406: Xbox’s Reset Continues And The Division 2 Is Back… Again!

Morgan (0:20)

Welcome to the Baunfire Gaming Podcast. I'm your host Morgan, aka Baundiesel. This is episode 406, and this week we'll be talking about more layoffs and restructuring at Xbox, the Division 2 reveals DLC details, Mass Effect Hopium updates, and much more. Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Baundiesel YouTube channel to get more of my videos including this podcast. Thank you to everyone who supports his YouTube members and Twitch subscribers, and be sure to check out the links in the description of the episode for my other content and ways to support.

Okay, let's kick it off with the news this week. I think I would be pretty dumb to not lead it off with the Xbox layoffs and restructuring. So I'm going to go through most of just what happened, and then we'll go back through and I'll give some of my thoughts on it. So 268 employees were laid off. They were mostly at Halo Studios. We'll come back to that.

A thing that, a wrinkle that has happened since this, was there's been some reports coming out that back in the summer, when the first big layoff happened at Xbox, when they were starting to do some of this restructuring, when they announced like compulsion and undead labs and all that were leaving, that, at that point, their number was, they were expecting to layoff 3,200 people, which was pretty wild. I want to say they laid off around half of that earlier this year. After this number, the 268, supposedly, we'll see how this actually plays out, that number is going to be much smaller or may not be much bigger than it currently is. So, for whatever reason, whether it's the restructurings or maybe once they actually got into the reality of laying these people off and moving things around, they figured out that 3, 3,200 wasn't going to be necessary. So, if you want to take that as good news, then there's some, I guess, good news for you.

Some of the restructuring, is Activision Blizzard King is absorbing World's Edge and Rare, notable that Rare hasn't released a new game in a really long time. I believe they're the ones who do Sea of Thieves, which is, I assume, still probably a pretty viable product. World's Edge is who does Age of Empires.

We are also under the impression that about half of that team was part of these layoffs. Since we know that most of the layoffs were Halo studios, I have to imagine the World's Edge team was probably really small, if that was half their studio, because it was likely only a dozen people or so. Only, obviously, it still sucks. But that was a weird one. There was also a wrinkle there, where a bunch of journalists and influencers and stuff posted that a former World's Edge head of that studio threw out this really, really pretty snarky attack on Asha Sharma.

She said that something along the lines of wearing the fancy jacket and getting pictures with Kojima wasn't a great look to do before these layoffs.

Sure, maybe. That may be a good point. The people who reported on that, though, didn't point out that this lady has not been at Xbox or Microsoft for almost half a decade at this point. She's been gone quite a while. Well, I'm sure she's still attached to the studio.

Maybe she's just trying to get some attention on herself. But apparently she didn't like it because she deleted her account. As far as I can tell, I think this was on threads of all places. But a part of the ABK one is kind of interesting.

They are moving Halo to Activision Blizzard King. So they're creating a whole new team there. We don't really have many details about that yet. We don't know what they're going to do with the continuation of Infinite Story or otherwise. We do know that Halo Studios suffered the most from these layoffs, that they will still exist, at least for now, doing support for the games that 343 slash Halo Studios did. So I have to assume that's mostly going to be work on Infinite, whatever is left to do there, as well as support on the combat evolved or campaign evolved, the new remake, and I guess maybe if they need to do anything with like Halo 4 and 5, maybe I assume we haven't gotten any patches for those games in a while, but you never know. So it's interesting. I've seen a lot of takes on this.

It's funny to me that the sentiment generally has been that 3-4-3, which became Halo Studios, was a disaster. Most of the people don't like the games they've released. And then the moment this happens, you see everyone, you know, clutching their pearls and freaking out. Like say what you will about Call of Duty and Activision and such, but I find it really hard to believe that this is going to be a downgrade to the general consumer. Sure, I'm sure there's some purists that are, you know, not going to like how they handle this, how this gets done or whatever. But if there's anything Activision does well, is they get games out on time and they make tons of money and they sell tons of copies of said game.