Yesterday,Xbox game developers held coordinated “Save Our Devs” rallies across nine cities in the United States and Canada on August 18, organized by the OneBGS union (representing Bethesda Game Studios) alongside the Communications Workers of America (CWA), in protest of the wave of layoffs that recently swept throughMicrosoft‘sgaming division like a whirlwind.
The Scale of the Cuts
The rallies respond to Microsoft’s announcement of roughly 3,200 planned Xbox job cuts, with the first phase already having eliminated 1,600 positions and the remaining cuts expected to hit before the middle of 2027. CWA-represented Xbox workers now total nearly 4,000 unionized employees across the division, spanning developers, artists, engineers, producers, user researchers, and customer support staff working on franchises including Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Warcraft.
This is not the first coordinated action of its kind. On July 15, hundreds of developers marched simultaneously at six Xbox-owned studio locations across four cities after an earlier round of cuts eliminated 440 union-represented positions across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Workers United QA, and ZeniMax corporate teams. Over 200 developers were laid off from ZeniMax Online Studios (the studio from The Elder Scrolls Online and the previously canceled Project Blackbird) alone in that round, alongside what’s been described as well over half of id Software‘s staff.
“We Didn’t Have Layoffs Before”
Speaking to Kotaku ahead of the rallies, Alex Nguyen, a lead character artist who has worked at Bethesda for several years, described a starkly different culture prior to Microsoft’s acquisition of the studio. Under sole ZeniMax ownership, he said, layoffs happened but were rare:
That was one of the benefits… a lot of people had such long tenure here, and they were like, ‘Yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at.’
Nguyen pointed to the rocky launches of both Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online as examples where, under ZeniMax, developers were given time and support to fix problems rather than face cuts. Now, though, such situations are handled differently:
But since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs.
Nguyen added that the loss of veteran staff is compounding the damage through lost institutional knowledge:
If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.
Nathan Hahn, a technical producer with four years at Bethesda Game Studios, emphasized the direct link between the cuts and game quality:
Every coworker contributes to the success of our company. Without us, Bethesda games aren’t Bethesda games.
According to Hahn, the union attempted to head off the current situation months in advance:
We actually submitted a proposal to the company on how to perform a reduction in force back in February of this year. The company sat on that for four months and did not give us a response before performing these layoffs.
The CWA has since filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Microsoft violated its bargaining obligations.
Setting the Record Straight
Part of the rallies’ purpose is combating misinformation about who’s actually being let go:
We’ve seen statements that it’s like a whole bunch of middle management was let go. It’s not middle management. It’s people on the ground making sure that this game works and putting it in the hands of players.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has famously characterized the cuts as part of a reset for a business that had overextended its ambitions; however, OneBGS has pushed back on that framing, previously stating that Microsoft internally described the cuts as an entrepreneurial change in the business’s scope.
That tension spilled into a more theatrical protest a few days ago, when Bethesda developers staged a demonstration featuring a giant inflatable rat outside their offices after learning that Sharma herself was visiting to check out a new build of The Elder Scrolls VI.
Union recognition across Microsoft’s gaming studios has expanded rapidly since Microsoft and CWA reached a labor neutrality agreement back in June 2022. OneBGS achieved recognition in August 2024, Bethesda Game Studios Montreal was certified the same month, and id Software’s roughly 165 workers unionized as recently as December 2025. However, that neutrality agreement never included an enforceable timeline for reaching first contracts, and workers at studios that hadn’t yet ratified agreements before this round of layoffs (unlike ZeniMax Workers United QA, Raven Software QA, and Blizzard Quality Assurance, which already had contractual advance-notice and recall rights in writing) have had comparatively little formal protection against the cuts.
Despite the difficult circumstances, Hahn struck a note of cautious optimism in his conversation with Kotaku:
Morale for our work at our jobs has never been lower. But morale for what we can do while working together collectively… that is on the upswing.
That’s great to hear, though on the flip side, fans of highly anticipated upcoming titles like The Elder Scrolls VI won’t be happy to learn that morale for game development is at an all-time low. Whether that affects the final product’s quality remains to be seen, but it’s not difficult to imagine developers can do better work when they’re properly energized.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief.
In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech’s gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews.
Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications.
His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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