#398: Deckchairs on the Titanic

And so the Xbox circus trundles on. Its latest stop: Consolidation Town. Perhaps having recognised that all this talk of resets and restructures wasn’t really landing with people — hard to leave a good impression, isn’t it, when you’re sending workers to the wall in their thousands — this time the very clever strategists at Microsoft have decided on a subtle shift in tactics. This isn’t about laying people off to cut costs, no no. It’s consolidation, baby! We’re just merging business units to make ourselves fitter, leaner, better equipped to face the coming challenges!

Obviously no one is fooled. Sure, there’s a certain logic to, say, folding the Halo team — which has spent a lot of money, and taken a lot of time, to make pretty much the square root of fuck-all — into Activision, whose well-oiled Call Of Duty production line knows how to actually ship stuff. But I don’t think there’s a soul outside the Xbox C-suite who believes any of this is any good, or will work. The Xbox tarot deck these days consists solely of Death cards. Shuffle them all you like; it’s nice to feel busy, after all. Just don’t expect anything to change.

Perhaps we should recap the news briefly, if only to save you all reading Microsoft’s latest tin-eared announcement post. Halo Studios is now part of Activision; the existing team will handle community management and tend to Halo games that are already on the market, while a newly spun-up team will allegedly make new games. Rare and Age Of Empires developer World’s Edge are also now under Activision’s wing.

Over at Bethesda, Todd Howard will have to take some of his leather jackets home to provide hanging space for the crew at Obsidian. Given the two studios’ output throughout the Series generation, he should count himself lucky the merger isn’t the other way around. Forza Motorsport developer Turn10 is being folded into the Forza Horizon gang at Playground Games, while King now oversees whatever Microsoft Casual Games is. Elsewhere, an attempt to sell off Ninja Theory seems destined for failure after two prospective deals collapsed; Microsoft has begun the consultation process on a proposed shutdown. Arkane continues to face closure, with Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty — a man who has been stealing a living for years, and whose gig has got even easier now that almost all of his studios are reporting to someone else; while removing his compensation package would do far more for the balance sheet than any of the people cut loose this week, he’s somehow sticking around — saying the consultation with the Dishonored maker will continue “through the new year”.

In total, 268 people are losing their jobs, which combined with the 1,600 lost in July, and the divestments of Compulsion Games, Undead Labs and Double Fine, means Microsoft is, according to Booty, “roughly three-quarters” of the way towards its goal of 3,200 layoffs for the fiscal year. Taking Booty at his word — no small ask given his track record; he doesn’t strike me as much of a details guy — that would mean another 800 or so layoffs are in the post. Where they will come from is anyone’s guess, though I’m sure the Fable team at Playground are simply loving life this morning, putting the final touches to their decade-long project while knowing exactly what awaits them at the finish line.

Gears Of War: E-Day is still a few weeks away from release, but staff at developer The Coalition are already suffering: the game’s story director was laid off yesterday, just days after the team sent off the gold master. Over at Halo Studios, cinematic director Josh Daniels suffered the rare indignity of being promoted and laid off in the same week. We do not know the names or roles of the other 266 people who lost their jobs yesterday, but I feel pretty confident in stating that they did far more to try and turn things around for Xbox than the LinkedIn-brained losers who run the show, and seem to have no ideas left that don’t involve the unemployment line. Once again this is pathetic. Once again, it will fail. In this darkest chapter of videogame history Microsoft has been the greatest evil, and no amount of resets or restructures will change a thing.