As reported by TheVerge, Microsoft is planning some pretty big layoffs by the end of the month, meaning by the middle of next week.

People say that the gaming industry is a bubble, but I’d liken it more to a balloon. Every now and then it lets some air out but that’s not going to save it from the fact that one day it’ll burst. Sadly, news that companies are mass releasing developers or liquidating entire studios is not exactly a rare thing to see these days, every other week we hear about how Bioware is sizing down or Rocksteady announcing massive layoffs and this coming week is no different, apparently.

As TheVerge claims, “Microsoft is planning to restructure parts of its Xbox business as it looks ahead to its next generation of consoles”, though obviously anyone can look at this and deduce that Microsoft aren’t doing so hot, all things considered. These future layoffs, on top of the massive amount of layoffs that Microsoft dropped earlier in the year, in addition to the entire year of 2024, where Microsoft laid off several hundred workers and you can see why Microsoft being in the news so often for firing people isn’t exactly a great PR look for the mega-corporation.

It’s always a shame when these stories come across my desk, but as I said that’s just the reality of AAA gaming. Despite being one of the most profitable industries in the world, it’s strangely not sustainable at the upper echelons, with many AAA titles taking millions of dollars to produce and not being able to make their money back, mass firings are sad but inevitable. Hopefully, the notion that games should be smaller in sheer graphical power but higher in quality takes off, for the sake of the jobs of the hard working men and women in the industry, as well as the industry itself.