Fans are fed up with constant mass layoffs at Xbox. They’ve said as much on the new Player Voice Portal that Microsoft launched earlier this year. A call to “end studio closures” was posted last week and has started trending with over 3,000 upvotes. The frustration comes after multiple years of cuts, cancellations, and worse across the very profitable tech giant’s struggling gaming division.
“The layoff of 3,200 workers at XBOX (across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, Obsidian, id Software, and XBOX Game Studios) is unacceptable,” reads the current top-trending post on the Xbox player feedback portal. “This continues a pattern that has led to 10,000+ layoffs at XBOX in as little as two years. Multiple studios have been closed or had their futures jeopardized (Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios) and numerous games have been canceled. The developers and players agree that This Can Not Continue.” (Note: while Microsoft proper has had over 10,000 layoffs in the last two years, the number for just Xbox is lower).
User Witt Yao goes on to lay out a series of demands in order for the current corporate reset to meet the needs of the Xbox community:
- Keep Teams Together – No layoffs for the next 2 years and end studio closures. Studio closures hurt the fans of that studio.
- XBOX is already profitable without reaching a billion people every day – Stop constraining XBOX by the unrealistic profit expectations of the Microsoft Accountability Margin.
- Trust the Developers – Negotiate in good faith with unions and developers, so they can better represent the needs of both developers and gamers.
- Layoffs are a Failure of Leadership – No executive bonuses when there is a layoff.
- Invest in the Future of Gaming – Invest in the future generation of video game developers instead of unpopular technologies like AI that players don’t want. Game development expertise is the biggest asset of a video game company.
Item one is a dig at Xbox showing State of Decay 3 footage and teasing a new Hellblade at its summer showcase, only for Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, the developers of those games, to be spun off weeks later. And while we don’t know what the compensation structure looks like for Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and her leadership team, we do know that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s total compensation jumped to $96 million for its 2025 fiscal year.
Although Sharma has pitched her current reset of Xbox as a long-overdue course correction after the console maker spread itself too thin during the Game Pass era, the truth is that massive cuts have become all too routine at Xbox. Around 1,900 staff were laid off in early 2024. Around 650 were let go later that same year. A bunch more developers were cut in July 2025. And even the latest round of bloodletting remains incomplete, with an ax hanging over the heads of another 1,600 staff over the course of the next 12 months.
“I especially agree that layoffs are a failure of leadership,” wrote one user today on the Xbox feedback portal. “These are talented developers. If you cannot figure out how to make money with their skill the failure is with the leadership.” Another echoed that sentiment. “There is absolutely no reason to let this many people with that much experience go,” they wrote. “These people have helped shape gaming over the last who knows how long with their combined experience. Microsoft is taking away the livelihood of thousands of employees to benefit no one. I will not be renewing my Game Pass.”
