Hello everyone, and welcome back Modern Console Warfare. There’s no way around it, the Microsoft Layoffs have dominated the last media cycle.

We covered them in last week’s newsletter as the news was breaking, but honestly they were worse than anyone feared. One major studio was shut down completely, multiple games were cancelled, and a few other studios were all but hollowed out. We’ll get into some of the specifics.

To anyone from Microsoft who was part of the layoffs: this layoff doesn’t define you. The Industry is lousy with layoffs right now, I just was part of one myself, so I sincerely hope you can find your way back to an even better place at a new spot that appreciates your talents. If there’s any way I can help, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, and if there’s any connections I can facilitate, let me know.

Here’s THE SPREADSHEET where, as always, we’ll be tracking the scores for every studio, publisher, and game company we track in this experiment.

First, some good news from the Stop Killing Games movement.

Let’s dive into it.

The increasing online-ification and live-service-ification of the video game industry has presented a problem to media archivists: what happens when the servers turn off.

The games industry is littered with the lifeless corpses of online games, forever relegated to obscurity with no official avenues to play them. Some continue unofficially (shoutouts to the Star Wars Galaxies and Toontown Online fan servers, you’re real ones), but games like The Matrix Online are lost to time completely.

Stop Killing Games asks game developers for an alternative: when you build an online-only game, have a plan in place for depreciation so people who want to play it, can, even when official support ends.

We publicly ran into this when Ubisoft decided to shut down it’s racing game The Crew, and were promptly sued for it. There’s still no way to play it, but at least Ubisoft has added offline functionality to the game’s two sequels so if they ever go away they’ll still be playable.

Now, 1.2 Million signatories agree: there should be a plan to keep games playable after end-of-life.

Of course, industry trade groups and publishers have responded basically saying that putting this into law would be untenable, stifling innovation by requiring additional development cost and time to build these offline features in and to plan for a game’s death as part of its development roadmap.

But speaking purely for myself…why shouldn’t that be the case? Just last year we saw Airship Syndicate take control of their previously online-only game Wayfinders back from their publisher Digital Extremes, and completely rebuild the game as a co-op offline experience.

I can’t recommend it enough, by the way, it’s a very fun action RPG to play with a group of friends, and it’s currently on sale in Steam, I’ll drop a link below.

SCORE: +3

This one hurts. It was only one year ago the Xbox touted Perfect Dark as the big “one more thing” reveal for their press event at Summer Games Fest. This remake of Rare’s seminal FPS classic promised slick gameplay, and an open “handle this however you want” approach to level design that in their gameplay demo (which WAS actual gameplay, and not pre-rendered, by the way) looked absolutely stellar.

Microsoft opened a brand new studio named “The Initiative” in Santa Monica to build the dang thing, in 2018.

It was unusual that Microsoft would bring on the non-Microsft-owned studio Crystal Dynamics to support development, but this game was the crown jewel in last year’s presentation, it HAD to be going well and headed for a 2026-2027 release…right?

Well, last week it was announced that not only was Perfect Dark cancelled, but the whole studio was completely shut down. Of all of the culling that happened at Xbox last week, and we will get into more of them, this is the one that has me scratching my head most.

The Xbox brand is in such a strange place now, looking at last year their lineup of exclusives was already slight with just 3 major titles released. (Senua’s Saga Hellblade 2, Flight Simulator 2024, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle just under the wire at the end of the year.)

Their lineup is looking more robust this year, but is still without a big hook to hang their hat on, and Perfect Dark was shaping up to be a hell of a hook.

SCORE: -10 (RIP)

What’s sad about Everwild’s cancellation is that we know almost nothing about it. It was revealed with the above trailer in 2019, and it seemed like an incredible project for Microsoft, which was desperately looking to add exclusives to their library.

Let Rare, one of the most storied developers in history with one of their most popular multiplayer games of all time (Sea of Thieves), go wild and create a new IP. And though we new very little about it, it looked absolutely gorgeous.

It was a case, though, where every year after its absence from Xbox presentations grew more and more conspicuous. When Microsoft held its Summer Games Fest event this year and had it’s 4th straight no-show, it did lead me to wonder what was happening behind the scenes.

