Latest news with #XboxLayoffs
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After 11 years of development, 6 years of marketing, and a full reboot, Rare's Everwild has been canceled amid mass Xbox layoffs – 5 months after Phil Spencer's assurances it's making "progress"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Everwild, the gorgeous but mysterious Rare title first announced back in 2019, has been canceled amid the mass layoffs happening today at Xbox. Rare has not yet confirmed the news, but three separate reports now suggest that the game is, indeed, dead. News of Everwild's cancellation was first reported by VGC, which mentioned that "employees are likely to lose their jobs as part of broader restructuring" at the studio. IGN's sources have also corroborated that the game is canceled, as has Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who first reported on today's Xbox layoffs. We'd seen a handful of trailers for Everwild, which offered promises of a big adventure through a strange world filled with unusual animals. The exact details of the gameplay were never clear, but the almost Studio Ghibli-like vibes were enough to catch plenty of attention. Earlier this year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that the game was still making "progress." Reports circulated that Everwild's development had been rebooted in 2021, though Xbox representatives suggested those reports were "a little more extreme" than the truth. However, those same reports alleged that Everwild had been in some form of development since 2014, and a game rarely spends that long in development without some sort of trouble behind the scenes. What the cancellation and the looming layoffs mean for the future of Rare remains to be seen. The studio has a storied history going back to the British computer scene of the '80s, and was a prolific NES developer in its early days. It developed a close partnership with Nintendo throughout the '90s, during which it created the beloved Donkey Kong Country trilogy for the SNES, as well as titles such as GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark for the N64. Microsoft's acquisition of Rare in the early '00s shocked the gaming world at the time, and while many of the studio's games under Xbox were quite good - I'll defend Viva Pinata and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts forever - they never made quite the same impact as the earlier Nintendo titles. After years supporting Xbox's ill-fated Kinect peripheral, Rare seemed to finally find its footing with Sea of Thieves, which, while it took some time to really find its footing, proved to be an excellent multiplayer sandbox. Everwild had the potential to be a strong follow-up, but I guess now we'll never know. I expect we'll lose a few more upcoming Xbox Series X games before the day is out. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Another Xbox studio reacts to the layoffs exploding around it: with Rare's Everwild dead, Sea of Thieves dev says "it's impossible for something like this not to ripple through the studio"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Sea of Thieves studio Rare is the next Xbox studio to respond to the recent Microsoft layoffs and in this case, specifically the cancelation of the action-adventure game Everwild. Everwild, first announced in 2019 with a development story going all the way back to 2014, was one of the many casualties of Microsoft's recent downsizing, which resulted in the loss of around 9,000 jobs. We didn't see a whole lot of Everwild in the years since its reveal, but what little we did see of its colorful fantasy world was mighty promising, making its cancelation all the more disappointing for Rare diehards. In July's Sea of Thieves developer update, Rare production director Drew Stevens opened by addressing the elephant in the room, speaking out about the impact of Everwild's cancelation on the overall studio. "I think it would be strange to jump straight into our usual updates without acknowledging the news that we've ended development on Everwild here at Rare," Stevens said. "While this didn't directly impact Sea of Thieves, and we're continuing on as we'd planned, our focus as a team and a studio is on supporting our friends and colleagues whose roles are at risk." The layoffs at Xbox resulted in the cancelation of the Perfect Dark reboot and the shuttering of developer The Initiative, the downsizing of Forza studio Turn 10's workforce by about 50%, and the cancelation of an unannounced ZeniMax Online MMO. Longtime ZeniMax Online studio director Matt Firor of 18 years left the studio in the wake of the news, and later, the studio's union issued a statement on the cancelation, saying "a future has been stolen." "It's impossible for something like this not to ripple through the studio and affect us all in some way or another, so please bear with us," added Stevens. "And on that, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who's reached out to check in on us and share their kind words of support. Genuinely, thank you, it really means a lot." As bummed as I am about Everwild, I really do appreciate that Rare took the time to acknowledge the situation instead of just pretending like nothing's happened. I can't fathom the pain and uncertainty at Xbox studios like Rare right now, and I can only hope that being able to continue work on Sea of Thieves gives the developers some sense of poetic escape similar to the whimsical distraction the open seas have provided players like me for years and years. "What happened with Microsoft was clear": Former Square Enix exec says Game Pass, "a service with barely any growth," didn't cause layoffs – competition with AI did Solve the daily Crossword
