan-magnet Hearthstone is known for.

Reign of the Black Empire will land on Oct. 10, with the Monk class arriving March 2027. Follow the rest of today's Blizzcon news on our liveblog.

The biggest surprise of BlizzCon might be Diablo 5, which Blizzard announced will release in spring 2029, six years after the 2023 launch of Diablo 4.

The sequel will take place about a century after the events of Diablo 4. Sanctuary is no longer on the verge of apocalypse in Diablo 5: It's been fully apolcalpyted. The Lord of Terror—aka Diablo himself, absent in Diablo 4—is back, and he won.

"The heroes are gone, Sanctuary has fallen, and Diablo has won," declared Diablo 4 director Joe Shely. "For the first time, you won't be fighting to stop Diablo from taking Sanctuary. You'll enter a world where he already has. There are no towns or safe places waiting to protect you."

There's not a ton to go on in the trailer, but it is, fittingly, dark and grim: Everything's on fire, grubby peasant guys proselytize on behalf of the victorious demons, and angels are getting crucified. After the title drop, we get a brief view of the titular Diablo himself, out of focus and wreathed in fire.

2029 is still a ways off, but it's nevertheless surprising to hear news of a new numbered Diablo sequel. Given Diablo 4's live servicey shape, I expected another expansion roadmap rather than a full-blown sequel.

For comparison, there was a 12 year wait between Diablos 2 and 3, and an 11-year gap between the initial launches of 3 and 4, both about double the projected wait between 4 and 5.

Development times have been trending longer in the industry, not shorter, and I'm curious how Diablo players will respond to what would usually be regarded as pretty great news—do you think Blizzard should have stuck with D4 as a platform instead of already starting on a sequel? Sound off in the comments.

Regarding Diablo 4, Blizzard did announce that the Amazon class is coming, and talked about the next season, an anniversary celebration looking back at Diablo's past, but didn't announce a new expansion.

At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard president Johanna Faries took to the stage to announce that a Diablo animated series is in production with Netflix.

The announcement was light on details, and did not come with a trailer or release window, but Faries did note "great discussions being had" regarding adaptations of Overwatch and Warcraft. Faries also allowed that Blizzard's other properties could see similar treatments.

“After decades of bringing entire universes to life through our games, we’re partnering with some creative powerhouses to tell even more stories beyond gaming across new screens," Blizzard wrote in a press release about the project. "A new animated series set in the world of ‘Diablo’ is in development with Netflix. More details will be shared in the future, but this is only the beginning, with even more taking shape across our universes.”

It feels like the early 2020s gold rush of streaming TV videogame adaptations is cooling down—RIP, Halo show. But we also know what's worked really well. Netflix's animated adaptations of Cyberpunk and League of Legends, Edgerunners and Arkane respectively, are huge and much-beloved, with reaches well beyond their respective playerbases.

An animated adaptation from the same outfit behind these other hit gaming adaptations strikes me as a slam dunk. We'll have to wait and see if the goliath partnership is able to land the plane.

The rumors were true: A new StarCraft game is incoming. It's just called "StarCraft," it's an open world shooter, and Blizzard doesn't plan to release it until 2030.

The game was revealed at BlizzCon with a cinematic trailer, but no gameplay was shown, which isn't surprising given how far off it is.

The trailer showcases the training and gearing up of a Terran Dominion Space Marine, with an inspirational speech about killing Zerg over the montage. It ends with our anonymous hero doing battle with the Zerg, then a cut to his broken and bloody armor getting cleaned and repaired without him back on a Dominion ship.

This isn't the first time Blizzard has attempted an action-forward StarCraft spinoff. StarCraft Ghost was a legendary, Duke Nukem Forever-tier bit of vaporware that Blizzard teased, demoed, and reworked for much of the 2000s. Its titular Ghost, Nova, eventually got the consolation prize of being a secondary character in StarCraft 2 and the protagonist of a few tie-in novels. This new shooter appears to borrow little, if anything, from that earlier effort by Blizzard.

There was some speculation before the show that Blizzard might announce a new StarCraft RTS, but there's no sign of such a project, if it exists. It'll be interesting to see how fans react, as well as the esports scene. Excited for new StarCraft anything? Disappointed that it's not an RTS?

Earlier this week, it broke that Sony had dropped Physint, a videogame being developed by Hideo Kojima. Which is weird, given that Kojima's a bit of an auteur—his games are weird and ambitious in scope, but they're often viewed fondly, and the man made Metal Gear Solid, for crying out loud.

Physint was meant to be a return to "tactical espionage action", a prodigal return to what he's known for—it seems wild to drop it, something Xbox decided to capitalise on, snapping up the project instantly. It's since broken, in a Bloomberg report, that Sony might've simply ran out of patience.

And in fairness—as much fairness as you can give to a videogame giant in our current industry—some of these reasons do track, though, through the salt-pinched lens of anonymous sources: "[Physint] missed deadlines and was on track to be well over budget despite being years away from release," the report states.

There was also the point of "Kojima’s previous two games, Death Stranding and its sequel, which didn’t meet PlayStation’s revenue expectations." Also potentially fair, though you've gotta wonder if "revenue expectations" are worth dropping someone like Kojima over—surely you're in it for the prestige brand, or whatever people who wear suits and talk about growth in the next quarter call it.

The report also states, however, that "PlayStation was reluctant to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in another game that wouldn’t remain permanently exclusive to the company’s own hardware," which is audacious enough to make my eyebrows damn well jump off my head.

At the very least, it'll likely pour gasoline on a steadily-building ire from a gaming public that's just been told Sony won't be doing physical game disks anymore. But Sony's juke away from PC ports does seem incredibly stubborn and bone-headed. Especially since it's already cost the company Hideo Kojima's next game—to its direct competitor, no less.

Blizzard Entertainment's union—in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—has just signed a landmark contract with the studio to, among other things, force it to "discuss, evaluate, and bargain" any time it wants to introduce generative AI in the workplace.

As explained on the CWA website, this contract has been in the works for two years and impacts around 1900 workers from across the studio, including those working on World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, QA, Overwatch, and Diablo. The contract itself does a lot of good for these people, who are living in an era of uncertainty thanks to Xbox's 'reset' that has impacted over 1600 jobs and is soon to jeopardise 1600 more.

That good includes: "wage increases, grievance procedures, a three-day in-office hybrid workweek, 'just cause' protections, remote work, and disability accommodations". Most notably, however, is a stipulation that Blizzard needs to run any AI usage by the workplace first.

"The contracts now require Blizzard to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the usage of artificial intelligence in the workplace," reads the announcement. Essentially, this means that Microsoft cannot simply top-down enforce AI usage as it's been known to do in the past in its software development divisions.

Regarding the hanging sword of Xbox's 2027 deadline for future layoffs, union workers will also be protected if it comes to it: "In an industry first, the new union contracts give workers the right to be 'recalled' into open positions across any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months from the date of their layoff announcement. Workers have also secured an extra 4 weeks of severance for union workers regardless of their tenure."

On the victory, QA worker and bargaining committee member Simon Hedrick says: "I believe that the positive change we have won will ripple out and help make the games industry as a whole a better place for workers and players alike. This contract is the start of something greater, and I urge everyone to remember: when we fight together, we win together."

It's a major victory for a studio that, like most others under Xbox's umbrella, has a vague and impending sense of doom following it. In a sane world, I'd say Blizzard makes enough bank to be safe, that's just not the kind of industry we live in. You can get valued at $68.7 billion by Microsoft and still lose.

Physint has been hyped as Kojima Productions' return to "tactical espionage action" or, in other words, Hideo Kojima's return to making stealth action games in the style of Metal Gear Solid. It's been a PlayStation exclusive since its reveal in 2024, but things have changed dramatically: after Sony tried to cancel the project entirely in June this year, Kojima has found refuge with Microsoft.

"In mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project," Hideo Kojima wrote on X.

"Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions. Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in Xbox a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again.

"Please rest assured that development of Physint, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward."

In an exceedingly rare turn of events, Sony has even released its own statement, though it's unlikely to paper over the fact that the company tried to cancel a Hideo Kojima game.

"After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Physint," the official PlayStation X account posted. "We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima's vision for the game.

"Our relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading, genre-defining creative cooperation, and we look forward to continued close collaboration with Hideo Kojima and his award-winning independent studio in the future."

Xbox boss Asha Sharma, obviously chuffed, offers a more restrained missive: "Physint and OD!", she wrote. "Proud to build both with @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN in Japan. A big moment for Xbox."

In a seperate Xbox press release it's revealed that the relationship will "extend beyond games", with film and TV collaborations in the pipeline.

The change is unlikely to be entirely smooth: whether Physint will continue to use the Decima Engine—built by Guerrilla Games and owned by Sony—is yet to be seen. Physint also promises to be fairly unconventional: despite being marketed as "'tactical espionage action game", Kojima has also said the project will be "both a game and a movie at the same time". So Metal Gear Solid 4, then?

Physint doesn't have a release date but, as of last year, it was expected to release within six years. It'll follow OD, another Kojima Xbox exclusive, which according to Kojima himself, people at big companies told him he was "crazy" for making.

Double Fine has ducked out of the way of Microsoft's falling axe, going independent after the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced layoffs totalling 3,200 people earlier this year. The studio itself has had a bit of a troubled discography after the win of Psychonauts 2, with neither 2025's Keeper or 2026's Kiln doing much to move the needle.

Tim Schafer pretty much pins his studio's voluntary exile from Microsoft on Sharma in a conversation with Bloomberg, saying that the storm clouds first started gathering when she visited the studio in "listening mode"—but it was clear that, when she started talking about shifting Xbox's vision, it was bad news.

"We had a mutually beneficial mission," says Schafer, "Which is just to put great games on Game Pass, and then their mission changed. I can't imagine any amount of profitability—unless we had a breakout, Minecraft hit that year—would've saved us."

You're reading this article because Double Fine didn't do that, though Schafer doesn't seem to have any major hard feelings about it: "The games industry is full of terrible things, and I can't change most of them. It's like I'm a captain of a little fishing boat. And it's like worrying about whether the ocean is fair. Not much I can do about it. Just keep this little boat afloat, keep trying to see if that's a reef, or is that a bunch of fish? Is that money over there?"

As a matter of fact, Schafer seems galvanised by the whole process: "You're like, 'Wait a second, we're not going out like this.' Some people said: 'I'm checking out, this is one too many battles for me.' But for the rest of us, it's like a creative awakening."

That's not to say Double Fine came out unscathed. Just a few months after its departure, Schafer laid off 23 people to ensure "the survival of our studio". Mind, the attempt to keep those people employed for the three months beforehand—leaving the decision to let them go to fall squarely on Schafer's head—at least seems preferable to the brutal sweeping cuts from Microsoft.

That feeling of personal responsibility is expressed to Bloomberg in some lively terms: "No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me. Asha's not going to shoot my dog. I'm going to shoot it. But I'm not going to shoot it because it's going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog."

I'm not so sure about that last bit. While we rather quite liked Keeper, giving it a sterling 90 in our Keeper review, Kiln had an all-time peak of 193 players on SteamDB. There is, at the time of writing—and I swear I am not kidding—exactly one person playing it on Steam. Now, that's not indicative of the wider numbers, Kiln was a game pass joint, but still—Schafer stays optimistic.

"We never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money. I think people would say, 'Oh, Keeper looks like this art house thing that no one expects to be a hit.' But to me it's the kind of game that someone who doesn't play games would love. I really think there's a mass market appeal to Keeper. If we could just get to those people, we could have them catch Lighthouse Fever."

Watching videogame studios try and bob and weave around Grand Theft Auto 6's launch—especially when it was up in the air when exactly it'd come out—is a little like watching a flock of Marios (is that the correct plural noun? A mama mia of Marios?) all trying to dodge the same whomp.

