{"id":717,"date":"2026-10-02T11:02:51","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T11:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/?p=717"},"modified":"2026-10-02T21:49:01","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T21:49:01","slug":"link-as-xbox-swings-the-axe-gears-of-war-e-day-developers-fear-theyll-be-laid-off-straight-after-launch-and-right-before-theyd-be-due-their-bonuses-eurogamer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/link-as-xbox-swings-the-axe-gears-of-war-e-day-developers-fear-theyll-be-laid-off-straight-after-launch-and-right-before-theyd-be-due-their-bonuses-eurogamer\/","title":{"rendered":"Link: As Xbox swings the axe, Gears of War: E-Day developers fear they’ll be laid off straight after launch – and right before they’d be due their bonuses (Eurogamer)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Eurogamer<\/a> talking with some remaining Xbox devs and it\u2019s going as well as you\u2019d expect really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dIt’s hard to believe anything they say anymore\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whilst there\u2019s a lot upsetting around Microsoft gutting a huge portion of the games industry not because it\u2019s not profitable but because it\u2019s not increasingly profitable enough on a steep enough curve, it\u2019s been incredibly frustrating watching the people who have bought into the idea of a \u201creset\u201d that\u2019s \u201cstreamlining\u201d Xbox into an efficient hits machine just, well, buying into it at all. I\u2019ve mentioned it before but I can\u2019t see how Xbox can come back from this now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve just risen from my slumber so I\u2019m not going to write thousands of words on this but with the exception of the small amount of people who would tweet a CEO compliments and think this is perfectly normal behaviour for a human being, Microsoft have trashed just about every other relationship they have on just about every level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their own developers know that it doesn\u2019t matter anymore if they ship a successful game or not, Microsoft will lay them and their colleagues off in a heartbeat no matter what, with no rhyme nor reason beyond \u201cbecause they can\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Studios have had their workforces stripped down to unmanageable amounts and it is fundamentally clear many no longer have the staff or morale to continue to work at a healthy, sustainable, pace. Or at all in some cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When one of your star studios is announcing games four years in advance, in order to prove that people want them and they can and do ship games so please don\u2019t hurt us ~ please leave us some staff! ~ this is not normally how anything works. This is a desperate move on the part of the studio and a shameful reflection upon how the new management are seen to operate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third party developers have known sales on Xbox are shit for ages now. Unless a publisher or Xbox are covering the costs of working on Xbox, that\u2019s effort people could be putting into something that helps keep the lights on instead. Or buying lunch, whatever. Throw in a completely uncertain future for Xbox and there\u2019s no good reason to put that work in. As Sony have discovered in the past, the amount of work to recover from this is years long, substantial and needs people who can be trusted by the third party devs not to fuck them over. That is not happening with Xbox right now or anytime soon. Things can and will only get worse for Xbox here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Customers are getting front row seats to the chaos with ever changing decisions on what Xbox costs to use, what services Xbox is willing to offer and for what, and watching the entire ecosystem be gutted by Microsoft\u2019s swingeing cuts and the games suffer. You can\u2019t \u201cdo a good Halo\u201d your way out of this one. Especially whilst continuing to bleed the customers dry so they really feel it in the wallet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What remains of the games press is, for the most part, sitting there watching all this unfold in complete horror. The amount of people compelled to give Xbox anything close to positive, \u201cnormal\u201d coverage is vanishingly small. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no one place Xbox have not fucked things up. All that is left is distrust and a small handful of weirdo CEO tweeting fans. There is no functioning Xbox ecosystem to \u201creset\u201d, everything is (bluntly) completely fucked on every discernible level and the recent egregious increases in the costs of hardware pretty much ensure any attempts to salvage anything from this become borderline impossible anyway because who wants to pay an extortionate amount for a console with so little developer support, so few games and a willingness to keep asking for increasing amount of money for fewer services? Yeah, it\u2019s just those weirdos who tweet CEOs compliments left for that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Xbox are fucked, man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eurogamer talking with some remaining Xbox devs and it\u2019s going as well as you\u2019d expect really. \u201dIt’s hard to believe anything they say anymore\u201d Whilst there\u2019s a lot upsetting around Microsoft gutting a huge portion of the games industry not because it\u2019s not profitable but because it\u2019s not increasingly profitable enough on a steep enough […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Link post, with thoughts, on Eurogamer\u2019s \u201cAs Xbox swings the axe, Gears of War: E-Day developers fear they'll be laid off straight after launch\u201d article and surrounding hells.\n\nIn summary: Xbox are fucked.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,26],"tags":[106,83,54,156,155,154],"class_list":["post-717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","category-videogames","tag-ai-bad-kind","tag-business","tag-eurogamer","tag-i-hate-all-of-this","tag-microsoft","tag-xbox"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}