Xbox recently laid off 268 more workers across multiple teams, and handed Halo over to Activision. On the heels of this news, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that it's "great" to see the business being "streamlined" as the firm moves into the future of gaming.
Shortly after it made the largest tech acquisition in history, buying Activision Blizzard King for $68 billion, Microsoft inadvertently hindered its gaming business by disrupting chip supply through massive multi-billion dollar AI investments. Thanks to AI, chips are harder to come by for everyone, driving up prices for games consoles--prices that have already been increased by macro-economic disruptions like tariffs and volatile exchange rates.
Popular Now: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess 3DS port is getting closer to release as New 3DS performance improvesThis has led to a right-sizing of the video game industry; publishers laid off hundreds of workers as jobs were eliminated across the board, leading to thousands upon thousands of layoffs and redundancies across the globe. Xbox, who grew tremendously after the merger, has laid off over five thousand workers to date, per Game Developer.
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More layoffs are to come, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that this optimization of the Xbox business is good to see--perhaps after more than a decade of tumult and frustration about being in third place on the hardware market, for a number of reasons including content slate and fierce competition from Sony.
Interestingly enough, Nadella also says that Xbox has to create a sustainable model for game expansion, possibly hinting at major efforts like the free, ad-supported game streaming option that could introduce static advertisements alongside Xbox games for the first time ever.
In a recent episode of the Alex Heath podcast, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this about what's currently happening over at Xbox:
"There's some amount of streamlining the team is doing, and Asha is doing, which is great to see. And then we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people.
"That has always been the goal, which is, we want to be a great publisher and a great platform provider for games across both PCs and Xboxes.
"And so that is sort of our goal. And I think Asha and team have said that Xbox is going to get growth this next fiscal year. And that's the plan they're executing on, and in that process do a bang-up job of producing some great games."
Notice how the Microsoft CEO only mentioned Xbox and PC this time. It appears Nadella is aligning with the focus of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, which is a return to exclusive games--at least for select titles.
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This is particularly interesting because Nadella outright said in court testimony that he "has no love for the world" of video game exclusives.