As was the case with the new Fable game, which got punted over into 2027 to avoid debuting among an absolutely rammed lineup. And while Xbox was playing coy about which game it was trying to avoid back then, we've now got some soft, tongue-in-cheek confirmation that it probably was Grand Theft Auto 6, yeah.

Speaking to IGN at Gamescom 2026, Fable's director Ralph Fulton says: "I think the rationale behind moving us out of October, the date that we were in previously, is pretty apparent to everybody. I feel great about that. I mean, I was really looking forward to shipping this game this year. I didn't want to have to do another January 1 speech to the team about ‘this is the year we ship Fable,’ which I'm now going to have to do.

"But the rationale for it is absolutely sound. I'm glad that we're avoiding that chaotic window.” For what it's worth, the window itself includes a ton of non-GTA stuff. This summer's been a touch dry on big new releases, but in the wider videogame industry you've got Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Blood of Dawnwalker, two Star Wars games, Marvel's Wolverine, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and Phantom Blade Zero all before the year's even out.

But even Fulton cops that, yeah, the big one's the main reason: "We don't run scared of other big games. We're a big game ourselves. We hold ourselves to high standards. I'm happy to go toe-to-toe with a bunch of other games. There's just one that I'm happy to avoid entirely." Fair enough.

Microsoft has dabbled in dubious DRM over the years, having previously announced then unannounced disc-based DRM for the Xbox One back in 2013. Sony scored some free public praise on that blunder. Yet it seems like the pendulum has finally swung the other way. Sony has announced it is ending support for physical games entirely, while Microsoft will let users add physical games to their digital games library.

Microsoft says, "Players have spent decades building their Xbox libraries. Some games were purchased on disc. Some were purchased digitally" It says its "goal is to make it easier for those libraries to move forward with players" and "this is part of our broader commitment to game preservation."

This program will begin to roll out for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 and will start with a few thousand titles. Effectively, the disc can be 'claimed' on an account, giving you access even when your disc is not in the disc tray. Interestingly, this also gives you access to the game via Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming, which means you can play it from your phone or PC, complete with cloud saves.

The physical game will still function as normal, even after it has been added to your account. That means you can technically lend it to a friend. The license to add the game to your digital library is revocable, so if someone accidentally adds it to their account, you can remove it if you have the physical disc. This means it shouldn't have an effect on the preowned games market, as anyone who buys an already digitally claimed game can simply revoke the license.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced this new feature via their X account, and has since received almost 200,000 likes and over 24 million views as of the time of writing. This is to say the announcement seems to be going down well.

And Microsoft is in desperate need of that good PR. Just last month, it announced it would be laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios in what it calls "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." This is before mentioning the criticism Microsoft was already getting from the BDS movement for ties to the Israeli government and military.

But one question does go unanswered here, and that is whether or not Xbox will continue supporting discs in the next generation. As I noted in my conversation with game preservation group DoesItPlay, consoles going all-in on digital games feels like more of a hot topic than our long disc-free PCs. Microsoft and Sony own the platform, and the stores to buy games on it.

Sony removing a disc drive means that the only way players can buy its games legally is through its own storefront. This gives Sony ultimate control over pricing, ownership, and DRM, and it's easy to understand why Microsoft might want to take a bigger cut of the pie too, especially with the rising prices of hardware.

And Microsoft saying this allows players to 'move forward' certainly signals the all-digital future alarm bell to this writer.

Still, with the next generation of both consoles anticipated to launch around the end of next year (or maybe even the year after), we know roughly when we'll get our answer.

Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

"Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

“That’s why a lot of people had such a long tenure here," Nguyen told Kotaku. "And they were like, ‘yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at,’ or ‘this is the place where I’m gonna finish out,’ or ‘I love being here because I want to stay in the industry for a long time.’ That was basically one of the benefits of being at Bethesda or a Zenimax studio in general.”

Last year, ex-Xbox head Phil Spencer said that "nurturing and protecting creative teams that want to go take risks" was of the utmost importance less than two years after Xbox's acquisition of Blizzard called for 1,900 layoffs. Current Xbox head Asha Sharma has sung a similar tune so far, suggesting that Xbox ought to be entertaining over a billion people each day while also announcing the "reset" necessitating 3,200 job cuts in the very same blog post. It's plain to see why workers might balk at conditions that continue to raise the bar for achievement while more and more developers lose their livelihoods.

Aw dang we cropped out my favorite sign from the Minnesota rally

— @mouseatreides.bsky.social (@mouseatreides.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T16:43:09.232Z

One tragedy about the fall of Arkane Austin—aside from Microsoft's seeming unwillingness to give studios a chance beyond the next quarter—is the pervasive feeling that the studio, whose devs were previously known for their immersive sims, was forced to make something way outside of their wheelhouse. Redfall was a live service shooter, and a pretty cruddy one at that.

So it might be buoying news to hear that Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith and seasoned Arkane vet Ben Horne's new studio isn't going to try and chase down trends. In an interview with The Game Business, Horne and Smith were asked if they thought the immersive sim (which Black Pony Immersive has been strangely careful to talk around), is a dead or dying genre.

"If you look back through those games," says Smith, "There are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money."

Part of the issue, as many developers have outlined, is the general ballooning budgets in the industry itself: "If you look at Dishonored, for instance, the budget that we were working with was… I wouldn't say tiny, many triple-I developers would envy that budget, but it was very reasonable. And our [return on investment] was four or five times the total spend."

For Horne's part, one of the mission statements of Black Pony Immersive is to get away from tend chasing—which Arkane was clearly and famously bad at—and just make stuff its developers would like to play:

"The industry is growing in such a way that there are a large amount of players with a really varied appetite. We don't really know what turn the industry might take, and we're probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That's the best chance of making something great."

Smith concurs, outlining the (understandably cynical) perspective that, hey, he's heard a lot of these promises from big executives before: "Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, 'First-person games don't sell,' or, 'RPGs are a niche market,' 'If you're not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you'll be out of a job,' 'MMOs are the future,' 'In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them."

If we skim through that list, we can see a lot of nonsense. First-person games have continued to sell, one of the most successful games of the decade was an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons, and live-service free to play games have been an absolute trashfire for some publishers, even with deep wallets. And while Hollywood actors are in videogames now, they're not in live action.

"I've heard smart, good people," Smith continues, "friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they're right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that's what we have got to do."

Redfall is one of the biggest industry disasters in recent memory—coming from Arkane Austin, a studio known for an all-time classic in Prey, the game was panned both critically and commercially. Even we, at PC Gamer, dubbed it the "first Arkane game we don't like".

It also served as the death knell for the studio as, one year later, studio owner Microsoft announced it'd be shutting Arkane Austin down. The narrative paints itself, especially given Microsoft's utterly brutal behaviour in following years. The big bad M forced Arkane Austin, king of the immersive sim, to make a crummy live-service glob.

And that's sort of the truth—it is, after all, why the studio founder left—but it's not entirely Microsoft's fault. The studio director at the time, Harvey Smith, tells The Game Business in a recent interview that it wasn't just corporate which became swept up by the live service fugue.

"Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us."

Smith describes a sort of naive optimism that Arkane could nail the same live service successes elsewhere in the industry: "We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes.

"Then in the middle of all that, Covid happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs." Later in the chat, Smith describes a deeply chaotic development cycle, plagued by all sorts of baffling occurrences: "There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy. That development cycle."

And, listen—I think it's clear in hindsight that Smith was wrong to be optimistic, but it's also clear that he did genuinely care about Redfall, even if it came out a mess. So much so, in fact, that Smith reveals he pleaded with Microsoft to allow himself and other employees to come back into the office and finish the game's 1.4 patch.

"We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’

"And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game."

Ben Horne, who was the production director at the time, chimes in: "It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career, to release something after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down."

Patch 1.4 wouldn't necessarily save Redfall from obscurity. PC Contributor Rick Lane went back to it, writing: "still isn't the game it needs to be, or the one Arkane Austin could have made. Nonetheless, I think the update shows that Arkane could have redeemed it in the long run." The tragedy, I suppose, is that we'll never know whether 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7 would've finally turned it into Smith and Horne's vision.

It's been nearly seven years since the release of the Xbox Elite Series 2, which means we're well overdue for a new one. It sure looks like that's set to happen soon, as one Redditor just posted the motherlode of information on the unreleased pad—then their account mysteriously vanished and the thread was partially wiped with it.

The internet tends not to 'lose' things, so you can view all the leaked images on this thread from The Verge's Tom Warren. Warren also notes that the original poster says they bought the controller for $200 on OfferUp, a marketplace for buying things in your local area. The poster says, in a comment still live on the thread, that they live in Seattle. Seattle being the home of, you guessed it, Microsoft. The company's Redmond HQ is located just next door in Redmond, Washington.

Lots of people live in Seattle and they don't all work at Microsoft. So what else do we have to go on as to the veracity of this particular thread?

First off, the Redditor's new pad looks suspiciously similar to one we saw back in May. It has the same shape, trigger locks, rear paddle mounting, and battery bay. All of which look to be pretty neat features for the Series 3 pad, if not miles apart from the Series 2 pad. The face buttons, ABXY, are perhaps a little larger. A couple of us here reckon the new Elite Series 3 resembles the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro in overall shape, which isn't a bad thing. That's our pick for the best high-end controller right now.

A screen sits between the bumpers along the top of the Series 3 pad, likely some sort of mono OLED display. These tend to be pretty useful for this sorta application, as the self-emitting pixels draw very little power. In the leaked photos, this display shows an aka.ms URL, made using Microsoft's own shortening service. They also show a very basic game running on the screen in a later comment.

Some other redditors in the thread have followed various versions of the URL in the pics and claim to have landed on documents pertaining to the controller's use and how to connect it via a dedicated connection for cloud gaming—that's a feature we've seen with the Amazon Luna Controller and Google Stadia Controller (rip). This was also a feature tipped in that original leak from May.

The comments from the original poster have not been removed, and from these we can gather a few more tidbits of information. They show the paddles and d-pad removed from the pad, with the latter having a simpler but similar rocking design to the previous model. They confirm that the triggers become clicky once set to the shortest option via the rear adjusters. We also catch a glimpse of the battery, which clearly states "PROTOTYPE NOT FOR SALE" on it. Oops.

The Elite Series 3 even includes a travel case, as has been included with both previous generations of Elite controller, albeit a slimmer version. I would guess that means this thing is pretty far down the road for development. Providing it is real and not some elaborate 3D-printed project, this may suggest we see the controller arrive before the year's out.

What we don't know about the Series 3 is whether the sticks are using Hall effect or TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) technology. This helps banish stick drift for the most part, and it's something I value more than most other features these days. The Elite Series 2 famously lacks any such tech, instead using older potentiometers on account of its age, but we can only assume the Series 3 will. It would be wild not to.

We also don't know how it will work in action, as the redditor says it doesn't work on either Xbox or PC right now. Some suggest it will be locked to a dev account, which does seem likely if it's the real deal.

The redditor succinctly sums up the controller in one reply, noting it "feels like a Xbox Series X controller but pro and more clicky." If that sounds like your sorta thing, and I have to admit, it is mine, then this might be something to keep an eye out for in the near future. That said, as someone who has owned a couple of Elite controllers over the years, I've started to look elsewhere these days. You don't have to spend Elite money for an elite controller anymore—the GameSir G7 Pro proves that.

PC gamers may have watched physical game discs disappear years ago, but there's a battleground happening over in console land right now. A big one. And it might only be getting more contentious as time ticks on.

With Sony ending support for physical discs in the near future, and the heads of Ubisoft and Take Two seemingly not caring very much, you might think the end of physical game media is not far off. Yet there exists a growing movement to push back against this trend. I had a chance to chat to Clemens Istel, the owner of game preservation site Does It Play, about this movement.

