Video Game Studios Aren't Monoliths
I'm just going to come right out and say it this time - treating video game studios like some kind of fantasy football draft, in the wake of mass layoffs no less, is sickening.
The last three years, or even more, have seen the video game industry absolutely ravaged by layoffs, acquisitions, studio closures, and the list goes on. If you've followed games in any way, you've likely at least partially seen the numbers. Like the GDC study that revealed a staggering one-third of video game industry workers were laid off in 2025. Just look at this layoff tracker and think about how each one of these entries is a dozen people.
Unsurprisingly, the bloodbath hasnt' ended in 2026, as the worldwide cost of living crisis and economic situation have only looked more dire. And while there's no shortage of horrific things to focus on right now, Xbox has pretty much taken the cake lately.
As the new Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma and her team lead Xbox through a "rebirth," Microsoft has decided to cut 3200 employees. 1600 employees have been laid off currently, with 1600 more coming down the line — which wonderfully means current employees get to agonize over whether they have a job for months.
But I'm not here to talk about the actual layoffs, there's plenty of good, solid reporting for that. I want to talk about the way the media, particularly games media, has been framing all of this.
While there's been a real wealth of strong reporting from outlets (Kotaku, Aftermath, Bloomberg, to name a few - I'll post a few things throughout in this piece), I've also seen quite a few pieces of coverage that have been severely disappointing. Sycophantic "reporters" running damage control for Xbox when internal reports spin out of control, gleeful pieces of news about "Obsidian making a new Fallout," and now fantasy football-like propping up of which studios should be making which Xbox games.
Ethan Gach
I'm not in the habit of calling out other writers' pieces, even when I feel they're egregious, it's tough out there. But this "What Its [Xbox] Franchise-First Future Could Look Like" opinion from IGN (specifically Ryan McCaffrey) is so nauseatingly, affrontingly bad that I had to blog about it.
1600 people just had their lives upended, healthcare cut, futures dismantled - and here we are "drafting" studios to work on projects, saying Machine Games should be put on Halo, who cares about what the developers there want.
Xbox's franchise-first approach is bad for a number of reasons, but this kind of coverage is endemic of a major problem that has plagued games media for years, even decades - the idea that studios are monoliths. Studios make games, not the hundreds of people that make up a studio. I'm certainly not going to claim I haven't been guilty of the same thing in the past, but we need to do better.
Obsidian isn't the same Obsidian now. Zenimax and Bethesda aren't the same studios they were a month ago. Every single studio hit with layoffs by Xbox has lost years, decades, and generations of talent and knowledge. Games are collective pieces built by teams, years of endemic knowledge, and tools that build up over time. The more you wipe that away, the more these studios are going to suffer for it.
Nathan Grayson
And treating studios like Machine Games as draft prospects is only making the problem even worse, playing into exactly what corporations want you to do – see games as nothing more than "products."
As someone who's worked in games media for coming up on two decades now, I know how so much of this works. Information that publishers share is carefully selected and curated; only certain "media-trained" developers often do interviews with the press (yes, not every dev wants to talk to the press, and that's fine), and the more you see these studios as monolithic, the better. Because products can be sold, products don't have human costs associated with them, products are simply there to be consumed. That's what allows companies to say things like "From the makers of Fallout: New Vegas," even if a minute fraction of the people who actually worked on New Vegas are still at the studio. It's all about the smoke show. The more we believe these studios are a monolith, the less we care about contractors that aren't kept on, localizers that aren't credited, and generational knowledge that's flushed down the toilet – all for more money and stock price.
Brian Shea
Corporatization is so ingrained in the game industry, I genuinely don't think it can be untangled – but god damn, you don't have to do the corporation's job for them. The more we talk about games as products, and not complex pieces of art assembled by dozens, hundreds, thousands of people, the worse off we are. A game, especially an AAA one, doesn't just appear from thin air as if by magic. It's pieced together by artists who have a flash of inspiration, programmers who do the leg work to make things work, producers who make sure the pieces fit together, QA testers who push the thing to breaking, localizers who painstakingly adapt words and ideas to different regions, and much more.
I don't want to even think about what's next for Xbox, while the people's who's lives have been decimated worry about their future – in an industry that's currently hemorrhaging jobs. It's not just short-sighted to play fantasy football with Xbox right now, it's absolutely negligent. After months of the BDS boycott, cancelling projects, anti-consumer practices, and layoffs, Xbox doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And frankly, it never did.
Chris Kerr
I'm not comfortable treating the lives and livelihoods of those people as a simple tick mark on a bracket that we can play with at a whim – because that's exactly what CEOs and shareholders do. They treat the people who make games as line numbers and zeroes. And if we want to pretend to care about the people that work in this industry, or the health and longevity of it, it's about fucking time we don't do the same thing.