I am guessing XBOX ties up with Epic Games or even merges with it to get hold of Unreal Engine
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XBOX lays off 1,600 - Resetting XBOX
- Thread starter ivandagiant
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Well maybe they’re keeping their dead weight and firing the last people left that actually kept everything afloat. Without proper insider knowledge, I guess we’ll find out in 2-5 years when the effects of the layoffs begin to show in products.
Of course maybe they’re going to just make Unreal Engine slop from now on and didn’t need to coders. Or maybe all the talent at iD had already left and only the dregs not worth keeping were the only ones still there.
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Wow, here I was expecting middle managers to get the boot but they got rid of the programmers from Id? The people who are renowned for their in house engine and avoiding unreal slop?
There goes any hope I had for xbox
I still remember that comic showing Microsoft's organizational structure as a bunch of groups pointing guns at each other... sounds about right.
I'd add that Microsoft has an Eye of Sauron problem: that is, it focuses so intensely on its current goal that it's unwilling to pivot even when it's important. Ballmer believed Windows PCs were the center of the universe, so everything else (MP3 players, phones, consoles) had to be subservient to them. Nadella rightly realized that Microsoft had to focus on the cloud, but then made everything hinge on that. And now we're in an AI era where Microsoft pushed so hard on Copilot that it had to backtrack.
5 is not a lot between a junior dev and the Xbox CEO (assuming microsoft really achieve to remove itself from any talking point during the making of games), it is aggressive for giant organisations and hard to believe they would pull it off, outside the special case they point out.
Junior Dev->senior Dev->The top Game Manager directly->Head of publishing->Xbox game studio CEO.
It is probably try to cut from when it is limited now, to something maybe like this.
junior Dev → Mid-level Dev → Lead Dev →Technical Director → Producer → Studio Head →Xbox Game studio→ CEO of Microsoft Gaming → Microsoft Corporate.
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sharknice
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Junior devs do not report to senior devs.
Typically you have a bunch of developers of every level report to a dev manager and have multiple teams like this. Then all the dev managers report to a director for that department. Then all those directors a higher up director, etc. The bigger the company the more departments and director levels. That's usually where you get all the bloat.
There isn't standardized naming for roles so some companies will treat tech leads as managers and actually have people report to them and others they're just higher level developers. And they will call managers and directors all sorts of different names.
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In every software shop I worked on when I was young I did (and I was giving task-feedback-code review to the new employee once I became a veteran), maybe it is different in american game studios culture.
sharknice
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It's probably different. I've worked at a bunch of different software places in the US including game studios and it was never like that.
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Must be something new. Junior devs always reported to senior devs for code review. This was in America, albeit from 2002 to 2017. I haven't worked in the industry, since.
Now, this is anecdotal, but at about the 2010's, most middle managers were also developers who coded. I was in the QA department, so when I became a middle manager, I still wrote automated test scripts and did a lot of non-managerial work. It was kind of a good thing, as middle managers, we knew what had to be done, and knew where to delegate work to those who were capable. However, it was also a bad thing, as we also had to do the architectural leg work while splitting our time doing managerial duties and having meetings that sucked up most of our time.
When senior workers became middle managers, that meant the middle managers who only had managerial experience and not actual work experience, those middle managers became upper management. Things went downhill from there, obviously.
Junior dev & senior dev are not management. Typically neither is a lead dev, but it's possible.
EDIT:
Also to clarify, the wording was to indicate less approvals surrounding a project so development can move quicker. I'd take "manager" off the table in that scenario even as they are just managing the work handed down to their area. So 5 levels above that still just sounds high.
sharknice
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Are you actually talking about juniors report to seniors as in the senior is their boss and decides their salary, promotoions, and are employed or not?
That's what they mean by management structure and cutting layers. If you're just talking about getting their code reviewed or whatever that's normal. But actually reporting to them I've never heard of.
