Holding In The Reset Button 2K26

Jeff Gerstmann (0:00)

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Jeff Gerstmann (1:10)

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the program. I'm Jeff Gerstmann. This is The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It is September 22nd and change, 10 a.m., September 22nd and a little bit here in 2026 A substantial week has gone by over the last seven days, though really it's been the last, let's say 12 hours that have been relatively defining for this week's news and news and views from the world of video games.

I am of course talking about the further restructuring over at Xbox. This is something that I think, they were not done when they laid a bunch of people off a little while back. And so this morning they have announced further moves they are making around the future of their studios and how they are going to go forward. This is some consolidation. This is some, oh, you report to you now, you go with them, you're over here, this game is going to come from these people. So it's a little bit of that sort of shuffling, in addition to the more traditional layoffs. The only number we have out of this. So this was a post attributed to Matt Booty over at Xbox, who runs, you know, studios and stuff there. It is a relatively brief message. The only number we have is 268, which he says, we are eliminating 268 roles across Halo Studios, which was the studio that made Halo games. Other first party studios and the Xbox Game Studios Management and Central Functions layer. The actions completed since July, inclusive of the studio divestitures, meaning the studios, they divested themselves from, Double Fine, Compulsion Games and such.

This means they are saying, he is saying that they are three quarters of the way done with the restructuring. So more to come on this front. And then from there, they really needed a way to find the way to say, absorb without it sounding nasty. And they settled on the phrase, expanding its remit, which works, I guess, until you use it three times in a row. And then you realize like, oh, you can't think of a better way to say, we're slamming these studios together. So here we go. Part of it, so this reorg, yeah, this is obviously Halo Studios is the big name here on the list of cuts. And you'll see why in a moment here, Activision will expand its remit to World's Edge, as well as Rare. World's Edge is the studio that does the Age of Empires stuff. I had to look that up. I was like, oh, OK. OK. As well as Rare, a natural fit for the Activision machine.

Activision, if you thought that Rare being a part of Activision was weird, here's the next sentence in this thing. Activision will also be developing the next Halo title, led by a new purpose built team that is separate from ongoing development and plans for Call of Duty. A small team at Halo Studios will continue supporting the Halo community and games in market. So I guess if you make it through, if you're a person who was not part of the cuts today at Halo Studios, the message would seem to be, you've got to go, like, this is, we're not done laying people off, and you're supporting games that are in market that are not getting updated anymore. So, you probably, you know, they're not going to keep a studio around called Halo Studios while another studio is making a Halo game. So I would have to imagine that eventually whatever people are left at Halo Studios will either be integrated into whatever the new Halo Studio ends up being, lowercase s, not Halo Studios. It'd be nasty if they kept the name. Or they will cut those people as well. I imagine it ends up being a mix of the two, right?