He tells me, "Customer rights are almost non-existent in the gaming space, and companies have proven time and time again that honest communication is not their strong suit."

Does It Play is both a physical games media advocacy group and a database dedicated to documenting which games can be played without a download or offline. Istel is also part of the team behind Stop Killing Games. Just last month, we documented Does It Play's reporting, showing that 34% of physical PS5 games and 50% of tested Xbox Series X games don't fully work without a download first.

There are a handful of central reasons one might wish for physical discs to stay around. With games going through so many updates after release, a disc provides a clean way to preserve version 1.0 for future gamers to play and experience. It also means that storefront holders can't have a monopoly over pricing. If you wish to buy a game on PS5, for example, you can buy it directly from Sony, or through any number of second-hand or new physical marketplaces. This gives companies less control over the direct price long-term.

"Less options for people is always a bad thing. Especially if the only option is a future in which your purchased goods can just be taken away or altered whenever somebody else pleases," says Istel.

"For the most part, [over] all these years, it felt like there was an unwritten agreement between companies and players. They provide cool experiences, we buy cool experiences. But in recent years, this symbiosis [has] more and more turned into a one-sided form of exploitation." He continues, "Lobby groups and lawyers attacked preservation efforts, a growing minority of games are released unfinished, even hardware now has online dependencies."

Istel points out that the last two Xbox generations can't be set up offline without a Microsoft account, and notes that some games are fully available on disc and still have hard-coded online checks before you can play. "The next step is killing physical media, the last thing you actually had some form of ownership over."

Istel argues that gaming companies have a "stranglehold on players", and that's what Does It Play, and movements like Stop Killing Games have come out of. Istel believes that Sony knew what consumers wanted when it famously made fun of Microsoft's introduction of DRM back in 2013, but it now has "Zero understanding for what their customers want. All that's left is a hyper-arrogant 'take it or leave it' attitude, as far as we can tell."

But Istel says it's not just console players who are affected by this. I'm told the Sony situation is just one step. "It sets another precedent and pushes the distribution further towards the idea of streaming, as recently suggested by Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Once we reach that point, all hope for customers to ever have control over a product is gone."

Though Istel believes the perspective on game ownership has "only gotten worse" over the years, PC gaming does offer one "glimpse of hope" with the "emergence of more DRM-free stores on PC."

The likes of game marketplace GOG sell many games DRM-free, which means you can download offline backups, play without an internet connection, and can install and play games on multiple computers without any limits. It gives more freedom over bought games, and means losing connection to servers, or servers going down, can't remove your access to the game— assuming it's downloaded already.

PC gaming shifted to digital a long time ago, and even before that, many PC games had physical restrictions in the forms of CD keys, but Istel believes digital DRM is not the same: "Digital DRM that requires you to go online makes you dependent on a third party, while a CD key gives you everything in your own hands to access the game.

"The former will eventually lead to the game becoming inaccessible. At the very least, there needs to be an end of life plan to keep the game working after official support ends."

Still, even if Sony does officially end disc support with the PS6, Istel doesn't think physical media will entirely go with it. He told me, "I firmly believe that physical media will stay, but it will probably never be mainstream again."

Though PC gaming went mostly digital a long time ago, Sony being the creators of the hardware and software on a PS5 gives it ownership over the device to an extent that isn't possible on PC. If you don't like Windows, you can swap to Linux. If you don't like Steam (for whatever reason), you can make do with half a dozen different digital storefronts. And that makes this specific fight so important for console owners. There's no alternative to Sony whilst owning a Sony device.

And, as such, it's a little strange to watch from the comfort of my own rig, given how relatively healthy the digital gaming market is on PC. Steam, its biggest storefront, may not be DRM-free, but the option is there to actually own games for those who want it. As consoles are unlikely to adopt third-party storefronts, that makes physical game discs the final line of defense for actually owning games, and an altogether different ball game compared to our PCs.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.

The studio behind Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch just had its third-biggest year for top line revenue ever, according to a leaked email. The email (via Windows Central) reportedly contained Blizzard president Johanna Faries praising the team for finishing off FY26 as "the top-performing studio in Xbox's studios division."

"Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred and Overwatch drove exceptional performance in particular, with Overwatch delivering its strongest quarter since 2022," she wrote. She said Overwatch has been growing for multiple consecutive years for the first time since its release, and that Blizzcon 2026 should "serve as a powerful springboard into a new era of momentum."

Notably, this success is despite the fact that Microsoft is a pressure target and Xbox is a priority target of the BDS movement protesting the involvement of corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. And while Blizzard seemingly hasn't been pummeled by Xbox's 3,200-layoff "reset" the way studios like Double Fine and Zenimax have, a huge portion of the job cuts have yet to land.

Rumors are aswirl as to what's coming at the next Blizzcon, the first of what used to be an annual convention since 2023. A Starcraft shooter and a remixed follow-up to World of Warcraft Classic have both been speculated about endlessly. But each of those big moments, as well as diversions like WoW's Dungeons & Dragons crossover, seem to carry a big fat asterisk with the unfinished turmoil at Microsoft hanging overhead.

It seems clear that Xbox will be relying on the studio to help shore up its so-so financials as it attempts to "return to growth" by FY27—just two years after its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard resulted directly in 1,900 job cuts and at least one major game cancellation.

If Microsoft gutting its Xbox division, laying off staff, and struggling to give its console a real unique selling point hasn't quite put you off the brand, you will now have to pay hundreds more for its devices if you live in Europe.

As originally spotted over in a Resetera thread, the prices of Xbox Series S and Series X have just gone up (the change is reflected on the Microsoft Germany website too). The new changes are as follows:

This means the 1 TB model of the Xbox Series S now costs more than the 1 TB Xbox Series X console. As well as this, in June, Microsoft started sunsetting the 2 TB model, citing component costs. And Xbox hardware is seemingly already struggling to sell. As revealed on the latest earnings call, Xbox hardware revenue decreased by a whopping 29% "driven by lower volume of consoles sold."

As pointed out by VGC, Microsoft did previously confirm price hikes, but only in the US. With increases of $100-$150 across the board, Europe actually appears to have been hit worse by the changes. The 512 GB Xbox Series S got a $100 rise in the US, but a £130 (around $175) increase in the UK

Even though higher-priced hardware is bad for pretty much everyone in the gaming industry, there is some schadenfreude to be felt here. That's because console pricing is only so bad because of the memory crisis, and AI growth has led to that memory crisis. In turn, Microsoft has put a lot of money into AI, so as our Tyler puts it, "Microsoft doesn't know what to do about the memory pricing crisis Microsoft is causing."

Unfortunately, all signs suggest the memory crisis isn't ending soon. Samsung, one of the big three memory manufacturers, has warned of a 'severe' memory supply crisis next year, and it will likely take some time for supply to catch up with demand.

With the next generation of consoles still expected to launch at the end of 2027, or perhaps into 2028, it seems likely that whatever Sony and Microsoft do next will be hit by the same memory pricing and supply issues.

Both companies will likely take some losses on consoles to make it back in software, but even a small loss is unlikely to make a big dent in the astronomical prices of memory for the foreseeable future.

It was another not-great quarter for Xbox, and that's probably not great news for a division of Microsoft that in the minds of many observers is already up against the wall. But CEO Asha Sharma is having none of that defeatist talk, saying after the company posted its result that she expects Xbox to return to growth by the end of the 2027 fiscal year.

Xbox content and services revenue for the company's fourth quarter were down 10% compared to the previous year, while operating expenses increased by 8%, which chief financial officer Amy Hood said in an earnings call was driven by investments in R&D and impairment charges. Operating income decreased 14%, and operating margins were down by 21%.

The full year picture painted in Microsoft's annual Form 10-K SEC filing isn't any prettier: "Xbox revenue decreased $1.7 billion or 7% driven by declines in Xbox content and services and Xbox hardware. Xbox content and services revenue decreased 5% on a prior year comparable that benefited from strong first-party content performance, offset in part by growth in Xbox Game Pass. Xbox hardware revenue decreased 29% driven by lower volume of consoles sold."

So, simply put, game sales are down, console sales are down, and that's not ideal. Coupled with massive layoffs over the past two years that have left numerous studios gutted or gone, a big shakeup at the top, and a strategy that can't readily be discerned from the outside (beyond 'slash-and-burn'), and it looks especially bleak if your outlook on the future of Xbox is already less-than-optimistic.

Sharma, however, says better times are coming. "In FY26, over 200 million new players came to Xbox and our games, but our business did not grow with our audience," she wrote on X. "We need to close that gap by investing in what players value. That will take time, but we expect to return to growth by the end of FY27."

Microsoft's 2027 fiscal year ends on June 30, 2027—just shy of a year from now. What exactly will be done between now and then to encourage that "return to growth" is anybody's guess, but based on what we've seen over the company's past two fiscal years I wouldn't be surprised to see more cuts and closures between now and then.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also predicted better things for 2027. "When it comes to Xbox, we are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations to reset the business for long-term growth," he said during the earnings call. "We have the best IP in the industry, and talented studios around the world, and believe we can bring these strengths together and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027."

While Xbox was down, you don't need to shed any tears of worry for Microsoft. Overall the company took in nearly $332 billion in revenues in its 2026 fiscal, an 18% increase over the previous year, and operating income of more than $155 billion.

Will anyone ever reminisce fondly about the 2026 Toyota Camry? It seems impossible. Today's cars are almost all ugly to me, and the exceptions are usually concept cars that mimic the lines of decades past.

And yet, on an intellectual level, I know that perspectives on this will change. My first car was a 1990 Toyota Camry that was not at all cool when I was driving it around in the 2000s. Now? It may not be a coveted collector's item, but someone recently got over 900 upvotes on Reddit for showing off a well-maintained specimen.

A little later in the 2000s, when I was driving a different uncool car, everyone was making fun of "Xbox 360 brown," a trend toward muddy, desaturated colors (brown, green, grey, "piss") and ultra-gritty games (they said swears, even).

New graphics tech and movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix were influences, but if I had to pin the trend on one thing, it would be that the first people who grew up playing videogames were getting older and becoming increasingly defensive about the perception that they were investing thousands of hours into children's toys. They even tried to make Bomberman gritty with Bomberman: Act Zero—it sucked.

Even as I made fun of the trend myself, I remember thinking this same thing: What's mocked today will be celebrated tomorrow. Sure enough, I got to play a bit of Gears of War: E-Day the other day, and was pleased to find that its overcast sky is still the color of my old grey Camry.

Gears of War was one of the most prominent examples of Xbox 360 brown/grey/green, and had this new game heavily incorporated the saturated primaries that games like Marathon and Arc Raiders deploy against accusations of greyness, it would've come across as a self-conscious lack of conviction in the source material.

Parts of the E-Day campaign trailer (embedded above) do come across that way to me: The original really committed to the desaturated look, and didn't go for the bright red glow in some of the E-Day scenes.

But it's close enough. E-Day is certainly desaturated compared to post-Xbox 360 brown games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, which made a point of putting glossy candy coatings on their tech. And I'm not making fun of it anymore. I like it. Or, at least, I like the cheap thrill of remembering what it was like to be 20 years younger than I am now.

I doubt a full return to Xbox 360 brown is in our future, given that even E-Day doesn't go all the way. And even if I've come to appreciate the monochrome look, I'm definitely not pining for Resident Evil 5's piss filter and bloom abuse, which remain ridiculous.

But I wouldn't oppose a moderate revival of low saturation grime. It's the natural next step to follow the conspicuously aliased PS1-style low-poly models that are trendy right now. (The upcoming About Fishing is a good example.)

How do you feel about the gritty, desaturated look? Should it stay in the past or make a comeback?