A I thought to reach 14 layers they counted that type of real life actual management (and the claim made that it was a lot of those loosing jobs made), not just official title.
If they went , say |sub studio| ->|activisaion/blizzard|->|Xbox|->|Microsoft|
| Dev Lead -> producer ->studio game director -> studio director | -> | head for that sub studio at activisation -> head for all studios - > CEO of activision | -> |Xbox game portefolio - > Xbon Game studios - > Xbox gaming -> Xbox CEO |-> | 1 / 2 microsoft level -> Nadella)
you can reach 12-14 without going in the granular day to day
Microsoft closed studios that were actually profitable. Also as an aside, Teams sucks ass. Have you used it? There's enough articles about the hatred of Teams to write a book. It's awful. Many foreign companies can't even use it because it doesn't pass the necessarily security requirements that Zoom does. GitHub is a buggy mess just like Microsoft. It's been historically less stable since Microsot's ownership. The only thing they haven't completely screwed up is PowerPoint and that's because other than the Ribbon interface it hasn't changed too much year after year.
The studios it's selling are some heavy hitters and well known like Ninja Theory. They made Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. It also destroyed Tango Gameworks, a studio that sold millions of copies from Hi-Fi Rush, Tokyo Ghostwire, and the Evil Within Series. Thankfully South Korea stepped in and saved the studio.
To say they don't know what TF they are doing when it comes to their gaming division is a HUGE understatement.
In my experience very common for your manager to not decide your salary or having direct hiring-firing power, often the actual boss will listen to them and do it too.
yes daily and at least my small 5 employee or less version do suck, still a giant success story, I have no idea if Linked is good or what good or bad would be, but thinking they screwed it:
Same for github, I used it and azure repos a lot with incredibly low level of issues versus everything I used before (hosted by ourselve StarTeam, CVS, SVN, git, etc...) and performance, 24 hours of downtime in 3 years can be quite something for some use case but not for most people.
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I don't know where your original comment was that LukeTbk quoted from, but I don't see it. It was very vague. For salary, that was always upper management. I never worked in upper management, but in middle management, everyone in my department reported to me, and I reviewed their performance as well, but also never dictated their salaries or bonuses. So, "X does not report to Y" is a very vague statement, and someone junior always reports to someone senior. That's just the typical corporate structure.
Teams is pushed as part of a free package. Microsoft does Microsoft. It's not an example of the product being good. I mean is Windows good? I would say no.
Question, relating to the gaming aspect of Microsoft, how are XBOX sales doing?
sharknice
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I figured everything was related to the OP's article: "Plan to reduce management layers to 5, or even 3 where possible. Current XBOX has up to 14 layers of management in some cases."
I think we all have pretty similar experiences it's just the semantics we use are different.
They seem to be doing really bad (was not saying they have a perfect track record from Nokia to all game studios acquired, just pushed back that it is an automatic with them)
I would say the office 365 family as a whole in which teams is pushed, is not bad at all too and a full on success story for them. As for windows good, not bad at all in the angle that it create a platform on PC for people that make software to sell executable to people it is a success (so much that on Linux they often simply use windows executable in some form of translation layers to sell software because it is quite good)
I agree you could structure anything poorly. Doesn't make it less ridiculous.
When you buy a conglomerate that own studios like Activision, it is bound to happen something like that and of course you inherit all that day 1, it is not really that it was structured by design like that.
Sub Studio - > activision, then you have Xbox->Microsoft that get over it.
If you want keep them independant type of models and not mess with them too much, it will be really deep, but can be really short in actual day to day task, just large direction and when games do not test well that the higher up get involved.
Sub Studio - > activision, then you have Xbox->Microsoft that get over it.
If you want keep them independant type of models and not mess with them too much, it will be really deep, but can be really short in actual day to day task, just large direction and when games do not test well that the higher up get involved.
“id Tech as a technology is probably dead forever.”
