According to a new report, more Xbox employees have lost their jobs as part of Microsoft's ongoing layoffs. The news continues to affect every part of the Xbox division, with individual studios feeling like 343 Industries feeling the extent of the layoffs.
The Xbox Series X/S is smashing sales records, but this has not prevented Microsoft from engaging in mass layoffs like many other tech companies have done as of late. No matter what, players shouldn't worry about the future of Xbox. Microsoft appears to be completely committed to the consoles, and continues to invest heavily in the success of Xbox Game Pass.
The 10,000 layoffs at Microsoft were first announced almost a month ago, although it's now becoming clearer who has been affected by them. The latest report suggests that the new round of reductions has affected both the marketing team and the Gaming Ecosystem Group, with the Surface and HoloLens divisions also previously affected. It's unclear exactly how many have been lost from each team, and more losses can be expected to be announced in the coming few weeks.
It is always a sad day when job losses are announced in the gaming industry. Unfortunately, these layoffs are happening across the gaming and tech industries. Late last year, even trillion-dollar company Amazon had to cut jobs in its Luna Cloud Gaming experimental divisions. In a time of global financial uncertainty, many companies will look to cut back on experimental and unsafe investments, so to some this won't be a surprise. It remains to be seen how this uncertainty extends to smaller companies, where money is much tighter than at monolith mega-corporations.
Despite the layoffs, Microsoft continues to attempt to force through its acquisition of Activision. It's a legal battle that threatens to rumble on for a while yet, but it could be huge for Microsoft if it goes through. The potential of having Call of Duty as an exclusive franchise for Xbox could be enough to make the console the number-one option for gamers for years to come, though Microsoft has insisted that it will still release CoD on other platforms. Recently, Microsoft increased the price of the Xbox Series X/S consoles in Japan and India, which caused some pushback from players. It's likely that the price increase was yet another response from Microsoft to the global economic concerns.
Source: Bloomberg