Microsoft's Xbox division is eliminating 3,200 roles across its video game business over the next fiscal year, with 1,600 cuts starting this week. The layoffs are already hitting id Software hard, and one laid off worker said the studio was being torn apart in service of another reorganization of assets.
The timing matters because the reductions are not a distant plan. They begin now, and they come as Xbox starts resetting a division built around names that still draw players in large numbers. Jill Braff said Bethesda is being reshaped around its strongest franchises, shifting away from a planning model centered on what each independent studio was doing next and toward a roadmap aimed at the group as a whole.
That reset appears to be narrowing Bethesda’s focus to Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. In practical terms, that means the publisher is putting more weight on the brands it already knows can carry the business, rather than spreading effort evenly across studios with separate plans. For readers trying to understand how the cuts land, the math is simple at the top and messy below it: 1,600 roles are going this week, and the remaining 1,600 are slated to disappear over the next fiscal year.
What is not simple is how those losses are being distributed. Multiple anonymous sources said around half of id Software’s employees were laid off, with one source putting the total at more than 90 redundancies. Another said the QA department was decimated by the cuts. It is still unclear how many of the more than 100 union members at id Software were affected, which leaves a large part of the damage hidden inside a division that is promising a cleaner, more focused future.
That is the sharp edge of the story: Bethesda is being told to reorganize around its strongest franchises, but a source familiar with the situation said no existing studios are being shuttered. The company is trying to present the move as a refit, not a retreat. For the people inside id Software, the distinction may not matter much right now. The layoffs are real, the studio has been hit heavily, and the remaining cuts still have to be allocated somewhere before the fiscal year is over.
