Xbox Budget Cuts Won’t Stop Here & Game Pass Prices Are Going Up

Microsoft and Xbox have been on the game industry’s front page these past few days with bad news upon bad news for fans of Team Green, and that streak isn’t stopping now. Xbox shut down four studios: Arkane Austin, Roundhouse Games, Alpha Dog Studios, and the biggest blow to fans of Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks. Not only that, but the upcoming Perfect Dark reboot is also reportedly in turmoil. Now, according to Bloomberg, the mass layoffs and cutbacks aren’t slowing down, and fans of Xbox Game Pass should also brace for possible bad news relating to the price of the service.

The report also claims that Xbox is trying to get ZeniMax employees to leave by buying out their severance packages—essentially paying them to quit. The employees in question are producers and QA testers who work at ZeniMax. And the sources at Xbox have also warned that “more cuts are on the way.”

Microsoft To Undergo More Mass Layoffs & Cutbacks While Increasing the Price of Xbox Game Pass

It seems the profitability of Xbox has come into question, and Microsoft aims to cut costs as much as possible while increasing revenues to sustain Xbox Game Pass and justify the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. One of the claims in the report suggests that the main reason why Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin were shut down is because they were aiming to expand and wanted to work on multiple projects, which is why video game development studios exist in the first place.

To make matters worse, Microsoft has also been internally considering another price bump for the Xbox Game Pass, along with the idea of bringing the new Call of Duty game to the service as well. Since Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, the level of scrutiny over Xbox has increased quite a bit, and what we’re seeing might be the result of that.

Microsoft has already had the highest number of layoffs in the entire gaming industry, and it doesn’t look like that’s stopping, or even slowing down, in the foreseeable future.