Today’s Xbox layoffs may have hit Bethesda and ZeniMax particularly hard, as reports of “significant” cuts have begun to surface and the Bethesda Game Workers Union says that “many” employees at Bethesda Game Studios have been let go.
Today’s announcement of major layoffs at Xbox and the spinoff of four studios—Compulsion Games, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Undead Labs—also included word from CEO Asha Sharma that company is “making reductions across other units, and in some cases, shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. These changes vary in size across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios.”
Details on studio-specific cuts haven’t been announced, but Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that ZeniMax Media, the parent of id Software, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Online Studios, and others, “will be impacted significantly by the reorganization,” although he added that Bethesda will not be pared down to just Fallout and The Elder Scrolls teams, as some reports have claimed: “The publisher will also still work on Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake.”
But some of the studios responsible for those games are also reportedly being hit hard: “Studios in the Bethesda organization like id Software (Doom) and ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online) are not shutting down but are cutting a significant number of staff this morning, per sources,” Schreier added in a subsequent post.