Death By 3,200 Cuts

The Xbox division laid off roughly 3,200 people this week — 1,600 immediately and another 1,600 over the next year — in what the IGN Game Scoop! crew calls "the great Xbox reset." The cuts hit id Software especially hard, with more than half the team that made the Doom trilogy let go, even as new Doom DLC launched the same day. id Software's entire engine development team was laid off, and remaining studios are being encouraged to adopt Unreal Engine for all future projects. No studios were closed, but four — Double Fine, Compulsion, Ninja Theory, and one other — were allowed to spin back out as independent studios, keeping their IP.

The Strategy That Didn't Work

The panel traces Xbox's current crisis to a strategy borrowed from Netflix: acquire studios, give them blank checks, and build a subscription service around exclusive content. The problem, as they see it, is that game development takes seven years per title, not six months like a TV season, and the subscription numbers never justified the spending. "How good and bad the strategy was that everybody copied from Netflix," Damon says. "We need content for a subscription. So what are we going to do? We're going to give all of these creative people blank checks." When Amazon, Disney, NBC, and everyone else did the same thing, the streaming subscription war made the math impossible for any single p