Workers at Bethesda’s Rockville, Maryland office decided to commemorate a visit from Microsoft leadership in a unique way. To protest the mass layoffs that have seen 1,600 people lose their jobs, with another 1,600 folks to be laid off throughout the rest of the year, developers put up a giant inflatable rat, known affectionately throughout union organizations as Scabby.
NEW: CWA union members have inflated a giant rat and deployed a wall of red flags representing laid off Xbox workers outside the Bethesda office in Rockville.
The protest was timed to coincide with a visit from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who is apparently at the studio today.
In addition to inflating the giant, ugly, beloved rat, developers took action both inside and outside the office. Members of the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS-CWA) planted 800 red flags outside the office, each representing a person who had lost their job since July 2025. “Each flag was a public reminder of how many people management cut from our teams – not just our colleagues and coworkers, but our friends at the end of the day,” said Nathan Hahn, a technical director and member of the Bethesda Game Studios Union in a statement shared withKotaku.
Today at HQ, we had special guests from Microsoft leadership. We refuse to let executives forget what game studios are actually made of: their workers.
As welcome gift, we placed hundreds of flags outside, honoring all of the game workers who have been laid off by Microsoft in 2026 (so far).
Hahn also said the action continued inside the office, with employees placing posters outside their cubicles. Then, when management told them to take them down, they put up balloons. “We heard that Microsoft leadership was coming to our office this week, and decided to make our presence visible at the office to show how our developers have been impacted by these devastating layoffs,” Hahn said.
Last month, Xbox announced that it would lay off roughly 3,200 employees as a part of its “great reset,” a move which CEO Asha Sharma says will return the company to profitability. Xbox has already seen scores of layoffs, project cancellations, and studio closures, with this latest round of layoffs cutting the gaming organization seemingly to the bone. Formerly Xbox-owned studios Double Fine and Compulsion Games have been spun off, becoming independent again, with both studios undergoing layoffs in the aftermath. The fate of Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arkane Lyon remains unclear amid reporting Ninja Theory and Undead Labs will be bought out by an as yet unknown purchaser while Arkane is “pursuing strategic options.”
The layoffs have caused untold amounts of disruption among the devs who remain at these studios, and they’re fighting back in hopes to staunch the bleeding. Next week on August 18th, Xbox workers, in coordination with the Communications Workers of America, will hold rallies across the U.S. and Canada to protest layoffs and demand fair contracts for union members that are likely to include layoff protections.
“We’re mobilizing to fight back against these layoffs not just to ensure impacted XBOX devs and testers get treated fairly, but to remind our company and game studios everywhere that layoffs like this cannot continue,” Hahn said.
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