Xbox confirmed another round of job cuts on Tuesday 22 September, alongside a reshuffle that touches nearly every major first-party studio. The official figure is 268 roles. What kept the industry talking all day was everything that came after it: the next Halo will not be built by Halo Studios, it moves to Activision. Obsidian sits under Bethesda now, Rare answers to a different publisher, and one well-regarded British studio is facing closure.
At a glance
268 roles cut across Halo Studios, other first-party studios and the Xbox Game Studios management layer.
Activision will build the next Halo with a purpose-made team, and also takes on Rare and World’s Edge.
Ninja Theory faces a proposed closure after two separate deals collapsed.
What Xbox actually said on 22 September
The announcement came through a post on Xbox Wire written by Matt Booty, who runs the studios. It is called “Continuing Our Reset”, and the headline gives away the framing. The company sees itself partway through a job it started earlier in the year, with a fair distance still to run.
The post puts the figure at 268 roles, spread across Halo Studios, other first-party teams and the management and central functions layer at Xbox Game Studios. Booty’s stated aim is to run fewer business units, bring together groups that already worked side by side, and concentrate publishing expertise in one place.
He also notes that everything done since July, studio divestitures included, leaves the company roughly three quarters of the way through the restructuring it announced back then. So this is not the final round. Few of the write-ups led with that line, and it is the one that matters most for what comes next.
That plan covers roughly 3,200 job cuts, set out in July. Tuesday’s 268 sit on top of it rather than replacing any of it. Which is why nobody across the industry treated the day as a one-off.
Another studio confirmed its own exit on the same day. Undead Labs, the team behind State of Decay, said on its site that it is independent again and employee-owned, while acknowledging it had said goodbye to a significant number of colleagues. State of Decay 3 is still targeted at 2027.
Halo moves to Activision, and the original team is left on the sidelines
This is what dominated Tuesday. The next Halo title will be developed at Activision by what Booty describes as “a new, purpose-built team”, separate from the people working on Call of Duty. Halo Studios keeps a small group to support the community and the games already out there.
It’s worth pausing on what that means. The studio that took the series in-house never shipped a single original game under its new name before the project was handed elsewhere. The cuts announced the same day hit it directly too.
Halo is not all Activision picks up, either. Its remit now covers Rare, the studio behind Sea of Thieves and Banjo-Kazooie, and World’s Edge, which looks after Age of Empires. Three long-running names now sit with the Call of Duty publisher.
Obsidian under Bethesda, Playground and Turn 10 merged
The second move covers the role-playing studios. Obsidian joins Bethesda and carries on with its current projects, Grounded among them. Both teams are already working together on a new Fallout, which makes the pairing less of a leap than it first appears.
On the racing side, Playground Games and Turn 10 become a single studio responsible for the Forza and Fable franchises. The two had been running in parallel on the same family of games, sharing tools along the way.
Studio mergers rarely leave schedules untouched, though. GameSpot’s round-up of the day points out that these changes land on top of work already under way, with no release date publicly revised so far.
Ninja Theory, the closure nobody managed to avoid
This is the harshest line in the post. Booty writes that two separate agreements for Ninja Theory fell through, and that consultation with employees on a proposed closure will now begin. The Cambridge studio, known for Hellblade and for Senua, had shown its next project only months earlier.
The wording does leave a door open, since it mentions exploring other possibilities. All told, when two buyers walk away one after the other, recent history in this industry doesn’t offer much hope.
What changes for players
Very little in the short run. No announced game was cancelled on Tuesday, no date moved, and the series carry on under new ownership. Team names shifted on an organisation chart, while the projects on the hard drives carried on.
Further out, the question is one of identity. A Halo designed and built by a fresh team, at a publisher shaped by annual shooters, will not necessarily feel like the series did. It could turn out very well. It will certainly turn out different, and that judgement has to wait for something playable.
The last point is the plainest one. Tuesday’s cuts belong to the wider plan set out in July, and Matt Booty places the company three quarters of the way through it himself. The remaining quarter has not been spelt out. Until it is, every studio announcement will be read with that hanging over it, and that may be the real damage done on Tuesday.
One large unknown went unanswered on the day: the schedule. Neither Halo, nor the next Fable, nor the Ninja Theory project was given a release window. For players, that is the one piece of information that would have changed anything, and it is exactly the piece that is missing.
To keep track of what is coming next, check the release calendar.