Following July’s mass layoffs across Xbox, Bethesda developers had spoken about how they thought that would be safe. In an interview with The Guardian, former Bethesda Game Studios Austin developer Anne Barrett further added to this by speaking about the sense of security that the studio’s employees had thanks to their work on games like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and the Fallout franchise.
Barrett also went on to note that this sense of security eventually made Xbox’s announcements even more surprising. Unfortunately, this also led to a massive drop in morale across the workforce.
“There was an impending sense of doom, and it was like, man, is it going to be us? We thought we were safe. I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.”
“I remember, I laughed the whole day because I was in complete disbelief. I was like, there’s no way they’re doing this. That’s how I processed it. Some of my co-workers were just devastated. I mean, breaking down. They did not understand what was going on. We had people who were just in really dark places. I think it hit me probably the next day. I felt like, wow – I just spent seven years doing all this. In college, people called me Bethesda because it was my dream to work here. And that was just … gone.”
Looking forward, Barrett also expressed some concern about Bethesda’s future, since while the layoffs didn’t hit the sheer amount of the workforce at the studio as they did in other Xbox teams, many key people were let go due to the decision. This, she said, has led to a loss of institutional knowledge that was vital in working with the company’s proprietary game engine.
“I don’t know how you create games at the quality level we were without the institutional knowledge that’s been lost. We have proprietary tech. Our titles have a very well-known visual identity. And when you lose the people who built the tech, when you lose the people who were improving it, you can’t just throw new people at that problem, right? You can’t replace an artist with someone brand new and say: ‘Now replicate what they were doing 15, 20 years ago.’ The company has said that they can do it. I disagree.”
She went on to note that, “My view of the industry has definitely been damaged. There’s been a loss of sight over why AAA games were so valuable to players. It wasn’t just that they were big and shiny. It was that [the studios] had the resources to invest in creativity. What I see now is the same formula over and over and over again. In any entertainment industry, if you do that enough times, people get tired of it. I would love for us as an industry to get back to actually being creative and investing in that creativity.”
Previously, employees had also spoken about how layoffs were quite rare at Bethesda before the company got acquired by Microsoft. Following this, the practice seems to have become a yearly thing.
