There is every indication that Microsoft is set to fire a large swath of game developers and/or shut down entire studios in the next few days.

While Microsoft is weighing canceling Blade, it’s also exploring options to sell Arkane Studios. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Microsoft is trying to spin off Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, too. GamesBeat reported this week that Microsoft is actively looking for a buyer for Undead Labs, the developers behind State of Decay. If buyers are found for these studios, then they’ll avoid being closed, but sources stress these talks could take months in some cases.

If some of those studios sound vaguely familiar, it’s because they were showcased in the recent Xbox Games, er, Showcase. Like three weeks ago. Ninja Theory is the one developing Senua and Undead Labs has State of Decay 3, a game series that I have very much enjoyed in the past. If the studios don’t find a buyer soon though, they may be shuttered and the games canceled, no matter how close (or not) to release they were.

What has been interesting about this latest round of layoff news has been the general Reddit sentiment. A few years ago, there was an appropriate level of outrage when Tango Gameworks got axed right after releasing the award-winning Hi Fi Rush. With this latest teaser round of studio closures, the reactions are, at best, ¯\(ツ)/¯. Some are straight-up supportive.

…and more and more, I find myself falling into the latter camp.

To be clear, I find Microsoft generally abhorrent. I shill for Game Pass because I consider it a great value for consumers (for now), but everything else about Microsoft is bog-standard megacorp bullshit. Asking for your games division to have a 30% profit margin like the rest of your monopolies products is absurd. Buying studios and then shutting them down so that the IPs are forever entombed is tragic, let alone the reality of layoffs in this economy generally.

However. HOWEVER. Sometimes… there’s no baby in the bathwater, and you’re hanging on to dirty bathwater for no reason. Sometimes it’s been so fucking long since you’ve checked on the baby that he’s done grown up and moved out of the house. If Undead Labs gets dissolved and we lose State of Decay 3, I will be sad. Or would have been, if I hadn’t done some cursory Google searches:

A 2022 investigation by Kotaku reported on a sexist studio culture, which was abetted by Philip Holt, the new studio head who replaced Strain, and then-head of HR Anne Schlosser.^[15] Schlosser was removed after a Microsoft HR investigation. The toxic work environment, which continued after Schlosser’s departure, led to a high employee turnover rate, especially among experienced staff. These issues, combined with a lack of design vision, contributed to extensive delays in the development of State of Decay 3.^[15] Employees also blamed Microsoft for not living up to its goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion by not responding to reports of abuse in a timely manner.^[15]

Back in April, I wrote Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons. This is the sort of thing I am talking about. Presumably not every studio has the same skeletons in their closets, but the point is that these companies are not releasing games faster because of incompetent (at best) leadership. It does not have to take 6+ years to develop a game. The original Mass Effect trilogy came out in 2007, 2010, and 2012. Can you imagine how long it would take for any other trilogy to come out these days?

Arguably, Microsoft should not have bought all these studios in the first place. Or maybe if they didn’t buy Activision Blizzard, they would have had the time to let the devs cook longer before layoffs. But it could also be true that many of these studios would/should have died on their own via natural selection. We’re used to being outraged by publishers closing studios, but I somehow doubt that Undead Labs could have gone 6+ years without another product to sell without folding on their own. Mayhap it was the Microsoft money that encouraged the foolishness and dulled the scrappy edge.

I dunno. The sympathy I have for game developers in general is at an all-time low. The live-service bubble is for sure popping, and the economics of AAA games in general is collapsing along with it. And it kind of has to, for everyone’s sake. The status quo is being made possible by only the most extreme psychological hacks, FOMO, battle passes, gacha mechanics, etc. Remember when these companies were incentivized by, you know, selling more copies of the game? The indie and AA developers remember because that is pretty much all they have access to. We should get back to that.

Soon enough, there may not be another choice.