Microsoft has already laid off a lot of people in the last year and a half, and according to a reliable journalist, there could be more layoffs within Xbox this week!
The other day, Jessie Thomas, who used to work at Xbox, tweeted that her position at Microsoft had been eliminated. Thomas joined Microsoft in 2015, and had been a senior business project manager for cultural programs since 2022. In response, The Verge editor Tom Warren said that there would be more layoffs at Microsoft this week. That’s surprising enough, but what Warren then wrote is typical of large corporations: Thomas’ job was terminated while she was on vacation! That takes some nerve.
A little later, Warren also wrote that it wasn’t just one person who was affected by the new wave of layoffs. Although we have not seen any further comments from the affected ex-employees, we will probably know more tomorrow, although today is Independence Day in the US, so if Microsoft were to do this today, it would make the layoffs even more disgusting.
The last major layoffs at Microsoft were in January, six months ago, followed in May by the closures of Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, among others (both teams were part of ZeniMax Media, so the Redmond giant did some housecleaning within Bethesda). Even then, game industry analyst Rhys Elliott of Midia Research said that Xbox was focusing on something bigger, and that the result would be more job cuts at Microsoft.
It’s not official how many people have been laid off this time, but at least one person’s departure has been confirmed (Thomas just didn’t write fiction, that wouldn’t make much sense or be of much use). When we find out how many people lost their jobs this time, we’ll probably come back to this topic.
Source: WCCFTech
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