New ZeniMax Online Studios co-head Nick Giacomini says that despite deep cuts at the studio as part of the most recent round of Xbox layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online "is here to stay." But those layoffs, which saw more than 200 people let go including Giacomini's predecessor Joseph Burba, mean that previously announced timelines are no longer workable, and things are being moved.

"Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right," Giacomini wrote in today's update, invoking the same term—"runway"—Xbox used when it dumped Compulsion and Double Fine. "Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands."

What this means in practical terms is that Update 52, which had been scheduled for Q4 of 2026, will instead arrive in January of 2027, and season 1's new Crimson Veldt trial is also being bumped to '27. Less certainly, from the sounds of it, ZeniMax is now "targeting 2027" for TESO's promised class and combat refresh, although it is "discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime."

As for 2026, Update 51 will launch on September 27, one week later than planned, with a new challenge, "Rumors" game system, and "player experience improvements," while TESO season 2 will debut on October 21.

The impact of the Xbox layoffs are obviously being felt at ZeniMax, but Giacomini said in his missive that "we are not looking to just 'maintain' the game. We are looking to grow it."

That's appropriately upbeat for a new studio boss, but the reality remains that ZeniMax has been gutted by layoffs over the past two years. Original TESO director Matt Firor, who helped launch the studio in 2007, also departed following the 2025 layoffs and was replaced by Burba, who lasted only a year before he was let go in this latest round of cuts.

Less than one month after Xbox spun off Double Fine Productions as an independent studio, the developer has laid off 23 employees, a move it says was necessary to ensure "the survival of our studio."

"Our transition to becoming an independent company means becoming a size that we can sustain," Double Fine said in a message shared on Bluesky. "The people we are losing were all important. They all made an impact on our games and culture, and they will be missed."

The layoffs at Double Fine are sad but not entirely unexpected. Xbox earned plaudits from some corners of fandom for allowing Double Fine to go independent as part of its July restructuring that saw 3,200 people put out of work rather than closing it outright, but the reality is that without Microsoft backing, the sudden transition to independence for a studio famed for its offbeat, modestly selling games—especially given the current state of the industry—is fraught.

Compulsion Games, the other studio Microsoft cut loose as an indie, put out the word that it needs work just one week later. Prior to the Xbox layoffs earlier this month, numerous Compulsion employees began looking for new jobs, presumably on the assumption that their positions at the studio would likely be lost.

It's not known how many employees remain at Double Fine following the layoffs, but Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said the studio had 90 employees prior to the cuts.

Do you own Ubisoft games on your Xbox console but wish you could play them on your PC—but not so much that you're willing to pay extra for it? If your answer to that oddly specific question is "yes," and the games in question are one of a list of 13 titles that we'll get to later, then this is your lucky day.

Announced over on the Xbox Wire, Ubisoft is adding a handful of its games to an "Xbox console-to-PC" program that grants access to PC versions of "select games" to people who own them on Xbox. The selection:

• Assassin’s Creed Mirage
• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
• Far Cry 6
• Immortals Fenyx Rising
• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
• Riders Republic
• Skull and Bones
• The Crew 2
• The Crew Motorfest
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
• Watch Dogs Legion

Beginning today, if you buy a digital version of any of those games on Xbox, you'll get both the Xbox version and the "Xbox on PC" version. If you already own any of those games, you'll also get the emulated version for your PC, but that won't start happening until next week: Xbox said a "progressive rollout period" will begin on August 4.

It's pretty straightforward, but there are a couple caveats. Currencies and consumables in the Xbox version of your game will not be included in any PC game versions, although if the game supports cross-progression then anything you've earned in the Xbox edition will be available on PC too. And it's strictly a one-way street: Purchasing the PC version of any of those games will not get you the Xbox edition. I imagine this will one day cause confusion.

You'll also need the latest version of Ubisoft Connect installed in order to access the PC versions of all these games—pick it up at ubisoft.com.

First reported by Tom's Hardware, it's come to light that, not only are the four "Backward Compatibility on PC" original Xbox games released last week running on a double layer of Xbox console emulation, but savvy independent developers have already used those emulators to run other Xbox games on PC.

Developer Nathan on X, "The Everything App," has a succinct topline explanation: "The new OG Xbox Backwards Compatibility layer released by Microsoft for the PC is actually an Xbox 360 emulator running XeFu (the OG Xbox emu for the 360)," he wrote, pointing to telltale indicators visible in a dump of XeFu (the Xeon Fusion Emulator) pulled from the Fuzion Frenzy PC re-release.

For an even more in-depth explanation, developer Milenko has an article on the subject, also on X. The big takeaway? It's a "Beautiful piece of engineering. Also: Emulators, all the way down."

Rewind all the way back to 2005: The very first instance of Xbox backwards compatibility on the 360 was XeFu emulation, as outlined in this 2018 video from Modern Vintage Gamer. When you popped your old Halo 2 or KotOR disk into a 360 back in the day, they weren't running natively on the console. The 360 emulated the original Xbox to run those games.

This tech is the basis of Microsoft's later backwards compatibility efforts on Xbox Series consoles as well. So instead of building a new Xbox emulator from scratch to run these games on PC, the company ported its in-house Xbox 360 emulator to PC, then ran XeFu through that. Pretty neat.

Meanwhile, the devs of the XWine1 project, an Xbox One translation layer for PC, shared that it's possible to use the in-development XWine1 with the dumped official emulator to get other OG Xbox and 360 games running on PC, though with "varying degrees of success."

As for how this will affect game preservation and end-user emulation quality in the long term, that remains to be seen. The xemu OG Xbox and Xenia 360 emulators have been in development and available for use for some time, but better public understanding of Microsoft's internal emulation methods can only be a good thing.

Bethesda is eager to reassure you that its house is not, in fact, on fire in the wake of 3,200 layoffs (1,600 that already happened, 1,600 that are still to come) at Xbox that claimed numerous devs at the studio, including the artist responsible for designing The Elder Scrolls' khajiit and argonians. Thus, its recent announcement that it currently has Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters in the oven as well as an incoming, Obsidian-made Fallout.

Now, in response to questions from YouTuber MrMattyPlays, Bethesda has said that the layoffs also won't affect its plans for The Elder Scrolls 6. "The roadmap [for TES6] is unaffected," said the studio. That's all you're getting. No, really.

Bethesda was ever-so-slightly more chatty about its plans for Oblivion Remastered. Yes, Bethesda has plans for Oblivion Remastered. I'm as surprised as you are.

Since a one-two punch of patches the game got shortly after it released last year, the UE5-ified re-do of one of the funniest games ever made seems to have been largely forgotten, despite still having its fair share of performance hitches and bugs. MrMattyPlays also asked if Bethesda planned to remember Oblivion Remastered on other platforms when it gets its Switch release in August. Apparently it does!

"The team working on remasters is focused on the Switch 2 launch," said Bethesda, but take heart: that version "has optimizations we hope to bring to console/PC." I also hope that. I had a good time with the Oblivion remaster despite its issues, but I'd quite like to be able to enjoy it, you know, not in spite of anything.

Anyway, Bethesda has said a few times now that it would like to be a bit chattier and more open with fans going forward, and it reiterated that here. It also said its new Glasnost policy isn't because Xbox boss Asha Sharma is making the studio do it: "Look, we read the internet too," said the studio.

"All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we're doing as a studio. So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone. This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now."

I'll be honest, I can't say I completely buy that, given the timing of all this, but I suppose I welcome a more communicative Bethesda anyway.

The Halo remake has released for those who forked out for the advance access version, and they're not thrilled with what they've got. At time of writing, Halo: Campaign Evolved is sitting at a humdrum 68% Mixed rating in the Steam user review scores—a mere 2% off the score given to the game by our Morgan Park in PCG's Halo remake review.

Why are fans—who were sufficiently John-117-pilled to pay the advance access premium—underwhelmed? Oh, the classic reasons: bugs, server problems, utterly extraneous account linking requirements. It wouldn't be a 2026 videogame release without those, would it?

"Login failed. Cannot play the singleplayer game as servers are overloaded," reads a review from Steam user GoatMedic󠁳Echoo. "Screw your DRM. Combat was not evolved." That's pretty much the vibe when it comes to how users feel about signing into their Microsoft account to play. "Error 400 or 500 when trying to login to Microslop's online services to connect Steam account," says user LVL13_. "Typical."

On the plus side, Halo Studios is replying to complaints about login issues to let fans know they're fixed. "This login issue should now be resolved. If you're still encountering this issue, please close and restart Halo: Campaign Evolved," reads the dev comment posted in reply to various different login complaints.

It seems to be more and more common for devs and publishers to wade in and start answering negative reviews these days, which makes me feel a little bad for whoever it is that gets saddled with the responsibility.

Anyway, Halo Studios does not yet have a canned answer for the other complaints players have. Many are encountering technical issues, with one user complaining of "constant crashes, graphical shimmering effect with fast movement [and] inability to disable upscaling". "Disgusting frametime spikes and stutters," laments another. They're far from the only ones. Plenty of the negative reviews touch on performance problems at least once.

All Halo Studios can offer in reply to that is a comment that performance feedback is being passed onto the devs, which probably would not mollify me if I had paid extra money for advance access to a videogame.

The Bethesda Game Studios Union says it is filing a legal complaint against Bethesda for "continuing to violate labor laws in Canada" by prematurely terminating Canadian employees on July 17—the same day it dropped a huge announcement about the future of Fallout and other games.

The timing of the Bethesda infodump was suspect, to put it politely. Less than two weeks after Xbox announced that it is laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios, Microsoft-owned Bethesda suddenly decided that it was time to confirm that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both being remastered, that Obsidian is working on a Fallout game of its own, and on top of all that, that Fallout 5 is in early development too.

Good news as far as it goes, although as I noted at the time, the obvious intent was to reassure (or convince) followers that the loss of hundreds of employees wasn't all that big a deal, and so maybe just don't think about it so much.

The OneBGS union implied that the announcement was a more purposeful smokescreen, however, saying that Bethesda "flooded news sites announcing every expansion, remake, and sequel they could" while simultaneously blindsiding employees at its Montreal office by terminating them months ahead of a previously promised date, and with no negotiated severance.

"Previously, on Monday, July 6th, dozens of employees from Bethesda Game Studios across the US and Canada were told via video call that they were being laid off," the union said in a message on Bluesky. "They were told they would remain employed until September while the company negotiated severance with our union; this at least provided some solace and breathing room.

"However, at the end of the day on Friday July 17th the affected Canadian employees (part of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls teams) received termination letters via email. This was contrary to what they had been told in the Monday calls. These letters stated that the Canadians are to receive the bare legal minimum in terms of severance: eight weeks of pay in lieu of the minimum legal notice, any outstanding vacation pay, etc. They were to also immediately lose their group benefits health insurance."

CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth confirmed with PC Gamer that the termination letters took effect that day: "Those laid off were told in writing their employment ended effective July 17 (which was also the date of the letter that told them)."

Bethesda Games Studios’ Montreal workers are being treated especially poorly by XBOX and we won’t stand for it. Here are the details.If this upsets you let Microsoft know: feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ide...

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T13:29:26.941Z

The Communications Workers of America and CWA Canada unions, of which the Bethesda union is a part, had already filed a joint complaint against Microsoft prior to July 17: Smyth told Game Developer last week that Microsoft had "unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining a collective agreement."

Smyth added that the union would continue to file legal challenges against Microsoft as necessary, and the OneBGS union said in today's message that it has done just that.

"Bethesda and Xbox leadership depend on our labor to make them millions, and yet when we do, we are disposed of," the union said in today's message. "The cycle of workers paying for the mistakes of management ends here."

As it continues to try smoothing the waters churned up by the recent layoff of thousands of people, Xbox has followed up last week's big Fallout infodump with the launch of a new "Backward Compatibility on PC" program that will bring old-time Xbox games, previously exclusive to the platform, to PC and compatible handhelds for the first time.