Now news has leaked out that in 2021 the game was basically scrapped and restarted under a new director, and throwing out 6 years of work is a tricky prospect. But as recently as this year, Xbox leadership was touting that “progress was being made” on the title.

Now we’re left to wonder what’s next for Rare. It would be an awful shame if all Microsoft kept them around for was to crank out content for Sea of Thieves, a game that’s now 7 years old, and was revealed 10 whole years ago.

SCORE: -8

It was reported on the day of the layoffs that Turn 10 was hit hard, with 50% of the studio’s workforce getting let go. Since then, the impact of those layoffs has been made apparent in staff comments and it’s grim.

Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that, VIA staff comments, the studio has been effectively “shuttered,” and the people who are remaining have been moved off of their flagship title Forza Motorsport and onto its sister spinoff title Forza Horizon completely.

Historically, the Forza Motorsport sim racing franchise has been a cornerstone of the Xbox stable, ever since the first game on the original Xbox. Hell, Forza 2 was the first ever Xbox game I personally owned, so the franchise has a special place in my heart.

Most recently, Turn 10 released their brand new reboot of the franchise simply titled Forza Motorsport in 2023. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire with sales, but with regular content updates and a planned long-tail service it was planned to be the future of the franchise, coexisting with the more arcadey Forza Horizon games as their simulation big brother.

But it’s no secret that the the Horizon games, particularly 2021’s Forza Horizon 5, have eclipsed the original games in popularity with their focus on expansive environments, varied racing events, and just plain fun over the more buttoned up simulation games. A recent PlayStation 5 port has reportedly sold very well for them.

Still, as much as I love the Horizon games, it’s a terrible shame to see the studio that started it all get hollowed out to build the spinoff. There’s room in the industry for both simulation and arcade racing games, but the options for sim racers are getting thinner and thinner.

SCORE: -9

ZeniMax Online Studios, the online multiplayer game arm of Bethesda, has been running The Elder Scrolls online for a decade now. I remember getting hands on ESO for the first time at my first ever E3 in 2013.

It’s still alive and kicking, but until this week the team behind it was deep in development on a brand new game in a brand new IP completely unrelated to Bethesda’s bread-and-butter Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.

We don’t know much about the project, codenamed Blackbird, aside from the fact that it’s now scrapped, and the team working on it laid off, pending union negotiations.

Oh, and that only a few months ago Xbox leadership stopped by to play the game and were reportedly blown away by it. So much so that Xbox head Matt Booty had to literally pull the controller away from another exec to keep a meeting going. I know this is the 2nd time I’ve said this in this newsletter so far, but this cancellation is baffling.

Development was going smoothly, they were hitting their roadmap targets, it had a vertical slice in a completely playable (and apparently addictive) state in March, and they were on track to release in 2028.

None of that, apparently, was good enough to save it from the layoff grinder. On top of that, once the game was cancelled Matt Firor, the head of the studio who helped spin it up way back in 2007, tendered his resignation.

Honestly, I can’t blame him, he did everything completely right, made something quality and had a plan to execute, and it still got his game cancelled with no fanfare.

Similar to Rare, it’s sad to think of what’s next here. Is the plan to keep them shackled to Elder Scrolls Online for another decade, keeping it shambling along?

SCORE: -8

There’s still news leaking out from the Xbox layoff fallout, like conflicting information from Romero Games as to whether or not it even still exists, so we’ll have to keep an eye on the story as it evolves.

Sony is set to dedicate a whole 20-minute State of Play video event to it’s upcoming game Ghost of Yotei, sequel to the stellar Kurosawa-inspired Ghost of Tsushima. It’s set for this Thursday, July 10th at 2PM PT, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that game will shape up later this year.

Further out, Nintendo’s second big Switch 2 launch-window title Donkey Kong Bananza will launch next Thursday evening. It came out this week that it was developed by the same team that brought Super Mario Odyssey to the original Switch’s launch window, and that was one of the finest 3D Mario games ever put to cartridge. I have high hopes.