Earlier this month,around 9,000 people at Xbox and Microsoft lost their jobs. It was the latest set of mass layoffs,this time seeing the closure of Perfect Dark developer The Initiativeand essentiallythe death of the Forza Motorsport seriesthanks to massive cuts at developer Turn 10. It was a chaotic day for the company, and nowZeniMaxemployees have spoken out about how it all went down.
Speaking with Game Developer, a number of employees described being left in limbo by the higher-ups, forcibly locked out of the company’s internal Slack channel and left waiting for news. According to one developer, the only place that employees could go to was an off-work Discord channel which wasfilled with “people freaking out with no real verifiable info.”
ZeniMax Employees Speak Out Over “Inhumane” Microsoft And Xbox Layoffs
A current ZeniMax employee called Page Branson told Game Developer that it was “one of the worst days at a job I’ve ever had in my entire life”, with the lack of communication from Microsoft about who was getting cut causing untold distress and panic among employees. She also believes that the layoffs were a “betrayal of trust of the highest magnitude”, and felt like Microsoft was taking the feelings of shareholders into account more than its actual staff.
ZeniMax Media senior QA tester Autumn Mitchell goes one step further than Branson, calling Microsoft “inhumane” for laying off people in the manner of which it did, and explains she was personally left in a state of “fight or flight” during the whole ordeal.
It’s not okay. It wasn’t normal. I don’t care how many times they do it to try and make it seem normal—it’s not. The way they do it is inhumane.
Mitchell goes on to explain that long-time veterans at Microsoft who were cut had to “rush to type a goodbye message into Slack”, and calls the treatment of these individuals “disgusting” given how much work they gave to the company for so long.
Mitchell and Branson both go on to call out Xbox leadership, such as Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, calling them “disconnected” from the realities of working on the ground level, and wish that they would “think about the human cost” when it comes to mass layoffs, for both those that are let go and those that stay.
Both employees also claim that those who have been left to pick up the pieces following these layoffs are struggling too, with morale at an all-time low and employees struggling to do good work thanks to them constantly “looking at a graveyard.” It sounds like a truly dire situation at Microsoft, and now that Xbox has gone through four rounds of layoffs in just 18 months, here’s hoping that some more stability can be established for those still working there.
