According to a ZeniMax designer, the Xbox layoffs last year and in July of this year were devastating for the team behind the MMO.

ZeniMax Online Studios (ZOS) was one of the in-house studios most affected by the layoffs. Last year, the team’s sci-fi online game, Project Blackbird, was canceled despite the fact that Phil Spencer, the then-head of Xbox, reportedly loved the game. The cancellation led to the layoff of hundreds of employees who had been working on the project for years. The end of Project Blackbird also led directly to the resignation of Matt Firor, ZOS’s founder, who later called it a missed opportunity for Xbox.

After Blackbird was canceled, ZOS refocused on its flagship game, the popular MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, and shifted its live service strategy from an expansion-based model to a seasonal one. This freed the development team from an outdated content delivery system, resulting in an exciting roadmap extending through 2026 with new content systems and experiences, such as naval battles. However, the first season was released just as a new wave of layoffs mandated by Xbox hit ZOS. This forced the studio to admit that the roadmap needed to be revised.

In an interview with the BBC, Morgan Goin, a senior encounter designer who was among those laid off, said that the pace of updates for The Elder Scrolls Online would slow down significantly due to the scale of the layoffs. Goin, a member of the studio’s bargaining committee, also discussed how it felt to be confronted with rumors that surfaced well before the layoffs took place.

“We’re not going to be able to release the amount of content at the speed that we were… or anything approaching that. We were blindsided. We knew something was going to happen, but we didn’t know who or how much. What we were left with was just a lot of uncertainty for about a month,” Goin said.

The Elder Scrolls Online has not performed poorly. It’s a game that has long surpassed $2 billion in total revenue and remains popular. In an interview with Game Developer, an anonymous source from ZOS said that the metrics were trending upward. “All the information we ever saw in those numbers meetings, in the monthly staff meetings, was that we were doing fine. You know, we’re paying for ourselves. We were improving on the metrics that Microsoft wanted us to improve on.”

The source added that no number of external contractors could help with creating new content for a game running on a proprietary, in-house engine because it would take newcomers at least six months just to understand what to do.

Source: WCCFTech, BBC, Game Developer