ZeniMax employees have spoken out following Microsoft’s mass layoffs impacting over 9000 employees at the company, calling the process – which reportedly saw “hundreds” of colleagues at the studio lose their jobs – “inhumane”.
“It’s not okay. It wasn’t normal,” senior QA tester Autumn Mitchell told Game Developer. “I don’t care how many times [Microsoft lays off people] to try and make it seem normal – it’s not. The way they do it is inhumane. I don’t care how much they say that it’s dignified or they want to do it in a respectful way – it’s not.”
This month’s mass layoffs – which impacted numerous Xbox studios including Rare, Turn 10, The Initiative, and Raven Software – were accompanied by multiple project cancellations, and marked the third round of significant job cuts at the company since 2023.
One source, speaking to Game Developer, described the chaos accompanying Microsoft’s latest layoffs, claiming staff had been frozen out of company communications – including Slack and email – before HR had even made contact, causing “widespread confusion and panic”. Another employee, Page Branson, told the publication Microsoft had “failed to effectively clarify who would be impacted by the layoffs”, leaving colleagues “distraught and confused”.
“Making it so that people have to rush to type a goodbye message into Slack to their colleagues that they’ve been working with on various projects, that have been making your corporation money for 15 years, is disgusting,” Mitchell said. “It’s disgusting.”
“If I could get any message to any executive right now it would be review this process because it’s not normal and it’s not okay… This is an acute traumatic event and it needs to be treated like that… How do we mitigate the impact of how absolutely traumatic this is on people, including those who survive it?”
Branson shared similar sentiments around Microsoft’s handling of the layoffs, which were announced to staff in a memo from Xbox boss Phil Spencer that also celebrated the company’s recent “success”, highlighting “more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before”, and a “platform, hardware, and game roadmap [that] have never looked stronger.”
“These mass layoffs affect real people and real families and throw their lives into disarray,” Branson continued. “I wish for empathy, is the core of my messaging. I wish for people to be empathetic and think about the human cost when it comes to all of this.”
According to one Game Developer source, Microsoft’s layoffs affected “hundreds” of ZeniMax employees. As a result, Branson told the publication, “A lot of practical knowledge just disappeared overnight… Everyone left now has to pick up the pieces as best they can. The [dwindling] morale and general confusion of it all has extended into our general workflow. We used to have very, very reliable people working on things and they’re no longer there.”
“Microsoft just took everything that could have been great about the culture and collaboration and decimated it,” she continued. “Morale is terrible. It’s grotesque. People are stressed. They’re crying.”
“This carcass of workers that remains,” Mitchell added, “is somehow supposed to keep shipping award-winning games.”
As Game Developer notes, both Mitchell and Branson are members of the ZeniMax Workers Union (ZWU-CWA) and both believe the layoffs would have been “so much worse” if so many of the studio’s members hadn’t unionised. “If we didn’t have the backing of an outside organisation that could fight for the people who have been affected – and those who still retain their jobs,” Branson said, “it would be night and day for people.”
Layoffs, of course, continue to blight the games industry, with tens of thousands of workers – across both major publishers and smaller studios – having lost their jobs in the last few years. Just this week alone, Still Wakes the Deep developer The Chinese Room and The Dark Pictures Anthology studio Supermassive Games have announced job cuts.