- Bethesda employees felt safe from Xbox layoffs because of the long-running success of Skyrim and Fallout.
- The team is currently working on multiple projects related to both IPs.
- Xbox’s layoffs still impacted Bethesda, though this studio wasn’t affected as much as teams like id Software.
Xbox’s recent cuts led to thousands of job losses, impacting a wide range of Bethesda Softworks studios. In particular, a team like id Software was hit quite hard.
Similarly, Bethesda Game Studios lost employees despite ongoing work on The Elder Scrolls 6. This came as a surprise to the team as it thought the pedigree of these RPG IPs would shield the team from layoffs.
Why it matters: These instances show just how big the layoff problem is currently in the games industry, with no studio really being safe.
Speaking to The Guardian, ex-Bethesda Game Studios developer Anne Barrett discussed how Xbox’s latest job cuts impacted the team.
She discussed how the team was taken aback by the layoffs, specifically because it did not expect to be hit by the layoffs. As Anne put it, the Bethesda Game Studios developers thought that work on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout was important enough that Xbox would not disturb the team in any way.
Unfortunately, Anne Barrett, along with other developers, was laid off after a small meeting that lasted just two minutes a few months ago.
We thought we were safe. Bethesda Game Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe.
This proved to be devastating, and many within the studio had trouble even processing the news at first.
Because of how many projects Bethesda Game Studios is currently working on, including both Fallout and Elder Scrolls, Anne Barrett’s sense of security can’t be blamed. However, this does go to show just how brutal Microsoft has been with its job cuts.
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[Editor-in-Chief]
Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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