Microsoft has canceled a lot of projects over the past few years, but none live in the imagination quite like Project Blackbird, an online loot shooter RPG from the studio behind The Elder Scrolls Online. It was one of the casualties of the tech giant’s cost-cutting in the summer of 2025, despite then–Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer reportedly having loved what he played of it. Former ZeniMax Online Studios head Matt Firor recently shed more light on the project and that pivotal decision, which caused him to leave the company, in a new interview.
“Making games is always a heartbreaking business,” he told MinnMax‘s Ben Hanson. “Like, no matter what happens, you could be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people. I didn’t agree with what happened, but I understood the reasoning behind it. It is just financial.” Firor added, “We’re a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say, and that number was always large.”
Firor, who has been working on games for decades after breaking out as a designer on 2001’s Dark Age of Camelot, said that a lot of money was invested in a new engine for Project Blackbird to enable more efficiency on the back end of development. While that would lead to a high upfront price tag, it meant live-service support for the online sci-fi MMO would be a lot easier with developers able to create and adjust content more rapidly.Â
Unfortunately, that also made it an appealing target as Microsoft started making mass cuts across its gaming division following the $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Firor said the unexpected decision to cancel Project Blackbird didn’t feel personal and that there were plenty of great people he worked with at Xbox.
“A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them, right?” he said. “They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount. And this isn’t Xbox. This is like all public companies. They want reliable forecastable business. And the entertainment, like the video game industry, just doesn’t work that way sometimes.”
Firor continued, “And so you can say Xbox, but you could say EA 2008 or Activision 2004. It’s a business, and it’s terrible sometimes. And I don’t agree with some of the decisions obviously, but the reasoning behind them makes sense on a ledger somewhere.”
Earlier this year, the veteran developer posted a message on LinkedIn confirming that he had quit over the cancellation, a rare move in a close-knit industry where talent is encouraged not to publicly air internal frustrations and disagreements. “It was a pretty devastating blow,” Firor told MinnMax. “It’s like, this is the game I came up with the concept for. I came up with the world design for. Obviously, people took it and ran with it and made it a thousand times better. But I’ve been kicking this idea around for a long time.”
He explained that there was still a lot of work to be done to finish the full game, likely another one of the reasons Microsoft ultimately decided to bail, but that it was “a hell of a lot of fun and much different than anything else out there.” Firor continued, “The world probably would have been a better place with that game in it as far as I’m concerned.”
