As more strife continues to pour out following XBOX’s looming layoffs, the company has reaffirmed its stance on producing video games and says it’s still investing the same.
The entire gaming industry is waiting with bated breath for what XBOX is going to do next, and it’s not in a good way. Since the XBOX Games Showcase at SGF 2026, more bad news continues to pour out from the company.
This bad news involves impending layoffs, potential project cancellations, and corporate memos that almost affirm commitment to dismantling well-established teams. IO Interactive, a third-party developer not directly employed by Microsoft, has also caught a stray from the company’s new decision to ‘take a fresh look’ at where they invest, as Project Fantasy has hit a wall in development. The company has also given their consoles (on every level) a notable price hike in the middle of the turmoil.
As countless game industry employees (including Double Fine, Arkane Studios, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games developers currently in limbo) start tidying up their resumes, XBOX has confirmed they are still investing in gaming at a large scale, as a matter of fact, to the same tune as last year. In a Bloomberg report from Jason Schreier, an Xbox representative said that the company is “taking a fresh look at where we invest so we’re focusing on our highest priorities,” adding, “We’re not reducing our overall investment in games. We expect to invest about the same in content as we did last year. What’s changing is where we’re investing and the kinds of projects we’re backing.”
While there have been countless rumours on which studios will suffer most from the impending XBOX layoffs, Hideo Kojima’s latest development, OD, has been reportedly marked ‘safe’ from the wave. IGN reports the new horror title recently acquired by the brand that built Halo will not face the wave of cuts that will soon be imposed by the company.
While a serious number of layoffs are still impending, it’s worth noting that XBOX conducted an eerily similar number of layoffs last year around the same time. Microsoft cut over 9,000 staff in July 2025 in a company-wide round of layoffs that also hit what was then called Microsoft Gaming. Several titles were cancelled as part of those cuts, including Rare’s Everwild, and The Initiative’s Perfect Dark (The Initiative was killed then).
The layoffs at XBOX are currently forecasted to land on July 6, and the staff who remained from July 2025 will have to go through the same thing a second time.
