Xbox Layoffs Gut Halo Studios and World's Edge, Ninja Theory Set to Close

Xbox has had another brutal week. A second round of layoffs has swept through Microsoft's gaming division, and the fallout is being felt across several of its best-known studios.

The hardest blow is the planned closure of Ninja Theory, the Cambridge developer behind Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and its sequel. The studio was long held up as a home for ambitious, character-driven games, and its impending shutdown has landed particularly hard with fans who saw it as one of Xbox's more distinctive creative voices.

Other teams have not escaped. Halo Studios, which looks after one of Microsoft's flagship franchises, has been left almost dismantled by the cuts. World's Edge, the studio that oversees the Age of Empires series, has reportedly lost around half of its staff.

Community reaction has been a mix of confusion and anger. Many players are asking what Xbox's strategy actually is, given that the affected studios sit at the heart of franchises the company regularly promotes. Others have been more personal, with one widely shared response saying the news "genuinely breaks my heart." Much of the sympathy has gone to the developers who have lost their jobs, many of them after years of work on beloved series.

The timing adds to the unease. Xbox has spent recent years buying up studios and building out its first-party lineup, and now it is trimming or closing some of the very teams that lineup depends on. That contrast is fuelling questions about what future releases from Halo and Age of Empires will look like, and whether other Xbox studios are safe.

Microsoft has yet to lay out a detailed roadmap for how these franchises will be developed going forward. Until it does, expect the debate over Xbox's direction to keep growing.