Bethesda’s biggest franchises gave employees confidence that their work would be protected, but Xbox’s latest cuts reached the studio anyway. At least 1,600 of the 3,200 jobs covered by the plan had already been eliminated, including staff with decades at Bethesda, while the remaining cuts are planned by the end of Xbox’s 2027 fiscal year.
Anne Barrett, who worked at Bethesda Game Studios Austin, told The Guardian that employees saw Skyrim and Fallout as a kind of job security. “We thought we were safe,” she said, pointing to Bethesda’s established franchises and major projects in development. Instead, some staff were placed in two-minute Teams meetings that ended decades of service at the studio.
In at least one of those meetings, employees could not speak or react because their cameras and microphones had been disabled. Goodbye messages appeared in Slack before access to the channel was shut off, adding another abrupt end to careers that had often lasted for years or decades.
News of the cuts arrived with almost no internal warning. Employees were following the same public reports about possible layoffs as everyone else, then saw Asha Sharma’s July 6 memo, “resetting Xbox”, published for the world to read. About an hour later, workers entered meetings where they learned who had been let go.
Barrett said she initially laughed through the day because she could not believe the cuts were happening. The loss sank in the following day, after seven years at Bethesda and a lifelong ambition to work there. She also described coworkers breaking down as they struggled to understand what was happening.
Bethesda’s future pipeline made the layoffs even harder for employees to understand. Fans have waited well over a decade for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, two long-awaited RPGs at the center of the studio’s future. Bethesda later said most of its development staff were focused on The Elder Scrolls 6, while Fallout 5 was in preproduction.
Barrett’s concern goes beyond the loss of individual jobs. She pointed to proprietary technology and Bethesda’s recognizable visual identity, both of which were built and improved by people who spent years at the studio. She questioned how easily new hires could replace that knowledge, saying, “You can’t just throw new people at that problem, right?”
Bethesda Game Studios employees formed a union after the layoffs, while talks with Microsoft about further redundancies were still ongoing. OneBGS has also shared interviews with affected developers across social channels, giving more staff a way to discuss what happened after their jobs ended.
She also said the layoffs damaged her view of the wider game industry. Barrett argued that AAA games were valuable to players because their resources could support creative work, not simply produce larger versions of the same formula. For Bethesda employees who believed its best-known franchises would offer some protection, the cuts delivered a very different message.
The contrast between decades spent building Bethesda’s identity and meetings that lasted only minutes is difficult to miss. Share your thoughts in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, or Telegram.
