Xbox Gutted the Only Studio Making Elder Scrolls Games

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says the company is focusing on its biggest franchises. The Elder Scrolls is one of those franchises. And yet, the only studio currently shipping Elder Scrolls content just had roughly half its active development team cut, two days before a major release. If that doesn't strike you as contradictory, I don't know what would.

ZeniMax Online Studios, the team behind The Elder Scrolls Online, was hit hard by Microsoft's latest round of 1,600 layoffs announced this week. Writers, designers, programmers, artists, community managers, producers. According to one developer impacted by the cuts, around half the MMO's active dev team is gone. In a post to the game's forums, associate director of community Jessica Folsom confirmed that while Season One would still launch as planned, the future is now an open question:

Looking beyond Season One, the roadmaps we previously shared will be shifting.

Folsom couldn't say when a new roadmap would be ready, only that the team needed time to "evaluate the work in front of us and then lock down an updated schedule." That's a polite way of saying the plan is gone.

Six months of work, undone

Back in January, ZeniMax Online Studios announced it was ditching yearly expansions in favour of a seasonal release model, with new content drops every three months. Executive producer Susan Kath told press at the time that the shift wasn't a reaction to 2025's layoffs, that the team had been working toward seasons for over a year. The roadmap they published covered a full year of updates. It was supposed to signal stability and a renewed commitment to the 12-year-old MMO's future. That signal lasted about six months before Xbox torched it.

I keep coming back to the same question: if The Elder Scrolls is a priority franchise, why is the only team actively producing Elder Scrolls content being carved up? Bethesda Game Studios, the team building The Elder Scrolls 6, wasn't spared either. The Bethesda Game Studios Union posted on Bluesky that the studio lost "dozens of programmers, artists, designers, and testers," many of whom had worked there for decades. Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier stated during a Bloomberg Live Q&A that TES6 is still "at least two or more years away" from finishing development. So the sequel is years out, the live game just lost half its team, and the corporate line is that Elder Scrolls is a focus. Something in that equation does not add up.

Skyrim sold over 60 million copies as of June 2023. It will turn 20 years old in 2031. We haven't had a new mainline Elder Scrolls game in 15 years, and the one game keeping the franchise alive in the interim just had its legs cut out from under it. ESO isn't some legacy product on life support; it was actively being retooled with a new content model, new seasonal structure, and a year-long public roadmap. ZeniMax Online Studios was doing the work. Now they're being asked to keep doing it with half the people.

Microsoft has said a further 1,600 roles will be cut over the coming year, bringing the total gaming division reduction to 20%. For ESO players who stuck around through the transition to seasons, the question now is whether what's left of ZeniMax Online Studios can deliver anything close to the quarterly cadence they promised in January. Based on the scale of these cuts, I don't see how they can.