By Ethan GachPublished July 9, 2026
Key positions were cut and entire teams were decimated, three sources told Kotaku. This included the team in charge of id Tech, the studio’s long-standing proprietary game engine for the Doom franchise. Sources said only one employee on that team is believed to be left.
Doom isn’t the only franchise that relies on id Tech. A branch of it is used by MachineGames on the Wolfenstein games, including the sequel it’s currently developing. Every so often those branches are merged when one side has tech improvements the other would like access to. One source said some of the most recent improvements occurred during the development of Revelations. Following the cuts to the engine team, they weren’t sure who would be left to help MachineGames get access to them and keep them from going to waste.
https://kotaku.com/the-cuts-at-doom...ow-they-make-a-game-with-that-team-2000713860
The Cuts At Doom Doom Maker id Software Will Change It Forever: ‘I Don’t See How They Make A Game With That Team’
Doom Studio's Future Unclear After Xbox Bloodbath At id Software
Doom: The Dark Ages Id Software Layoffs XboxBy Ethan GachPublished July 9, 2026
Key positions were cut and entire teams were decimated, three sources told Kotaku. This included the team in charge of id Tech, the studio’s long-standing proprietary game engine for the Doom franchise. Sources said only one employee on that team is believed to be left.
Doom isn’t the only franchise that relies on id Tech. A branch of it is used by MachineGames on the Wolfenstein games, including the sequel it’s currently developing. Every so often those branches are merged when one side has tech improvements the other would like access to. One source said some of the most recent improvements occurred during the development of Revelations. Following the cuts to the engine team, they weren’t sure who would be left to help MachineGames get access to them and keep them from going to waste.
https://kotaku.com/the-cuts-at-doom...ow-they-make-a-game-with-that-team-2000713860
I wasn't really a fan out what they turned Doom into with it's annoying damage and ammo mechanics. But the engine seemed solid and it was good to have an alternative to UE that I'm not a fan of. They're collateral damage by the looks of it. A smart studio that wants to control its own engine would snap the good ones up straight away. It wouldn't surprise me if Epic was already offering jobs to the best ones that were fired to prevent other people hiring them. Valve could do with some talented software engineers for the Source engine as well.
*edit
Actually, if they're any good, Valve should take as many as they can get to make a new version of the Source engine. They could never really get that many companies so use the engine, and it's probably down to not having enough skilled people to work on improving it as well as market saturation at the time. Epic has been trying to muscle in on the PC game store marketshare, what if Valve actually took a serious shot at taking away Unreal engine marketshare now that the game engine space has really shrunk in viable choices.
*edit
Actually, if they're any good, Valve should take as many as they can get to make a new version of the Source engine. They could never really get that many companies so use the engine, and it's probably down to not having enough skilled people to work on improving it as well as market saturation at the time. Epic has been trying to muscle in on the PC game store marketshare, what if Valve actually took a serious shot at taking away Unreal engine marketshare now that the game engine space has really shrunk in viable choices.
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Flogger23m
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Nothing has been stopping Valve from doing that for a decade or more. Source 2 never received the support from Valve to go to 3rd parties. Making an engine is one thing but supporting it for external studios is another. Valve does not have the desire and possibly man power. I'm sure they could hire more, so it is more of a lack of will to make a good game engine. You'd think they would be interested as Steam has a lot of pro-independent developer features and has always been good about bringing small developers onboard the platform to sell.
Though Valve clearly likes to be lean. Part of Epic's problem is their vast expansion over a short time. They have around 4,000 employees now, and UE5 has not received good improvements for performance issues in a timely manner. Seems like they're already moving onto UE6 right as UE5 is getting where it should have been day 1. Sometimes too many people leads to problems and I assume Valve wants to avoid that.
apparently more than a dozen people support the engine (for other games/studios probably) from the frankfurt location — which operates under more strict German labour laws
https://x.com/Kotaku/status/2075440403809993018?s=20
Have you tried making games for gamers who play them and not activists who don't?
correction:
only 6 people work now on id.tech engine in Frankfurt
Layoffs Hit id Software Frankfurt
Half are out at yet another location as id Software insists that it still has the necessary manpower to make gamesCurrent and former id Software employees informed Aftermath of layoffs at the Frankfurt office, saying that six of twelve of id workers were let go, in line with what happened to the rest of id earlier this week. Layoffs also affected Bethesda employees working out of the same office.
