The Stunning List Of Cancelled Xbox Projects, From ‘Perfect Dark' To ‘Everwild'
While it was known before this that Xbox layoffs were coming this week, what wasn't known was their scope. It's not just that jobs that have been cut, but a number of high-profile projects, and others that might have been great if they were not killed early on like this.
These news stories have been coming so fast that it's hard to keep track of everything that's been cut, so here's a list of the disastrous dissection of projects that have accompanying layoffs. Significant ones, in many cases. This is a running list, as more news may drop at any moment.
Perfect Dark – The long-gestating shooter had reported troubled development despite Microsoft assembling a 'AAAA' studio, The Initiative, specifically to make it, eventually also bringing in Tomb Raider's Crystal Dynamics to help. That did not help, and what once was one of the most promising-sounding, large-scale games (alongside Fable) is now completely dead, and The Initiative itself has been closed down, resulting in significant job losses. On top of that, rumors are circling back around that the recent, flashy trailer Microsoft showed off for the game after years of silence may have been more or less faked and not actual gameplay.
Everwild
Everwild – Rare, the storied developer, was given a chance to develop a brand new IP, and now that chance has been erased, despite just months ago, Xbox exec Phil Spencer was singing its praises and talking about the time it needed: 'It's nice to see the team with Everwild and the progress that they're making,' Spencer said. 'It has been [a while]
FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™
Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase
Pinpoint By Linkedin
Guess The Category
Queens By Linkedin
Crown Each Region
Crossclimb By Linkedin
Unlock A Trivia LadderRomero Shooters – An unnamed shooter from Romero Games, of the legendary John Romero, has announced it has lost the funding it was getting from Xbox, and the game may never see the light of day. In addition to that, funding was lost for 'several other unannounced projects.' The developer is unequivocal about how devasting this all is. It's reported that other Bethesda-based projects have been scrapped, but there are few details there.
ZeniMax MMORPG – This was supposed to be a new MMORPG from the team behind the long-running Elder Scrolls Online, codenamed Blackbird, which has been worked on for years.
Warcraft Rumble – Layoffs with this Blizzard team mean that support for the Warcraft-themed mobile game will no longer produce new content, even if it continues to exist.
Halo Infinite
The Deep Cuts – The rest of these are a high-level series of layoffs that may not have specific projects announced as cut, but it's a wide range of developers. Team 10 has been gutted to the point where it seems questionable if there will be future Forza Motorsport games, only Horizon. Cuts hit Call of Duty studios Sledgehammer and Raven. King, Microsoft's purchase mobile giant, will cut 200 jobs. Specific social teams at Blizzard have been cut, with many roles now outsourced. Halo Studios lost some employees as the future of Microsoft's biggest IP remains in flux years after its last underwhelming release.
And all of this is after more layoffs and shutdown 18 months ago which closed Arkan Austin, Alpha Dog Games and the developer of Xbox's best game in a while, Hi-Fi Rush's Tango Gameworks, which had to be saved by another company.
All this, as Phil Spencer pointed out in his layoff note, for some reason, comes at a profitable time for Xbox which says its expansion strategy is going well. Well, isn't that nice to hear.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
TechCrunch
18 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Startup Battlefield 200 Newsletter
Be the first to know when Startup Battlefield 200 applications open — and which early-stage startups are turning heads at TechCrunch. Sign up for the newsletter to follow the journey from thousands of applicants to 200 standout companies, culminating at Disrupt, where one startup will win $100,000 equity-free and take center stage at the biggest startup event of the year.
