The new Gears (or Gears of War… knowing Microsoft, they’ll bring back the full name) might be the most important thing right now for the Vancouver-based studio.

We reported earlier this week that 343 Industries was involved in Microsoft’s layoffs, and if the rumor is true, the rebooted studio has dropped its proprietary technology. Let’s look at another team at Xbox Game Studios, The Coalition, which has recently been co-developing The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo alongside Gears (aka Gears of War) and helping other Xbox studios.

The team is rumored to have had more minor projects. Still, these will not be finished, as Jeff Grubb spoke on Game Mess Mornings about how the studio had to sacrifice side projects to focus solely on developing Gears 6: “The Coalition has canceled its smaller non-Gears project. I have previously reported that to get up to speed with Unreal Engine 5. The Coalition planned to take on a smaller non-Gears project before moving on to Gears 6.

That game was in the works, but they were also doing other stuff alongside that, including, most prominently, in addition to their support work, that Matrix demo. That was not the smaller project. It was a separate thing, but it does seem like they feel like we are up to speed because we worked on [The Matrix], so they have canceled that smaller project as well as another project. So there’s been two games canceled there. This was reflected in the Microsoft layoffs, which hit The Coalition a little bit. The studio is going to move on fully to Gears 6,” says Grubb.

It’s not official, of course, but with Microsoft laying off more than ten thousand employees, it stands to reason that Xbox Game Studios couldn’t escape, and a kind of streamlining may have happened here, as 343 is in a similar situation.

Source: WCCFTech