Xbox CEO Asha Sharma visited Bethesda’s Rockville office on August 11 for a live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. Outside, CWA union members staged a protest with a giant inflatable rat and a wall of red flags representing Xbox workers affected by Microsoft’s layoffs.
Sharma praised the upcoming RPG’s scale and story during the playthrough. In an X post after seeing the game, she wrote, “The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater.” Bethesda employees used the visit to draw attention to Xbox’s announced plan to cut 3,200 jobs. The protest followed earlier cuts at Bethesda, including reports that more than 50 people across programming, art, and design on Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls 6 team lost their jobs, alongside losses among testers.
Red flags and an inflatable rat outside Bethesda
OneBGS, the union representing Bethesda employees, said in a Bluesky post that workers placed hundreds of flags outside the office to honor game workers Microsoft had laid off, including those affected by the 2026 cuts. An August 11 post from Pirat_Nation counted 800 flags and said they represented workers laid off since July 2025. The union said the display was intended to remind visiting executives that game studios are built by their workers.
A separate post from the protest showed the giant rat, known as Scabby, positioned outside the Bethesda office in Rockville. Scabby appeared to stand roughly 30 to 50 feet tall. The inflatable rat is sometimes used in CWA demonstrations over alleged unfair labor practices. The message was hard to miss: the demonstration was timed to coincide with Sharma’s visit and focused on the people affected by the cuts.
Nathan Hahn, a technical producer at Bethesda, told Video Games Chronicle that employees wanted to make their presence visible and show how the layoffs had affected developers. Workers put up posters around their area, but management told them the posters could not face the outside of their cubicles. They then brought balloons into the cubicles so Microsoft leadership could still see them. Hahn said the group was standing up for impacted Xbox developers and testers while pushing back against further job losses. “We’re mobilising to fight back against these layoffs not just to ensure impacted Xbox devs and testers get treated fairly, but to remind our company and game studios everywhere that layoffs like this cannot continue,” he said.
The protest adds pressure around The Elder Scrolls 6
Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls 6 in 2018, and the studio still has not given the RPG a public release date. With only occasional comments from Bethesda and Xbox executives reaching the public, the protest placed the game’s staffing concerns alongside the limited updates about its development.
OneBGS has also warned that the cuts could affect the quality of future Bethesda projects, including The Elder Scrolls 6. For now, the studio’s public message is focused on the game’s scale and story, while employees outside the office are asking Microsoft to address the human cost behind that work.
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The Elder Scrolls VI
Developed by Bethesda Game Studios
