Bethesda Game Studios suffered at the hands of the Microsoft layoffs that also heavily impacted XBOX several weeks ago. It was a turning point for the worse for Asha Sharma’s XBOX, and it was only the beginning – hundreds more layoffs are in the pipeline.
In a recent interview, a former Bethesda Game Studios employee impacted by the redundancies and laid off during a ‘two-minute Teams meeting’ this year revealed the intricacies of the drama. They explained that they believed the work they were doing with legendary franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout would keep them safe from layoffs.
They were wrong.
‘I Was in Complete Disbelief’
Recently, Anne Barrett, a former employee of Bethesda Game Studios Austin, sat down with The Guardian, a UK-based news outlet, to talk about being made redundant from the company. It was revealed that she, along with many other employees, was pulled into a quick Teams meeting, during which they were prohibited from ‘saying or reacting to anything’ by way of having their cameras and microphones locked off.
We were just brought in, told the news and it was like: ‘You guys are going to lose access to your Slack channel.’ So you just saw a flurry of goodbye messages before everything was just shut off.’
Barrett explained that the team believed they were effectively protected from layoffs because of the sheer power of the games they were working on. That wasn’t the case, of course:
There was an impending sense of doom, and it was like, man, is it going to be us? We thought we were safe.
I mean, Bethesda Game Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe.
The next statement was damning, as Barrett confirmed that two-minute-long calls brought a decisive end to some careers that had spanned decades at the studio.
Later in the interview, Barrett doubled down on that notion:
I don’t know how you create games at the quality level we were without the institutional knowledge that’s been lost. We have proprietary tech.
Our titles have a very well-known visual identity. And when you lose the people who built the tech, when you lose the people who were improving it, you can’t just throw new people at that problem, right? You can’t replace an artist with someone brand new and say: ‘Now replicate what they were doing 15, 20 years ago.
Employees at Bethesda Game Studios formed a landmark union in the wake of the layoffs, and talks are ongoing with Microsoft about further redundancies. In a social campaign, OneBGS has posted on various platforms, like TikTok, showcasing interviews with impacted developers eager to share their stories.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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