Union workers turned Bethesda’s office in Rockville, Maryland, into a protest site yesterday as Xbox CEO Asha Sharma visited to catch a glimpse of The Elder Scrolls VI. Outside, Communications Workers of America members crowded the building with Scabby and a line of red flags meant to mark the layoffs that followed her July cuts.
The timing made the message impossible to miss. Sharma had confirmed plans in July to eliminate 3,200 jobs across Microsoft’s video game division by the end of the current fiscal year, and the layoffs began immediately at Obsidian, id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios. For workers who have spent weeks organizing under the Save Our Devs banner, her appearance at Bethesda was not just another office visit. It was the moment they chose to make the cost visible.
Nathan Hahn said the protest was designed to force Sharma to reckon with what the layoffs did to the people behind the games. He said workers first tried posters inside the office, then balloons, before a separate team of laid-off developers planted flags outside, one for each person cut. That detail gave the protest its hardest edge: the sea of red flags was not a symbol pulled from a slogan sheet, but a count of colleagues, teammates and friends.
That count matters because the layoffs were not a one-off move. They were the fifth round of mass layoffs at Xbox in three years, and CWA members in the United States and Canada have already taken legal action against Microsoft over the latest cuts. Carmel Smyth said Microsoft unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union, a complaint that has widened the fight beyond the office lawn in Rockville.
The protest also landed just weeks after CWA members in the United States and Canada staged numerous Save Our Devs rallies outside Xbox offices. More rallies were set for August 18, 2026, outside Xbox studios in Irvine, Austin, Dallas, Seattle, Albany, Rockville, Hunt Valley, Montreal and Minneapolis. That means the Bethesda protest was not an isolated confrontation; it was another stop in a campaign that is moving from one office to the next.
What Sharma saw when she came to Bethesda was not a quiet look at The Elder Scrolls VI. She saw a labor dispute built around the same leadership that ordered the cuts, with workers using flags, posters, balloons and Scabby to make sure the layoffs were impossible to overlook. The next round of protests is already scheduled, and the dispute over Microsoft’s video game division is still expanding.