The program is launching with four "classic original XBOX games," as Microsoft described them. I'm not sure I'd use that characterization myself, but to be fair I haven't played any of these games (although I did enjoy the original Crimson Skies), and PC Gaming Show maestro Jake Tucker informs me that "Conker was the shit."

I am not convinced, but anyway, here's the starting lineup:

• BLiNX: The Time Sweeper
• Conker: Live and Reloaded
• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
• Fuzion Frenzy

All four games are now available for purchase on PC and are also offered through all Game Pass plans, and if you already own a license for them on console that will carry over to your PC as well. As well as being playable on new hardware, the PC-compatible versions will offer new features including customizable graphics options, and language and audio settings.

"This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve Xbox games from the past and bring them to PC over time," Xbox vice president of next generation Jason Ronald said.

Xbox confirmed with PC Gamer that the games will run on PC via emulation, and you're going to need something a little more powerful than an OG Xbox console to play them:

Minimum system requirements:

• GPU: Nvidia GTX 950 or AMD Radeon RX 550 or Intel UHD 770 or Intel Arc A310
• CPU: Min 4 Cores Intel Core i3-8100 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or AMD Ryzen Z2 A Processor
• RAM: 8GB
• OS: Windows 11
• Drivers and Versions: Latest Version as of January 2026

Recommended specifications:

• GPU: Radeon RX 68005 or Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti or Intel Arc A770
• CPU: 6 cores and 12 threads Intel Core i5-10400 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme
• DirectX Version: DirectX12 API, Hardware Feature Level 11
• GPU VRAM: 8GB
• OS: Windows 11
• Drivers and Versions: Latest Version as of January 2026

This initial lineup of games is perhaps not socks-knocking, but the real tale will be told by what comes next. Xbox's assertion that this "is another step toward preserving the games from the past" rings hollow for me—dependence on digital platforms is neither ownership nor preservation, and the original Xbox already has a community-made emulator that supports around 80% of the console's library.

Bringing Xbox games to modern PCs isn't likely to be a huge money-maker, but it does comport with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's 'more exclusives' strategy—and also reflects the aspirations of her predecessor, Phil Spencer, who prior to his departure expressed concerns about the loss of videogame history and said he supported efforts to bring back old games for new audiences.

Just two months after he was appointed the new vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma, Jared Palmer is now the former vice president of engineering at Xbox and technical advisor to CEO Asha Sharma. In an update to his LinkedIn profile, Palmer said he's joined AI company Cognition to serve as its vice president of engineering instead.

"I’m grateful to Asha and everyone at Microsoft and Xbox for an amazing year," Palmer wrote in a very to-the-point missive. "Excited for this next chapter."

"Cognition operates Devin, the first autonomous software engineer," the company's website says, in case you were wondering what it actually does. "Devin plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own, working inside your codebase and the tools your team already uses."

AI is definitely Palmer's thing: Prior to his brief tenure at Xbox, he was vice president of product at Microsoft's CoreAI division, which Sharma headed up before taking the reins at Xbox. That was a fairly short spin too, lasting just eight months; before that he spent roughly four years as the vice president of AI at AI infrastructure company Vercel.

Sharma said when Palmer was appointed that he would work directly with her "on our most complex product and engineering problems, with a focus on developer tooling, taste, and infrastructure."

That's a pretty big mandate, and I have to assume that at least some of those complex problems remain unsolved. You never want to read too much into these things, and the great likelihood is that Cognition is more up his alley than a struggling videogame platform, and also that it offered him tons of money. But even so, the optics of losing a guy who was hand-picked for such a vital role just two months into the job aren't great.

Thus far, Sharma hasn't publicly acknowledged Palmer's departure. I've reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update if anyone gets back to me to wish him well, or otherwise.

I was born in the early '90s, and thanks to a life marked by periodic socioeconomic turmoil, I've come to accept—as any reasonable person would—that blatant dysfunction is the hallmark of a healthy and developed economy. The free market doesn't have seatbelts or brakes, and that's why it works. If there's any wreckage that might say otherwise, we're driving too fast to see it.

But even though I've learned that business success looks indistinguishable from a runaway vehicle, the games industry's current course feels like it's careening so close to a cliff's edge that I can't help but wonder: Are we sure anyone actually remembers how to drive this thing? Are we sure anyone remembers how to drive anything?

I know it's impertinent of me to question those most devoted to their civic duty of delivering shareholder value, but I mean, can you blame me? Being engaged in videogames over the last decade has meant watching a cohort of publisher executives inherit an industry of products, professionals, and consumers they seem to actively resent for failing to produce instant, infinite profits—profits they only ever had a vague notion how to create.

Faulty service

Take Sony, for example. It committed years to abortive attempts at bottling live-service lightning: Concord burnt hundreds of millions of dollars just to suffer a launch-week euthanization. Blue Point, a studio that built its reputation on remasters, was placed on a live-service God of War spinoff project—a notion that should have been declared doomed before it left the board room, but instead dragged the developer into a February 2026 shuttering once Sony lost patience with its own plans.

And yet, even after cancelling eight of the 12 live-service projects it said it would launch by 2025, Sony's spectacular streak of misguided endeavors somehow hasn't dimmed its live-service ambitions. Last month, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO and president Hideaki Nishino said the publisher wants to "continue to take on" live-service projects.

That commitment that would have been baffling enough to hear on its own, but it was made farcical by the fact that just days earlier, Sony laid off almost the entirety of Bungie's Destiny 2 team after pulling the plug on its ongoing content development. Yes, years of studio mismanagement had taken a toll on Destiny 2's output. But even though it was well past its peak, Destiny's rank-and-file developers had just drawn in a massive surge of returning players for a final update, closing out almost a decade as one of the longest-running games in a market where most competitors, including Sony's, suffer near-instant collapses.

If I wanted to give my next live-service swings the best chance of survival, having access to the Bungie engineers, designers, and artists who maintained one of the most successful games in the field seems like it would be a blessing. Instead, Sony culled that collective expertise to save on costs, investing Bungie's remaining staff on Marathon, which—though it brings me no joy to say so—doesn't seem to be thriving. (Its game director just quit.)

Meanwhile, Sony has announced the approaching end of its physical disc production, marking 2028 as the year it'll start releasing new PlayStation games exclusively through digital distribution. And while that undoubtedly looks good on its quarterly balance sheet, it's a decision that could quietly damage its future prospects: While the percentage of players buying discs has steadily decreased, ending their production means strangling whatever viability remains for reselling used games. Even among PC users who haven't handled a game disc in years, some of us—myself included—would never have maintained the gaming hobby if reselling pieces of our used console libraries hadn't been an option.

Maybe that won't be an issue. But if Sony ever decides it's dealt lasting harm to its user base—well, who knows whether the leadership responsible will still be around? That's a problem for whoever happens to be answering the investor questions at the earnings call.

Bad reset

And then, of course, there's Microsoft. In an industry that's seemingly lost its ability to place any bets but bad ones, Xbox has spent the 2020s making the worst. With Phil Spencer at the helm, Microsoft's gaming division sank tens of billions of dollars on an acquisition spree that put a sizable portion of the games industry under the Xbox umbrella, staking the futures of those studios as collateral for its all-in gamble on Game Pass.

That gamble failed. Hard. With Game Pass attracting tens of millions fewer subscribers than it needed to sustain itself, Microsoft floundered through misguided marketing campaigns, mismanaged release strategies, and recurring mass layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations.

The developers it had diligently collected were tossed, even as the company boasted about their work: Tango Gameworks was axed during a mass downsizing in 2024, a year after Microsoft said the studio's Hi-Fi Rush had exceeded "all key measurements and expectations." In 2025, Spencer insisted that Xbox's "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger" in the same memo that informed employees of another wave of Microsoft layoffs and closures. Those cuts included a ZeniMax team that spent seven years developing an MMO which Spencer reportedly enjoyed so much that the controller had to be physically removed from his hands during an internal demo.

Given Xbox leadership's bold strategy of achieving very little as expensively as possible, some amount of continuing fallout seemed inevitable even after Spencer's departure in February. The havoc unleashed this month under the regime of new CEO Asha Sharma, however, is an abandonment of any pretense of good-faith stewardship over the fiefdom Microsoft claimed within the industry.

On July 6, 1,600 Xbox employees were put out of work, with the axe still looming over another 1,600 workers set to lose their jobs before the end of Microsoft's 2027 fiscal year. The cuts are borderline nonsensical in scope and intent, hitting Bethesda, ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios alike, with King and Mojang now reporting directly to Sharma as part of an organizational restructuring meant to help Xbox become "one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day."

Any number of self-assured finance guys will happily tell you that all Xbox did was cut unprofitable employees from its payroll, but it isn't obvious that these cuts are cunning and calculated to any greater degree than the acquisitions that led to them. ZeniMax Online Studios has been gutted of 213 employees, calling into question its ability to maintain The Elder Scrolls Online—a game which, as of 2024, had generated $2 billion in revenue across its lifetime, and had just been gaining promising momentum in the months leading up to the layoffs as it transitioned to a seasonal model.

Maybe most galling are the heavy cuts to id Software, which slashed 136 employees from a studio with one of the most storied legacies in the history of videogames that had just delivered a record-breaking launch last year. Despite assurances to the contrary from Microsoft and id Software's Hugo Martin, some of its laid off staff insist that even the studio's proprietary id Tech engine—a technical achievement that powers not only id's own games but also its sister studio's projects at MachineGames—has been left with an uncertain future.

If Microsoft does have a coherent vision for its bloodletting beyond, potentially, improving Xbox's books in advance of a spin-off or sale, I doubt it's one we'll like. Its new chief strategist, Matthew Ball, is a true believer in the metaverse and the co-founder of a "UGC game studio." The company clearly has Roblox on its mind.

ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor, who left the company after Microsoft cancelled the studio's upcoming MMO, said this year that "a giant successful videogame" is "not that stimulating" to Microsoft, which seeks a greater scale of profit. What it saw in the project, he reckons, was cost and risk: "We're a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say."

For now, Microsoft is making a show of doubling down on big series like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, even as it lays off many of the veteran developers making them. The confirmation that there's a new Fallout in the works is slim consolation when it's in the hands of an executive culture that's so clearly disinterested in properly supporting the studios making its games and willing to toss out years of work when it decides to change course.

Deep cuts

Launching a successful game isn't as simple as providing game developers with job security; I won't dispute that. But it's been made abundantly, repeatedly clear that layoffs and employment uncertainty during a game's development don't help.

Whatever short-term gains those layoffs provide only intensify the long-standing difficulties driving the industry towards an existential crisis. Overlong production cycles and exponential budget increases are worsened every time a studio is forced to reassemble its detonated workflow to account for the institutional knowledge lost whenever a dev is cut loose. Even if a replacement is eventually hired, proficiency with studio-specific tools, conventions, and workplace dynamics doesn't come immediately—and that lost time isn't free.

The trend isn't hard to identify: Destiny 2's downward slide of expansion delays and disappointing launches followed back-to-back waves of layoffs as Bungie, under its new Sony ownership, tried to stem the bleeding of its leadership's overexpansion. The prolonged and turbulent development of Dragon Age: Veilguard included a layoff of roughly 50 BioWare employees in 2023. In 2024, Ubisoft launched the infamously troubled Skull and Bones, the ill-fated XDefiant, and the underperforming Star Wars: Outlaws—three games whose development cycles coincided with company-wide cost-cutting measures the publisher initiated in 2022, which let it shed 2,000 jobs over the next two years through hiring freezes, redundancies, and studio closures.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure—multiple layoffs before launch. Civilization 7—30 layoffs in 2023 as part of a wider 2K restructuring. Name a game that didn't have a stellar launch, and there's a good chance there were layoffs at its studio or publisher that left its developers with damage to rebuild or doubts about their livelihoods.