Forbes
19 minutes ago
- Forbes
New Google AI Changes Are Detrimental To Old News Models
Palo Alto, California, USA - January 02, 2018: Googleplex office in Silicon Valley. Huge Google ... More sign, Android robot sculpture and main Google office. In some ways, our news model has been the same for hundreds of years. But that way of providing a service to readers seems to be going obsolete pretty quickly. In recent times, news publishers are getting unpleasant surprises in the form of decreasing Internet traffic. That's a problem, because these publishers have already had to pivot away from a physical print medium to the web, and for many of them, that's been challenging. (Think, newspapers.) Now we see that Google's most recent changes to its model are throwing these traditional businesses another curveball. Reports in The Information and other sources show that traditional publishers are losing out as Google introduces AI search mechanisms that compete with the old blue hyperlink SERP directory search engine. We're Using AI to Search As I mentioned in covering remarks by Sam Altman of OpenAI a while ago, even Altman himself uses ChatGPT to find out things that he would have previously used Google for. Multiply that by millions of people, and you have a scary situation for anyone who's in the news business. We're transfixed by the power of these LLMs to scour the entire Internet in seconds, build responses based on collective consciousness, and get us our answers right away, without that tedious old job of doing the research. But it comes at a price for those relying on the old ways. Watching Traffic Decline Publishers, who have already seen their revenue model change, are now seeing that the Internet footprints they use for visibility and conversion are not doing as well as they did previously. Rebecca Bellan at Techcrunch reports on the New York Times having a certain percentage less of organic traffic in its overall numbers (down to 36.5% in April, from 44%) – which is sort of a strange way to measure declining search, but still one facet of describing a real problem. A Little Damning Then there are additional reports based on Apple's internal communications that suggest the company actively decided to make a power play based on its monopoly on traditional search. Reporters looking at Alphabet internal directives suggest that the company could have offered publishers more, but decided to force those who want to be included in traditional search to let their content be used by the AI, a Faustian bargain in which, presumably, the agreeing party is an active participant in its own demise. On the other hand, Google's apologists claim that it has created something called Offerwall as a potential new revenue model for publishers. Offerwall, they contend, offers these creators revenue beyond ads. But that's only if readers take the offers. Why Don't Micropayments Work? There's also another mostly theoretical solution in the mix – having people buy individual news articles with micropayments. This move, however, is almost certain to fail, according to some close to the industry who point out some major problems with the micropayments method. One is that news media is often seen as a package deal. 'If a subscription is worth a hundred dollars a year to a publisher, then even one person clicking on the twenty-cent button instead means the publisher needs five hundred people to buy articles to make up for the lost revenue,' writes James Ball at the Columbia Journalism Review. 'The ratios are different for different outlets, but the math remains intimidating. … There's also a philosophical objection. As noted, newspapers and magazines have been conceived as a package—a mix of the light and the heavy. Some stories cost far more to produce than others, but it balances out because you buy the whole thing. That logic dies if you separate them out.' As an aside, what few parties have tried is building a hyper-local newsroom on a shoestring budget, tying it to a mobile phone app, and charging subscribers very low prices for getting all the tea about what's happening in their neighborhoods. Perhaps people are scared of the legal liability. Does it Really Know? Then there's the question of whether the Google AI Overviews results are actually accurate. Some users claim the model is often wrong. And its track record is spotty. 'It became the laughingstock of the internet in mid-2024 for recommending glue as a way to make sure cheese wouldn't slide off your homemade pizza,' writes Max Delaney at TechRadar. 'And we loved the time it described running with scissors as 'a cardio exercise that can improve your heart rate and require concentration and focus.'' Figuring Out the Endgame In any case, publishers are between a rock and a hard place - they have to choose from a lot of bad options, and figure out the best ways to try to stay afloat in a scenario that seems wildly slanted against them. Some would say it's just free market economics – that publishers will have to do what many other businesses have done over the years, to be Netflix instead of Blockbuster, and change with the times. But we're certain to see more of this wider debate about how we consume information, and what it means in the second quarter of the 21st century.
Wall Street Journal
23 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
The Score: Nike, Paramount, Constellation and More Stocks That Defined the Week
The Score is a weekly review of the biggest stock moves and the news that drove them. Paramount has settled its lawsuit with President Trump over a '60 Minutes' interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
