In July, Matt Firor left ZeniMax Online Studios after 18 years at the company. He stepped down from the position of President after years of spearheading the development of The Elder Scrolls Online. Two days later, details emerged online about Project Blackbird, ZeniMax’s canceled MMO that was slated to be the studio’s next big title after ESO.
Blackbird had been in development for several years, but the strong arm of Microsoft came down heavy on the project and the studio amid a wave of layoffs and cost-cutting actions during the rocky summer of 2025.
In a new post on social media, Matt Firor has finally confirmed that he resigned from ZeniMax after almost two decades because Blackbird was shut down.
Confirming What Many Suspected
Matt Firor has emerged on social media six months to the day since he departed ZeniMax Online Studios, which might be linked to some kind of post-departure NDA or privacy clause having expired. He made a lengthy statement that clearly explained why he’d departed the studio he’d devoted almost half his life to.
Answering the second-most common question, about what led (to me) leaving ZOS, the most obvious explanation is the correct one.
Project Blackbird was the game I had waited my entire career to create, and having it canceled led to my resignation. My heart and thoughts are always wwith the impacted team members, many of whom I had worked 20+ years with, and all of whom were the most dedicated, amazingly talented group of developers in the industry.
Firor revealed that he’s still evaluating what comes next while he consults on some other projects and lends his experience and knowledge to other startups ‘in an unofficial capacity.’
He also confirmed he has been actively investing in studios that will ‘play a big part in changing the industry in the future,’ but hasn’t considered opening his own studio.
When Project Blackbird was canceled, it was alongside a claim that Phil Spencer loved the game, as did other ‘Xbox executives’, but it wasn’t enough to keep the project safe.
In another report, it was claimed that the focus of Blackbird would have been around ‘vertical gameplay’, offering players a grappling hook and other tools that would allow them to climb and wall-run across the game’s many surfaces, almost in a Spider-Man style.
It featured augmented humans with a deep character customization system that would allow users to ‘sculpt’ their bodies with biomodifications, cybernetics, outfits, and more. It would have been a classic human vs. AI story fused with anti-capitalist themes and a cyberpunk vibe.
Are you surprised that Matt Firor left ZeniMax after Blackbird was canceled? Let us know what you’re thinking on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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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.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Ok…honestly most Bethesda and Xbox studios should be closed outside Playground and id. Activision is fine but the other studios close them down
Well @Gfc… It is easy to see why you don’t have a job as a CEO at Xbox. Do you have any memory of what Xbox was like back in like 2016? When they had 5 studios… It was so boring as far as Xbox first party gaming went, there was nothing to look forward to other than the classic Halo, Gears, and Forza combo and Halo wasn’t being made by Bungie anymore.
When Xbox invested in the 5 smaller studios in 2018, Playground, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, Double Fine, InXile, etc. That was huge for Xbox, but when push comes to shuv, those were AA studios (which have certainly grown into bigger studios with Xbox Funding).
When Xbox invested in Zennimax that was such a big jump in investment for Xbox to make in its first party, it gave them so much more content that even if they never got Activision, they still were going to have a consistent output of first party games to keep Game Pass interesting.
When they pulled the trigger on Activision, that was a move that turned them into the biggest game publisher in the industry (it also changed the company as a whole to look at the gaming industry as a publisher instead of a platform pretty much, which was a tough pill to swallow for Xbox die hards, but in the end it still gave the Xbox player base much more to look forward to… even if other platforms were going to be getting those games too)
If Xbox went back to just making a few games, say Call of Duty and Forza… That would suck. Those games make money, but they arent a reason to stay subscribed to game pass year around…. and game pass is the platform more than the Xbox console at this point.