Microsoft has spent the past few years laying off thousands of workers from its collection of game studios, which ballooned under former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Now it's set to cut more jobs and close more studios as part of new CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset."
That years-long Xbox cost-cutting campaign has led to more game cancellations than we know about, ending huge projects that, at least on the surface, were exciting.
Were these "hard decisions" genuinely the pragmatic ones? The 2020s certainly have been marked by some massive flops, and it's possible that some of these projects were money pits. A couple of them were especially risky propositions: big, hard-to-make online games.
But as Microsoft doubles down on console exclusives and tries to hurry along heavy-hitters like The Elder Scrolls 6, I've got to wonder if it was wise to toss so much in-progress work, some of which was highly praised internally.
It's the risky games that are the most exciting, and while Gears of War: E-Day looks impressive in ways, it's not exactly an electrifyi...
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