Not to be outdone by Sony shooting themselves in the foot, Xbox has announced 3200 layoffs as well as the departure or closure of a handful of studios because what they’ve been doing is… not working.

If you ask me, things started going south the moment they shelled out such astronomical amounts to acquire Activision and Bethesda, putting more pressure on GamePass to keep bringing in subscribers. When that growth was slowing, Xbox panicked and started increasing the price of GamePass, basically killing its value in the process. So I’m not surprised they have to make some changes.

On the surface, cutting some of these studios loose struck me as drastic… Arkane, Ninja Theory and Double Fine are well-known studios responsible for some incredible content so we think of them with that value in mind. The flip side of that, I guess is… what have they brought to the table lately? They haven’t really been moving the needle in a big way since joining Microsoft. And I’m excited about State of Decay 3 from Undead Labs, but they announced that in 2020, and it still isn’t out yet. So that one is maybe easier to understand from a “cut your losses” standpoint.

Still, a bunch of studios and over three-thousand jobs is quite a bloodbath, and it’s hard to see Xbox doing much from here aside from shrinking down to focus on their handful of well-trod franchises. Just pumping out the incremental installments of Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, etc that they know will bring in money with little risk.

And with so much senior talent laid off, the cynic in my expects they’re assuming they can lean on AI to shoulder more of the work, so the downward spiral of quality is likely to continue.