Is it any surprise, then, that Capcom's currently enjoying a multi-year hit streak after avoiding mass layoffs since 2018? Or that Larian, a studio with a strong history of employee retention, pulled off a generational breakout hit like Baldur's Gate 3?

Crash course

Acknowledging the long-term damage that layoffs are causing, however, would mean returning to a framework the industry's current leadership has largely abandoned since the ascent of games as services, as platforms, as forever games. Cost-cutting has been the primary economic activity of the games industry for years.

The industry's giants perform so many layoffs for short-term gains that the success of any traditional game launch feels like an oversight. And I'll admit it's not without reason: Data reported by analyst firms like Newzoo indicates that gamers are spending as much as two thirds of their collective playtime on games more than six years old, with a concentration on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.

But sales successes like Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders, Meccha Chameleon, and Resident Evil Requiem are proof that there remains a lasting hunger for quality, novelty, and variety in traditional, purchasable games. How many more games like those might players have enjoyed had industry giants not maintained a myopic obsession with creating an ex nihilo Roblox of their own? Why would you stop playing Fortnite when it's felt like all anyone's done in the last six years is try to gouge you for the privilege of playing Worse Fortnite?

Roblox and Fortnite didn't become Roblox and Fortnite by choosing to become Roblox and Fortnite. Roblox and Fortnite happened. Neither was an overnight juggernaut: Roblox's original launch was in 2006, almost three years earlier than the first public alpha release of Minecraft in 2009, and it steadily ballooned over two decades. Fortnite as we know it today was cobbled together in 2017 from the six-year-old bones of an entirely different product concept to offer a free-to-play alternative that could capitalize on the ascendant PUBG zeitgeist.

The Roblox and Fortnite we recognize today were created through the years-long accretion of strategic decisions unique to their time-and-date contexts. A major game publisher can't simply choose to make their own Roblox because it's not possible to choose to become a phenomenon.

But these attempts to conjure perpetual revenue platforms continue as companies seek to make more money with fewer employees, build new gig economies, and lobby the public to please, please just accept AI-generated art already. Just making good games isn't an exponential growth opportunity—and those are the only growth opportunities we're meant to care about.

And maybe they're right. Maybe we can finally believe that something can be made without its makers. Maybe you can give the keys to someone who knows they won't be harmed either way, no matter how close they get to the cliff. Maybe the line can keep going up.

Or maybe we could put someone else back in the driver's seat before there's a crash.

One of the biggest questions left in the aftermath of the Xbox layoffs earlier this month is the state of legendary Doom and Quake studio id Software. Some have claimed the cuts ran so deep that the studio's ability to make new games and support its proprietary idTech engine are in question, while id Software itself published a statement, later echoed using almost identical language by TESO studio ZeniMax Online, that it's merely been reduced to a headcount comparable to what it had a decade ago, when it developed the 2016 Doom reboot—so, basically, everything's fine.

Now studio director Hugo Martin has weighed in, and unsurprisingly he's in the 'all is well' camp. Speaking in a new Slayers Club Live stream, Martin said "reports that we've been nerfed into the ground and gutted and we have 50 people [remaining]" are not true.

"We're the size we were when we made Doom 2016, and idTech is very much alive and well. You have to understand, we have idTech engineers both in Frankfurt and at MachineGames. We collaborate quite a bit. So the idTech is there, the Doom team is here, and we're excited to share with you guys more of what we're working on in the future when it is appropriate and approved."

According to an Aftermath report, id's office in Frankfurt—quite small to begin with—was also cut in half by the Xbox layoffs, being reduced from 12 employees to six.

That statement from Martin was fairly safe and anodyne, obviously intended to calm the nervous crowds without committing to anything specific, and I think the truth is that we're not going to know the true impact of the cuts until we know what id Software gets up to next.

But he had more to say, and Martin's subsequent comments struck me as considerably more tone deaf. "The fact that we made a game that people like and is critically and commercially successful ... that's good for everyone. For the people at the studio, for the people who unfortunately we had to say goodbye to, I think that helps everyone, and we really appreciate your support.

"What matters the most is that the games are good, and I'm so happy that people—it's just a good thing for everybody."

As someone who likes and appreciates it when the games are good, I have to say that I'm not sure that's really the most important thing at all, at least not compared to the long-term health of the industry that makes them—which of course means the people who make them. Technology advances at a sometimes alarming pace, it's true, but the headlong rush to embrace those advances, heedless of any consideration beyond the bottom line, is not going to lead us to a better place—or to better games. Pretending that everything is fine as long as the games are good is a quick way to end up in our list of "25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry"—which, yes, includes making an acclaimed and commercially successful game.

Martin isn't the only one looking to reassure gamers that everything is a-okay. Earlier today Bethesda dropped a massive infodump on its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game being made by Obsidian, remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and word that Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

Less than two weeks out from massive Xbox layoffs that will put 3,200 people out of work, Bethesda Softworks has laid out its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game from Obsidian and that remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are happening.

The full message covers pretty much everything Bethesda does, including a confirmation that Starfield, despite a middling reception and flagging player numbers, will continue to receive updates. There's also a nod to "more planned for the future" for The Elder Scrolls Online, even though the game and the studio making it both look pretty rocky right now.

But Fallout is the focus, and there is a lot going on. "Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today," Bethesda wrote. "Fallout 5 remains our long-range destination, and we have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now."

Included among those projects is a Fallout 76 expansion scheduled for 2027 called Raven Rock, which will serve as a prequel to Fallout 3, and as mentioned, the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters—no dates were revealed, but simple confirmation that they're both in development is long overdue.

The previously reported Obsidian collaboration is also confirmed in the announcement, and to my reading at least, it sounds like it will be another non-numbered entry to the series, as New Vegas was. Following the mention of Fallout 5, Bethesda seemed to reference the Obsidian game as an entirely separate thing: "The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment. We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

It also sounds like Fallout 5 is much further out than the Obsidian joint: Bethesda said that game is currently in pre-production, while the majority of the studio is focused on The Elder Scrolls 6. There's still no date on that either, although Bethesda at least acknowledged that "we know it’s been a very long wait for the sequel."

While the layoffs aren't referenced directly, Bethesda said it will be "bringing our teams closer together so we can get our games into your hands sooner," although to me it sounds more like a straightforward consolidation of studios that were hit hard by layoffs: "ZeniMax Online Studios will partner closely with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls franchise, while continuing to deliver incredible new experiences for The Elder Scrolls Online."

All told, it's quite the infodump, despite being short on specifics, and clearly aimed at reassuring fans that the wounds suffered by Bethesda in the Xbox cuts are not mortal, or even seriously damaging—beyond the hundreds of people who find themselves out of work, that is. How it all actually works out, we'll just have to wait and see.

Xbox's 1,600 layoffs last week were brutal on the developers impacted, and will have uncertain ripples on the industry for years to come—however, a recent report from Game Developer states that the "reset" itself was chaotically implemented.

Speaking with multiple sources, the report shares that employees across Xbox were "informed their jobs were being eliminated during a fleeting video call with management at their respective studios … Chat was disabled. Microphones were permanently muted. In one instance, cameras were automatically turned off—meaning those delivering the news couldn't even see their colleagues' faces."

One source told Game Developer that the call regarding id Software, where over 130 people were laid off, "lasted under 60 seconds," with an additional ask for ousted developers not to come into the office despite the fact that many had already begun commuting.

"Once the news had been delivered, Slack and internal email access was reportedly pulled within 48 hours," Game Developer states. "It left colleagues scrambling to make sense of the situation using unofficial channels—many of which are overseen by union members and organizers."

"Many of us did not know what was happening for weeks," one developer told the site. "Higher ups didn't know or did not say. It was left to all of us to speculate and spiral and worry." Another source from id Software added: "Does Microsoft care? Absolutely not. And they seem to actually put some level of effort and care into making it as painful as possible."

There's also the hanging sword of Damocles that is the additional 1,600 layoffs, which Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said would be happening before 2027. This looming aftershock has understandably been disastrous for morale. Another developer tells Game Developer that they "don’t know how anyone remaining at Xbox studios can feel safe knowing another 1600 cuts are coming.

"And even then, what happens after June 2027? Will we get layoffs in July for the third year in a row?"

I'd honestly be asking myself the same thing—mind, I'm not a CEO responsible for 'returning to growth' or what-have-you, but given the year of shame Microsoft had in 2025, I can't help but ponder if it was the best thing for morale to promise that another 1600 jobs would be lost at some point by 2027.

Point being, people who are waiting for the other shoe to drop aren't usually able to do good work, or might reasonably be looking for new work (not that that's easy, right now). That doesn't, to me, seem like a helpful environment in which to get 1 billion daily players.

One of the major victims of Xbox's "reset" is id Software, which suffered a whopping 136 layoffs—a move one artist likened to reducing it to a "support studio". This is a line that Microsoft itself has tried to counter, both via official studio channels and a statement given to Windows Central last week. More on that in a moment.

One primary concern was that the studio's engine, id Tech, would be scuppered in favour of Unreal Engine. This would be a huge loss. As my fellow PC Gamer writer Wes Fenlon described it, id Tech "runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second."

Windows Central spoke to Microsoft about that concern, and the site was told "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there’s only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

But now, a comprehensive Game Developer report, speaking to an id Software worker who was laid off, seems to contradict that statement: "They've just gotten rid of all the people who could ever fix, maintain, or change [id Tech], so it's most likely going to end up in the trash can. That's where I just come back to: It completely feels like success is detached from your ability to keep a job, and I think that's basically provable."

They continue: "There were five members of the VFX team, including the lead [that were laid off]. Our technical art and design part department now only has its lead. That's it. All other four of the members of the team were let go. The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense. [...] I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."

At the moment, it's Microsoft's word against the laid-off staff's—and to be clear, I am neither surprised nor judgemental that there are developers at id Software who are currently toeing the company line. This is a historically terrible time in the industry to be looking for work, given the sheer volume of talent that has been sloughed out of mainstream studios over the past few years.

If (and I am speaking in hypotheticals, here) Microsoft has ordered these studios to broadcast the message that everything is pretty much fine, I don't resent those studios for doing so. It's not the fault of these studios or their developers to be put in a position where dissent might lose them their work.

But I think it's a little telling that, when a source is allowed to speak anonymously and has nothing left to lose, the picture painted is far more pessimistic. Whether id Software is able to make another game in id Tech will be proven in the years to come—but it's clear there is a stark difference in optimism between the company message and the experiences of those laid off in last week's massacre.

ZeniMax Online head Joseph Burba is among over 200 staff laid off at the Elder Scrolls Online studio last week as part of Xbox's recent round of mass layoffs. Burba has been with the studio for 14 years, and has worked on The Elder Scrolls Online since its 2014 launch. He was promoted to studio lead in July last year.

The news comes via Game File, who obtained a list of roles impacted by Microsoft's recent purge from the state of Maryland, where both ZeniMax Online Studios and its parent company, ZeniMax Media Inc, are based. In addition to Burba, ESO executive producer Susan Kath, game director Rich Lambert, and production director Ala Diaz have all lost their roles.

According to documents seen by Game File, all four will remain at the studio for "the next few months" to help transition a new leadership team, which will consist of ESO game lead Nick Giacomini, and business operations lead Josh Henderson.

"We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick, the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO," an internal memo penned by the outgoing leadership read. "With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO."

ZeniMax Online has shrunk considerably since late 2024, when its headcount was roughly 461 if union membership is any indication. After layoffs in 2025 and 2026 the studio has lost at least 40% of its workforce. Lopping off executive staff is probably a quick and easy way to save money, but it also means destroying—especially in the case of Burba—decades worth of institutional knowledge.

