The Micro-Apcalypse

 Grim tidings

A lot of what we talk about on this blog is very much 'all fun and games' due to the fact that this blog primarily focuses on the art of videogames in the few times when I'm not off trying to prove that James Marsden doesn't exist or something. Rarely does that field slip into significant and terrible topics, unless we're talking about the conduct of Ubisoft and/or Blizzard, in which case it's a guarantee. Today however, if you can decipher that god-awful pun in the title you'll have deduced that we're talking about Microsoft. And what could Microsoft have gotten itself involved in that's so very terrible it's worth talking about whilst still being tangentially linked to gaming? Well, it appears that they've fallen on something of hard times. Hard enough to turn around and sack nearly ten thousand employees; which is just... yeah, that's pretty darn horrific. 

Apparently this comes on the heels of Microsoft looking into their collective crystal ball and foreseeing a lean year ahead; which is quite questionable when you remember it's Microsoft we're talking about here. What does that company even know about 'lean'? They were waving around tens of billions to buy a video game company last year, and now they're sacking ten thousand workers- talk about a whiplash in priorities. But of course this does wrap around to effect the video game industry because out of the many sectors that found themselves effected by the layoffs- a lot of the afflicted were from the plethora of gaming companies that Mircosoft spent it's past few years acquiring. (Wow, apparently the big M has been taking cues from EA on how to run their company!)

Which means that, yes, Bethesda is losing some of it's working staff whilst it's pretty much sitting on the eve of a launch so major it may decide the fate of this console generation depending on if Starfield is good or not. (Which shows you how much Microsoft favours it's video game divisions, eh?) It's all been a rough showing for Bethesda of late, as the fans are waiting around for their old beloved to kick itself back into gear and they've had to deal with set-backs and now full on chunks of their company getting forcibly ripped out to fit some vague company wide lay-off mandate. It's enough to make you wonder who's side the Microsoft team are even supposed to be on. Competitors are a challenge, no doubt; but none of them are capable of ripping the heart out of the company through layoffs. Only the big M can do that.

343 is another victim, one which appears to have been hit pretty hard by the slew of layoffs that have fallen upon them. Layoffs which come after a career of troubled releases ever since they took the helm of the Halo franchise in their inception, which recently resulted in a fan-led revolt to have them all fired. I can't help but wonder if that turn of public sentiment was taken into account when the job scythe was rolling over the company. 343 was going to lose people, just as everyone else did, but perhaps they were hurt more than they would have because of the fans. It's an idle supposition but one I can't help but keep rattling around in the back of my head. Passions flare as they always do, but I doubt anyone out there truly wanted people to start losing their jobs over the Halo situation, so it would mark a upsetting reality if any water actually held up there.

If you ask 343, or rather the more vocal members on Twitter, then this recent bout of layoffs, and the current state of Halo Infinite, is due solely down to mismanagement straight from the top of the company. Mismanagement that troubled development so much that Halo Infinite had to be delayed for a year, mismanagement that led to 343 having to break one of their core promises and pulling co-op split screen, mismanagement that has neutered the post-game support the game was supposed to rely on and now mismanagement that is seeing them be gutted in a brutal string of layoffs. Given everything that the game has gone through and how it's very much still struggling today, even with the boost that the release of Forge mode granted it, it's hard to imagine Halo Infinite lasting that 10 year life cycle that the development team wanted for.

Not least of all if the rumours are to be believed and 343 have been pulled off of Infinite entirely whilst all the single player content has been cancelled. Now to be fair this really is a 'rando online says this' kind of rumour as far as I can tell, not least of all because 343 haven't breathed a concrete word about any Single Player content being in development at all; but heeding the rumours at face value does spell a stark doom for the Halo fandom. 343 have dedicated themselves tirelessly to Halo since it's inception, and whilst it's true they've done very little to nothing successful for the brand, (Master Chief collection works today, but one could argue that Bungie were the team who originated the majority of that content) at least it's been there to work on the franchise and give fans some sense of hope that they'll nail it someday. This 'behind the barn execution' style of treatment sounds like the procedure of a parent company who has truly given up.

But at least the executives over at Microsoft have the good graces to hobnob off-shore to attend a special concert by Sting. What? Yes, because apparently the evil-supervillain image wasn't quite complete enough, Microsoft arranged for a corporate retreat the same week as the largest layoff the company has seen in ten years. That's the sort of stuff you see play out in movies and then gawk at how over the top and unrealistic it is. If you wanna talk about bad optics, that's pretty much the king of the pile laying right there. Not to mention how this actually reflects back on Sting himself, who presumably signed up for the conference the second he heard about the apparent theme of 'sustainability'. Pretty much a cornucopia of hypocrisy over at Microsoft these days, huh?

By and large this is grim news for just about everybody, but even bringing it down to just the level of video games I find myself wondering about the tidings. If Microsoft predict a slow year and thus are playing at cutting down their own fat, what does that mean for studios who have been working for years under Microsoft without anything to show for it either physically or even in presentation. Yes, I'm of course talking about 'The Initiative' with this one; they've got themselves a blank cheque for development and just disappeared off the face of the earth. Do they even have an office space anymore? Did they take the money and run? Is Perfect Dark going back to being a dead franchise again? Why did all the other companies who actually make stuff have to suffer when Microsoft could have just burned 'The Initiative' to the ground and save everyone else their jobs?