Age of Empires developer World’s Edge didn’t escape the bloodbath that happened at Xbox yesterday, as the studio was moved under the watchful eye of Activision.
Far from being an easy move, according to former creative director Adam Isgreen says that almost half of World’s Edge was laid off, and shared some reminiscences of his 16 years at microsoft where he worked after previously being at Petrogylph Games, and Westwood Studios where he worked on a number of RTS games. Separately, we found out that the next project that World’s Edge was working on was cancelled from Senior Software Engineer Andrew Martz, who shared he was laid off and their next project cancelled. The layoffs make up part of the 268 jobs that were part of yesterdays continued ‘reset’ of Xbox, and part of the 3200 employees that Xbox planned to downsize by the end of the year.
What changed with the latest Xbox Reset?
Continuing the mass layoffs and changes announced earlier this year, yesterdays announcement shared that Microsoft was eliminating another 268 roles across Halo Studios, other first party studios (like World’s Edge), and the Xbox Game Services management and functions layer. They also updated on its attempt to divest several studios, and reorganized some of their teams (also like World’s Edge) into new departments. According to the letter posted by Matt Booty this will bring them “roughly three-quarters of the way” through the restructuring, meaning roughly another 800 employees are still on the chopping block.
Reorganizations will happen as follows:
- Activision
- Will now be making the next Halo game with a new team. A small Halo Studios team will do community support as well as support current titles
- Will oversee World’s Edge and Rare
- Bethesda
- Will oversee Obsidian
- Obsidian developing new Fallout game in collaboration with Bethesda
- King
- Will oversee Microsoft Casual Games
- Playground and Turn10 will merge
Beyond that, Ninja Theory has failed to find a purchaser, as two agreements have fallen through. Thus, Microsoft is now taking steps to closing the studio, much like it is continuing consultation with Arkane, which has the stronger worker protection laws of France drawing out the process.
Undead Labs is the last one, and they are going completely independent.
Independent Undead Labs Lays Off Workers
While Undead Labs is continuing and State of Decay 3 is still in the works, it’s not all cheery for the developers. Without the budget of a major publisher like Microsoft supporting them, the studio had to layoff a “significant number” of workers. The studio says there are “far too many announcements like this across the industry, and we hate adding to the list” as well as praising the people it’s letting go, saying they would hire them back in a heartbeat.
Many of those were people working on State of Decay 3, which the team shared in a separate announcement is still targeting to release in 2027. More plans about the future of Undead Labs will be shared at a later date according to them, including probably whoever the new publisher of State of Decay 3 is.
