Xbox has laid off more than 200 workers at The Elder Scrolls Online studio ZeniMax Online, it’s been confirmed.
The state of Maryland, where ZeniMax is based, has published a WARN notice confirming that Microsoft has cut 213 employees at ZeniMax Online and a further 166 employees at ZeniMax Media.
It’s not clear how many ZeniMax Online have survived Xbox’s sweeping layoffs, but one employee claimed on social media this week that about half of its “active developers working on content” had been laid off.
A former ESO developer reacted angrily to news of the cuts, writing on X: “I’m just so angry today. People will never know the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making ESO or how we basically funded other failing projects while never getting enough resources to really keep up with our release cadence. The team deserved much better.
“I’ve been gone for a while, but talking to people today and realizing there’s really no one left and no changing it now makes my heart ache. For the people, our game, who we were as a team and a studio. This is a serious loss, and I don’t think people know how much.”
On Wednesday, a similar WARN notice confirmed that around 100 developers had been cut at ZeniMax’s Id Software.
A devastating year for ZeniMax Online
This is at least the second round of major layoffs ZeniMax Online has suffered in the last year under Microsoft.
Last Summer, boss Matt Firor resigned from the studio following a previous round of sweeping Microsoft layoffs, which saw thousands of people lose their jobs and multiple projects canceled, including an unannounced ZeniMax Online title.
According to a Bloomberg report, the canceled ‘Project Blackbird’ was a third-person, online looter-shooter set in a sci-fi universe. The game’s cancellation was said to have come as a shock to its development team, because it had allegedly received rave reviews from internal management meetings.
Writing on LinkedIn months after the cuts, Frior called Blackbird “the game I had waited my entire career to create” and confirmed that its cancellation led to his resignation.
