Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
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Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
The explosive growth of the gaming industry over the 90s-2010s was fueled by continuously unlocking new swathes of consumers. Games went from being for kids, to being for adults and kids, to people who would never consider themselves "gamers" with mobile, which in turn created the "whaling" industry of microtransaction fueled F2P. But there's only so many new, large groups of people with money. What we're seeing now is a correction, with growth estimates collapsing back down to what you'd expect from a mature industry.