It's unclear how "growth" will be achieved for ESO in light of how severely the studio's head count has contracted, but according to ESO community manager Kevin Gbolie, writing after news of the layoffs, "the plan is still to deliver great content, and we will hopefully have an update soon."

Last week's seismic Microsoft layoffs also impacted ZeniMax Media: of the 379 in total, 213 were from ZeniMax Online Studios, and 166 from ZeniMax Media, the latter including Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda's publishing concerns.

The Steam Machine might have turned out to be a disappointment (mostly down to its price), but the Steam Controller remains a very useful thing.

Should you be the tinkering sort, the OpenPuck project doubles down on the Steam Controller's Swiss Army Knife-like tendencies, allowing it to emulate Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation controllers.

The OpenPuck is the work of Github user safijari, and the project is based around a Pro Micro NRF52840 board. This $8 device can be flashed to emulate the Steam Controller's regular wireless puck, and translates the controller inputs to their console equivalents while also enabling Steam-specific features (via Hackaday).

Although safijari says "the Switch and PS3 modes have been verified to work on real consoles," so your mileage may vary. By the looks of the project's page on Github, DualSense emulation is currently supported for PC only, and there are various caveats for emulation support to consider for each potential mode.

Pairing involves connecting the board and the Steam Controller to a PC with a USB Type-C cable and flashing the microcontroller, after which the controller itself can be wirelessly connected.

"At any point you can hold all four back buttons and press X to switch over to Xbox mode which maps all canonical inputs to their expected counterparts," safijari confirms. "In this mode the right trackpad acts as a mouse, but at present this only works in Android and SteamOS."

Holding the back four buttons and Y switches to, err, Switch mode (with gyro and haptic support), whereas the same buttons + B puts it in "Lizard" mode, where the Steam Controller behaves as it does when Steam is closed—while it's still open.

"This has a few advantages," says safijari. "The biggest one being that you can use inputs when a high privilege application is in the foreground (like the Task Manager, when using Steam if you wanna be able to do that Steam must be run as admin)."

The project seems to be a work in progress, and the author warns that "Every part of this project HEAVILY used LLMs," so take that for what it's worth. Should you wish for a chassis to contain the puck properly, you'll also need to 3D print one for yourself—with several options offered.

Unfortunately, the OpenPuck isn't capable of charging your Steam Controller like the regular puck, as it lacks any pins. Otherwise, though, it seems to be a multi-talented little marvel.

As part of this project, safijari also includes reference to ReversePuck, which is their way to emulate Steam Controller inputs (except the grip controls) on the Steam Deck in order to use it as one of the world's most expensive console pads. It's an interesting part of the project for sure.

I had a feeling Valve's new hardware would excite the imaginations of the maker community, and by the looks of things, they're already beavering away finding all sorts of uses for the latest Steam-branded offerings.

Caught up in the wave of Xbox 'reset' layoffs that occurred last week, id Software has been hit particularly hard. And while official statements given by the studio maintain that it's still of a decent enough size to make the kinds of games it used to, that sentiment's at odds with many of the developers who were laid off.

It's even at odds with some of the devs still working there. id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was a large part of the studio's efforts to unionise back in 2025, has made a series of posts on LinkedIn which are still (understandably) furious, despite the studio's official stance that things aren't all ruined.

"I think the only way to fix the video game industry at this point is for developer owned studios to start rising from these studio closures and layoffs," writes Willis, "We've got to learn from the past, be fiscally responsible, and create an environment of sustainable growth (though growth should be a byproduct of success, not a goal in and of itself)."

A "return to growth" was, after all, mentioned in Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's announcement. "we will return to growth in 2027", Sharma said. Mind, that was also in the same post that announced there'd be another 1,600 layoffs happening by 2027, but hey. It's a pretty standard tag-line for most big businesses—something to keep the shareholders happy.

Either way, Willis remains unimpressed: "It's the only path forward I can see, and these large publishers and monopolies have proven themselves terrible stewards and somehow even worse financial managers. If the people who create the value own that value, good things will follow."

In a follow-up post, Willis adds: "The games industry must change if it is going to create art and franchises that have long term sustainable value—right now it feels like the monopolies that control it are simply trying to extract as much goodwill and value (that took decades to build) as they can with little concern for the diminishing returns it's leading to.

"This is what happens when the people who control it (most ivy league MBAs) do not play games, have never shipped a game, and fundamentally do not understand the industry they manage. You'll never get another WoW or Morrowind in the current climate."

While I'm not wholly convinced that you need to play videogames to be in charge of a company that makes them, I do think you need to be humble enough to delegate or listen to the people who do—and humility is clearly rare within the executive suite.

I also agree with Willis' assessment that you probably wouldn't get another World of Warcraft in this climate—it's something I've spoken to on our MMO column before. But, and this might be proving his point, I think we're getting plenty of games that are at least on-par with the classics from smaller independent studios.

That doesn't mean it's easy, though. Studios like Larian, which is shareholder-free (okay, Tencent has a non-controlling stake, but it's Tencent. Those guys are everywhere), are a bit of an anomaly—Larian itself surviving brushes with bankruptcy in the past. Point being, sticking it to the man is hard bloody work—worth doing, mind, but not a guarantee of safety for anybody.

Just a week after South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games returned to independence amidst the latest round of sweeping layoffs at Xbox, the studio is looking for work. In a message posted on LinkedIn, Compulsion said it is "expanding opportunities to collaborate with studios across the games and entertainment industry."

"We invite partners to leverage the talent and creativity of the award-winning team behind South of Midnight, a game that was honoured with a BAFTA Award, a Peabody Award, seven Canadian Game Awards, and recognized on multiple 'Best Games of 2025' lists," Compulsion wrote.

"With deep experience in creating acclaimed original IP, we bring our artistry, technical expertise, and collaborative approach to every project. We are excited to support the development of memorable experiences that engage and entertain players around the world."

It's a disheartening message. South of Midnight did indeed win all those awards and more—one high-profile win that went unmentioned is the Games for Impact crown at the 2025 Game Awards—and we liked it quite a lot too: It earned at 83% in our review, and reviewer Andrea Shearon went on to play through it twice after after the fact, selecting it as her Personal Pick Game of the Year for 2025.

It wasn't a huge seller, though, and all that critical praise wasn't enough to secure Compulsion a future as an Xbox-owned studio, much less ensure it a follow-up release. Microsoft, which acquired Compulsion in 2018, earned some plaudits for allowing it to go independent rather than simply closing it, but my worry at the time seems reinforced by this post. Cutting Compulsion loose as an "independent" studio, especially in the oxygen-deprived environment the game industry has blundered into, may have merely delayed the inevitable falling curtain—and, one might argue, gives Xbox a way to avoid blame should that happen.

Compulsion launched as a support studio—its website says it got its start in 2009 "as a home office providing services to other game studios," including THQ and Atari—so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory. But the environment then was very different than it is today: Sweeping layoffs and studio closures over the past several years have left countless developers without work in an increasingly constrained industry.

Quite a few Compulsion employees seem to share that feeling: A couple weeks before the independence announcement, numerous people at the studio began actively looking for new jobs, reportedly with the blessing of studio leadership.

As reported by Massively OP, senior developers at ZeniMax Online Studios said that the company has returned to its circa 2015-2018 headcount, before it staffed up for the development of canceled MMO Blackbird. The estimate is similar to one recently proffered by id Software in a statement on X, "The Everything App."

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) Discord moderator Baratron relayed the statement from the Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where a number of devs are interacting with fans.

"According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), ZeniMax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset,” Baratron told the UESP Discord. "Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs.

"So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

For context, ESO's Orsinium (containing the region of Wrothgar) and Summerset DLCs were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively. In id Software's statement last week, it wrote that "The team today is about the size we were when making Doom (2016)." According to WARN Act filings, ZeniMax Online and id Software laid off 213 and 136 employees respectively. ZeniMax also laid off 62 people in 2025 immediately following the cancellation of Blackbird.

I have some sympathy to members of these studios wanting to counter narratives of their decline⁠—see also Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler's harsh words for outsiders who flippantly claim the studio no longer has the same developers who made classics like KotOR 2 or New Vegas. It is also not inherently sinister for two studios with the same parent company to adopt a similar PR line.

At the same time, it doesn't sit right with me. It is an admission of undoing a decade of growth and development at these studios. Even if the headcount is the same on paper, a studio on the upswing is a vastly different environment from one that's just been gutted. The 136 people fired from id and 213 from ZeniMax were brought in for a reason. Game development has changed in the span of 10 years.

Bungie and BioWare probably hit similar headcounts as in their golden ages amid wave after wave of layoffs in the 2020s, and it did not improve their output or efficiency. It did not bring back Halo: Reach or Mass Effect 2.

If this is a PR justification Microsoft would like to exploit in the coming days, I have no interest in indulging it. It carries the tacit implication that those who were laid off did not matter, and beckons to that nasty "lazy devs" rhetoric.

It's a line of thinking that, at its heart, allows for this wanton misery and mismanagement to have been a necessary course correction by the adults in the room. I have no patience for it.

I'm somewhat prone to pessimism in this column, though that's not without cause. MMOs aren't exactly a dying breed, per se—we've got Guild Wars 3 to look forward to, and most of the old guard, while a little grey in the beard, have respectable playerbases and are thrumming with things to do.

But it's hard not to feel my blood pressure notch up a few numbers at this week's Xbox layoff news for… well, a number of reasons, really. I'm irate in particular, however, at the current state of Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS), developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, who seem to have become Microsoft's punching bag.

Left hook

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depressing set of facts than Zenimax's past couple of years—back in July of 2025, Microsoft put thousands of people out of work, including those at ZOS and, more to the point, the cancelled Project Blackbird.

Blackbird was Zenimax's next major project, and while I can't say for certain it would've revitalised the MMO market or anything, we sure as hell need more new MMOs. It was in development for over half a decade, something the then-founder Matt Firor had described as, admittedly, a bit of a "large bet."

Still, the odds weren't bad. The then-CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer reportedly had to be torn away from it, and it was slated for a tentative 2028 release. And listen, even if you've got a cynical heart—five years of work from a development team of around 300 people getting flushed right down the toilet, along with 62 jobs (per a WARN notice), is a damn shame.

It was something that shook Zenimax to its core—but the studio did manage to pull through. I actually spoke to some of them back in January, speaking with executive producer Susan Kath who said that "the team has very much rallied … I see a lot of enthusiasm from the team as we're going forward. Folks are excited about their work. I'm excited for them to be doing this. We're looking forward."

Game director Nick Giacomini also echoed: "We are excited by what we're doing. We're excited by this transformation, this change, this evolution. It's like a second wind, and we've definitely got our eyes on the future, because this is our home. We are determined to make it continue to be so for us, for our players, for as long as we possibly can."

Indeed, things were looking up for ESO. It had found itself in a bit of a rut, as most MMOs do from time to time—but a new commitment to a seasonal model and a whole heap of reworks seemed dedicated to addressing long-held quality-of-life complaints and shaking things up.

The air, to me, felt like a smaller-scale version of the turnaround that World of Warcraft had after the disasters of Shadowlands, commitment to roadmaps and all.

Right hook

Fast-forward less than half a year later—an unconscionable amount of time in shareholder land, I have to imagine—and Zenimax Online Studios has been all but gutted. As PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield figured out earlier in the week, an estimated 60% of the studio has been laid off between 2025 and 2026, with 213 of those layoffs happening this week.

That's a reduction of 275 developers at the studio in a year and a half, and, look—I don't want to cry that the sky is falling for ESO. Quite the opposite, I am hoping against hope that it'll manage to find a second wind somewhere down the line—but you simply cannot lose the contributions of 275 people without a massive dip in quality.