Following layoffs, Frankfurt is now home to the majority of id's id Tech engineers, with two others residing in Dallas. That said, other Zenimax studios also work on the id Tech engine.
The id Tech engine, regarded by many as a miracle of optimization, has been a point of concern following recent layoffs. Some employees have claimed that Microsoft tossed crucial institutional knowledge about its basic functions out the window, effectively killing it. In a statement posted to Twitter today, id contested that characterization of events:
https://aftermath.site/xbox-layoffs-id-software-frankfurt-doom/
Who would have guessed that charging, at release, ten bucks or less for the experience of a $60 single player game is bad business? Then they have the sheer gall to pretend their own strategic failure is due to "high cost".
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Unionized Bethesda Workers Plan Strike Over Xbox Mass Layoffs
I have nothing against unions per say, but a lot of those Bethesda employees deserved to be fired for incompetence and/or financial sabotage of product.
I have nothing against unions per say, but a lot of those Bethesda employees deserved to be fired for incompetence and/or financial sabotage of product.
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If you don't mind me asking, in what way did the employees financially sabotage product?
My thoughts are loosely focused on the 2,200 plus H1B being hired in their place. That completely irks me to no end.
Using a product to push a political agenda full well knowing that it will not sell well in my opinion could be construed as economic sabotage. Of course it has to get green lit, and have managers involved the whole way through. So more incompetence than sabotage. (And proving intent for economic sabotage would be hard).
If they are being replaced with H1B, then quality will get even worse. And morale will drop even further. Clearly they haven’t learned any lessons from filling up Windows development with H1B and AI.
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That figure is Microsoft's total approved H-1B petitions company-wide for all of FY2026. And a number of H-1B holders were among the people laid off in this same round.
Yeah. The people getting fired are rarely the one who make decisions about the direction of the game. They were simply doing what they were told. Heck, the people getting fired could have objected to the direction of the game and we have no idea. People just blame the workers who produced the game regardless to the level of input they had on the final product. Outside gaming this seems to rarely happen. After all, people don't blame Ford factory workers for the options available on the F-150 this year.
Why Microsoft's $80B Xbox Bet Backfired | WSJ What Went Wrong
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpqTnv7H2eo
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpqTnv7H2eo
I’d argue they only need a few dozen people to maintain the engine and develop it going forward.
It’s Microsoft they likely had bloat within bloat creating folds of fat even Nurgle would find excessive.
Epic manages and maintains Unreal with around ~200, and that includes tools, assets, and all that shiny extra stuff in addition to the engine itself.
Microsoft needs to strip most of their developers down to the studs and build back up from scratch. It’s clear that things have gotten out of control for most of them and if Microsoft wants to keep game development going forward they need to be somewhat drastic.
DukenukemX
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He talks about this for the first 3 minutes. Considering how many loved studios have closed down in the past due to being bought by a major corporation, I'm not entirely shocked this is what Microsoft has done. Remember that Microsoft destroyed Rareware, which used to be a major studio in the 90's but is a zombie that Microsoft keeps alive as a reminder to anyone who isn't making insane profits for them.
View: https://youtu.be/tKHPtFO2Roc?si=EvXa7O13tK4Je499
View: https://youtu.be/tKHPtFO2Roc?si=EvXa7O13tK4Je499
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I came here to post this exact video, you beat me to it.
Every single thing he says in that first three minutes is 100% accurate.