Xbox Gaming Layoffs Rock ZeniMax Workers: ‘It’s Disgusting’ and ‘A Betrayal’

ZeniMax is just one of many game studios under the Xbox Gaming umbrella that has fallen victim to a recent round of layoffs in the name of profit. The layoffs, which occurred in early July and seemingly affected over 9,000 employees, according to The Verge, were motivated by Microsoft’s desire to “increase agility and effectiveness.” However, workers at ZeniMax Media, the game studio behind the Elder Scrolls series, DOOM, and Fallout games, have recently spoken anonymously to Game Developer and said that the layoffs have effectively had the opposite effect. One worker said “Everyone left now has to pick up the pieces as best they can. The morale and general confusion of it all has extended into our general workflow. We used to have very, very reliable people working on things, and they’re no longer there.” By all accounts, the layoffs have resulted in a severe brain drain and loss of institutional knowledge and experience, and the remaining workers at the studio have been left to pick up the pieces. One employee emphasized that, in some cases, the remaining staff will need to pick up the slack of multiple people who were laid off.

Part of the reason for the outsized effect on the remaining developers is just how chaotically the layoffs were handled, with one employee saying that they were locked out of all their company systems, including email and Slack, for hours before there was any communication from managers or higher-ups about what was going on. The chaotic management of the layoffs and their wide-reaching effects have severely diminished the morale of the workers who are still at ZeniMax, with one worker, Autumn Mitchell, who remains at ZeniMax, saying that “Morale is terrible. It’s grotesque. People are stressed. They’re crying.” She continues to say “I also think we need to bring some people back. I don’t see how we get through this work without bringing some people back,” further implying that the workload and expectations placed on the workers still at ZeniMax are too much to handle for the remaining workers, especially if there is a standard of quality to be maintained.

“Some people were here for 15 years and cut out. Making it so that people have to rush to type a goodbye message into Slack to their colleagues that they’ve been working with on various projects, that have been making your corporation money for 15 years, is disgusting. It’s disgusting. If I could get any message to any executive right now it would be review this process because it’s not normal, and it’s not okay” -Autumn Mitchell, ZeniMax Media senior QA tester.

Another worker still at ZeniMax, Page Branson, said that the day of the layoffs was “one of the worst days at a job I’ve ever had in my entire life,” and that “It was so sad seeing people so distraught and confused and not knowing if they would have a job by the end of the day—or even if the layoffs were done by the end of the day.” She continued that the layoffs felt like a “betrayal of trust of the highest magnitude.”

Estimates from the staff who spoke to Game Developer say that as much as a third of the ZeniMax staff were affected by the July layoff round. ZeniMax and Xbox Gaming are also only the most recent example of a plague of layoffs that seems to be affecting the gaming and tech industries in the last few years, with the Video Game Layoffs Tracker estimating that at least 3,563 job cuts—excluding the ZeniMax layoffs mentioned here—have been confirmed.