It's a response echoed by employees at the studio itself. Andrew Young, who left it in 2024, wrote: "There’s really no one left and no changing it now". Other employees were sent reeling, stunned at the absence of teams they'd been working with for years and forced to pick up the pieces.

I want to point out that Xbox saw fit to lay these people off literally as its first season launched—with layoffs occurring on Monday July 6, and the season launching on July 8.

Just imagine it—you work on ESO, the layoffs from last year hit you hard, but you're determined to turn things around. You're using words like "rallied" in interviews, you're finally getting to sort out complaints players have been having for years, you're trying new things. And after a year of work, your first season of the new era of your game is coming out. Two days before it arrives, Microsoft lays off 213 of your team. That, or you're shown the door yourself.

This is despite the fact that your game has brought in over $2 billion in revenue over its lifetime. That figure, posited in 2024, was touted 10 years after the game's launch. That means that ESO was raking in an average of $166 million a year.

Now obviously, that figure's going to have dips and peaks, that's just the nature of doing business—but the sheer boneheaded, next-quarter blinders you have to have on to believe that a game that historically brings you in $166 million annually somehow isn't profitable seems absolutely absurd to me.

And sure, maybe this reaction holds water if the fanbase wasn't liking your new changes—except they did! Here's just a few quotes from the Elder Scrolls Online subreddit:

• "What the fuck man. ESO was really getting a second wind," says u/PompeiiSketches.
• "The game seemed to be on the up and up, what happened?" says u/Crimsonmaddog44.
• "Absolute insane behavior to make cuts to the team that has gotten tons of players (myself included!) back into engaging with the game" says u/Ion_bound.

In a post on the game's forums, understandably stating that Zenimax'll have to be shifting its schedule around a bit, support is present, too:

"I just came back because of your roadmap for the future, and knowing now the people working on it are getting cut by a company that's billions in the green is really heartbreaking," writes one user, "know we haven’t always been happy with you all but those affected, whether they remain or not, did not deserve this. Especially in an era where things were finally looking up again. I am horrified," writes another.

This really does paint a picture of an MMO that was finally getting its sea legs back, just for Xbox to sweep in and knock it right off its feet again.

Holding shares

I will state it plainly: I think the way that Zenimax Online Studios has been treated is cruel, senseless, and short-sighted. There's no capitalist argument to be made about shareholders or prices or changing industries that's going to reach my ears on this one—it's downright unconscionable.

This is a studio that was making a profitable MMO with big dreams for the future, one that had somehow, miraculously, recovered from having a massive project that'd been in development for half a decade shuttered overnight. One that was just about to release the first proper season of its new imagined identity for the game that earned Microsoft over $160 million a year for the past decade.

It has been sacrificed almost wholesale on the altar of growth, by a company that spent over $68 billion on Blizzard, with Microsoft itself spending over $80 billion in 2025 on AI pipedreams. Its developers have been laid off to support a fantasy of getting 1 billion daily players, somehow, in a portfolio that's down 1,600 working roles and will be down 1,600 more by 2027.

More than that, this is an MMO we're talking about. If ESO takes a nosedive from here on out (and god, I am hoping it doesn't), that'll be one less game in an already-dwindling genre that's struggling to put up a fight amongst the unhealthy ambitions of the current industry's gluttony. ZOS deserved better.

A star in the games business Twitter circuit, investor and analyst Matthew Ball has made waves in the industry over recent years with his "State of Video Gaming" slideshows, which in some corners have become doctrinal explanations for gaming's 2020s woes.

Now Ball has the chance to put his analysis directly to work at one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet: Xbox CEO Asha Sharma brought him on as chief strategy officer not long before initiating her "Xbox reset," which will result in 3,200 layoffs and see multiple studios cut loose.

Speaking to The Game Business after he was hired (before this week's "reset"), Ball said that step one for Xbox is shoring up its console business. But new Gears of War games are unlikely to achieve Sharma's ambitious goal to entertain "more than a billion people each day." So what's the plan?

The big-picture Xbox strategy hasn't been shared (and is surely still developing), but Ball's history suggests that Tim Sweeney and Roblox will be major inspirations.

Ball is a big believer in "the metaverse." He authored a book on the idea, "The Metaverse: Building The Spatial Internet," which was published in 2022 and revised in 2024, and co-founded the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF, an investment fund with stakes in Roblox, Microsoft, Nvidia, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and a variety of major game publishers and tech firms.

Ball also co-founded a "UGC gaming studio" that says it's creating virtual worlds for Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. The company, Prosimetrum, is credited as the creator of Steal the Shark, a Fortnite island developed by Brazilian studio Dojo Maps.

Ball is a passive partner in the business, not a decision-maker, according to a source familiar with the matter. Also associated with Prosimetrum is former Square Enix director of business development Jacob Navok, who currently runs AI company Genvid and has argued that "Gen Z loves AI slop."

The metaverse according to Ball

A universal definition of "metaverse" doesn't really exist, but in his book, Ball describes it as: "A massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time-rendered immersive virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments."

Essentially, it's the virtual world described by '90s sci-fi novel Snow Crash, and more recently Ready Player One: A network of immersive virtual worlds in which everyone's identity is persistent.

Ball does not suggest that this sci-fi vision will come to pass without friction—skeptics have had "a real basis for their skepticism," he says in his book—and it's certainly faced a lot of friction this decade.

Facebook's 2021 rebranding as "Meta" and Mark Zuckerberg's goofy VR avatar were mocked rather than embraced, NFTs were written off by many as worthless status symbols for gullible celebs and vectors for outright scams, VR and AR headsets have yet to sweep away old-fashioned screens, and after a metaverse hiring boom, the tech industry shed thousands of workers.

Above: Ball's recent interview with The Game Business

But among metaverse true believers, it's an inevitability, not just a dream. Ball concludes that he is "certain that the future will be increasingly centered around real-time-rendered 3D virtual worlds and networks" and predicts that computers and the internet "will evolve and be redesigned in support of the Metaverse." (A thought that could influence future Xbox hardware.)

Similarly, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a 2024 conversation with Ball and Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson that, while a certain social media company's attempt to get everyone working in chic virtual offices was "just totally lame," the metaverse is the "inevitable future of real-time 3D in gaming."

Epic continues to pursue its metaverse vision: The recently announced Unreal Engine 6 is all about helping developers link up their in-game economies and social features so that players can take friends and purchases from one game into another.

Hints at Xbox's future

During his interview with The Game Business, Ball recalled Sharma asking him whether Xbox was "fixable." His response: "I'm a strategic optimist. I think it is incredibly defeatist to think that there is any scenario that you can't do better, that you can't improve."

So far, improvement has meant reduction: Aside from parting with four development studios and laying off thousands, Sharma has announced a desire to simplify Xbox's management structure and to invest "with greater focus, greater discipline, and greater clarity."

But Sharma also says that Microsoft is not reducing investment in Xbox, and there are hints about where the money will go (aside from toward getting The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door). The CEO said, for example, that rather than trying to own all the good indie studios, Xbox "will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision." There are echoes of Epic's tools and platforms strategy in that remark.

Ball's interest in the metaverse doesn't necessarily mean that he was hired by Xbox to pivot the publisher toward that medium, but it stands to reason that the subject he dedicated book-length analysis to will feature in his advice. At the least, an increased focus on user generated content feels likely, and Microsoft could strengthen its relationship with Epic Games and Unreal Engine ("Fortnite is the future," Ball wrote in 2019).

Regarding UGC, it is notable that Minecraft developer Mojang will now report directly to Sharma, as it's the closest thing Microsoft has to Roblox.

For now, Ball has not hinted at any radical plans for Xbox's future. He said in his Game Business interview that Xbox's console business is "durable and valuable and important" and that upcoming shooter Gears of War: E-Day "looks terrific."

In his book, however, he predicts that the metaverse will be with us quite soon, suggesting that if Xbox is going to take advantage of such a radical transformation—should it actually come to pass—it ought to get to work on it with urgency.

"Though skeptics will shape the discourse," Ball wrote in his book, "I'd guess that by the end of the current decade many if not most of us will agree that the 'Metaverse' has begun (though even in hindsight, there will be no precise date of its start, nor will we be able to predict when it will arrive in full)."

I've seen a lot of complaints and concerns about the layoffs at Xbox that put 3,200 people out of work and resulted in the spinoff of four studios—eventually five, once the Arkane situation is sorted. One I haven't run across is a claim that it's all part of an effort to take jobs away from Americans and replace them with non-Americans on H-1B visas. That changed today, though, when Microsoft chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw took to social media to deny the claim.

The allegations are apparently rooted in stories like this one from Fox News, with the headline, "Fury erupts as US brand fires 1,600 employees after securing thousands of foreign worker visas."

Fox noted that Microsoft is laying off roughly 4,800 employees in total, the bulk of them from Xbox, while at the same time acquiring authorization "to hire from foreign countries 2,273 employer-sponsored, non-immigrant workers under what is known as the H-1B visa program."

Quoting a series of random people on X, the report states that "furious online critics claim that American jobs are being unfairly handed to foreigners," adding that "some online critics [have] claimed Sharma's Indian heritage played a role in firing the Americans, given the percentage of H-1B workers from India."

The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa that allows US business to hire foreign workers to fill certain speciality occupations. Criticism of the program and its impact on US workers has waxed and waned over the years, but it's taken on particular prominence during the second Trump administration: Earlier this year, Trump attempted to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas, although that was eventually overturned by courts. The Republican party continues to lean into it as a wedge issue, however: Vice President JD Vance, for instance, said during a recent speech that "American jobs ought to go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters, and the Department of Labor is fighting back against it."

It's the sort of rhetoric that can lead to bad places, and the accusations of H-1B visa abuse, accompanied by plenty of naked racism, has spawned countless posts, re-posts, and likes, particularly on X—enough to prompt Shaw to speak out.

"Lots of bad information out there—let's clear it up," Shaw wrote in his message. "Recent workforce changes were made to restructure the Xbox business because it is not healthy. They were not made to replace employees with foreign workers.

"The H-1B figures being referenced are Microsoft-wide visa renewals and new hire applications. They are not specific to Xbox and represent a small percentage of Microsoft's overall workforce. And the majority of roles impacted were not American roles."

Shaw also made a point of saying that "Xbox is the largest employer of American workers in the gaming industry and the largest American gaming company," and that its CEO is "American born, raised, and educated."

Earlier this week, the US Federal Reserve appointed Sharma to a new Productivity and Jobs task force, where she will help "assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments."

Xbox's 'reset' layoffs have hit Bethesda hard, with long-term institutional talent shown the door—Zenimax Online Studios, which is part of the same studio family as Bethesda and works on the Elder Scrolls Online, was also particularly dismantled by Xbox, with over 60% of its staff laid off in the past year.

Understandably, Bethesda developers are irate. Partially because in some studios HR forced them to take down tributes to their laid off colleagues, but also because these layoffs seem to—as the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS) put it earlier this week—be part of a "stressful annual routine" for Microsoft.

And with 1,600 layoffs yet to come, a sword is left dangling over the rest of Xbox's studios, wondering who's to come next—prompting OneBGS to action. In a statement (shared here by Kotaku), the union said: "The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified.

"To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday July 15th."

The objective, it seems, is to make sure that Microsoft understands it can't just keep doing this without adverse impacts on the developers left, who have the technical power to leave Xbox without one of their flagship studios:

"We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th."

The scale and damage of these layoffs is yet to be properly tallied, but we know at this point that they include a near-hollowing out of id Software, the aforementioned ransacking of Zenimax Online Studios, and multiple hits to accessibility leadership.

It's a waste of talent and legacy, by all accounts, but not one that's unprecedented, mind. In addition to similar layoffs and project cancellations that occurred last year, Xbox has closed studios that've landed major hits before, including Hi-Fi Rush and Prey.