Summer Games Done Quick has begun, which means that we’re in for a full week of video game speedruns. This year’s charity livestream, which is raising money for Doctors Without Borders, features Hollow Knight: Silksong, Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, and more. It’s already delivered an all-time great GDQ moment, though, thanks to a record-breaking Kirby Air Riders run.
Obsidian Entertainment, the studio behind Avowed, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment, and Grounded, has reportedly been impacted by Xbox's latest round of layoffs.
Several Obsidian developers took to social media to share the news that they too had been let go as part of Xbox's brand "reset" that cut 1,600 jobs today and will ultimately result in 3,200 cut jobs by the end of fiscal year 2027, according to CEO Asha Sharma.
"I and a good number of very talented game devs were laid off by Obsidian as part of the Microsoft sacrificial rituals this morning," reads a Bluesky post from narrative designer Jay Turner, who has credits on Avowed as well as older BioWare classics like Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. "If you or anyone you know is looking for a Senior Writer/ND with more than two decades' experience in titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, please let me know!"
Prior to Xbox's announcement, there were rumors and unconfirmed reports that Obsidian was actually one of several Xbox Game Studios negotiating with Microsoft to avoid full-on closure. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier debunked those rumors last week, but unfortunately it seems the beloved RPG studio wasn't able to escape Microsoft's wrath completely unscathed. The exact number of laid-off developers isn't clear, but reporting from Kotaku indicates that around 60-70 people, or roughly 25% of the studio, was cut.
Kate Dollarhyde, a narrative lead at Obsidian who's written for Avowed, Pentiment, The Outer Worlds, and Pillars of Eternity, said on Bluesky that "many excellent developers" at Obsidian lost their jobs today."
An animator at Obsidian said on Bluesky that they were among "dozens" of developers who had lost their jobs. "Incredibly privileged to have landed my dream job right after school. Obsidian was an amazing place to work," they said.
Up until now, Obsidian had been among the more resilient studios under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella, but as layoffs hit tentpole developers like Bethesda and Zenimax Online, it seems no one's safe right now.
The latest mass layoff at Xbox will see roughly 3,200 people lose their jobs—1,600 today, and 1,600 more over the next fiscal year—and four game studios turned loose into the forest: Compulsion and Double Fine as independents, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs under new ownership. It's bad no matter how you look at it, a reflection of flailing leadership at Microsoft and a dreadful state of affairs for the game industry as a whole.
The bloodletting has inspired a range of reactions across the internet—and yes, there is a small subset of the gaming population celebrating what it sees as a victory of 'real gamers' over some imaginary ideology that holds too many game studios in its grasp.
For the most part, though, the responses are shocked, sorrowful, angry, and even among those who insist these cuts were necessary, filled with regret.
Griffin DeClaire, who was laid off from Bethesda Game Studios today, said the cut came as a complete surprise because he was just told he'd be getting a raise. "I really don't know what my next steps are," DeClaire wrote on LinkedIn.
Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio, who left the company in 2017 and now heads up WolfEye Studios, embraced a bit of dark humor in response to Sharma's statement:
(Image credit: Raphael Colantonio (Twitter))
We initially thought that Obsidian, which isn't mentioned in Sharma's announcement, had escaped the axe, but that later proved to be false: Narrative lead Kate Dollarhyde said on Bluesky that the studio "lost many excellent developers and wonderful people" in the layoffs.
Among those let go was Daniel Alpert, who joined the studio in 2005—just two years after it was founded—and most recently served as art director on The Outer Worlds games.
Alpert said he was grateful for having spent more than two decades at Obsidian but added, "We are clearly at a turning point in the games industry. These past months have been difficult for so many talented people, and unfortunately, it seems the challenges aren't over yet."
Larian's publishing head Michael Douse was as surprised as any of us to discover that through all these years, Xbox did not have a chief operating officer.
(Image credit: Michael Douse (Twitter))
Gloomwood developer Dillon Rogers pointed out the incongruity between Sharma's stated commitment to Bethesda's biggest franchises, and gutting the studios that make them:
(Image credit: Dillon Rogers (Twitter))
Mike Kern, who was laid off after nearly 14 years at ZeniMax Online Studios, noted the obvious difficulty that many in his position don't talk about publicly: The videogame industry simply cannot reabsorb all these people. Talent is going to be lost on a massive scale.
Dan Callan, a former designer who was let go amidst last week's layoffs at that company, reflected on the deep and inescapable shittiness of pre-announcing 1,600 layoffs that will happen over the next fiscal year.
This was the best part about the last year of Bungie, through multiple layoff cycles it was a daily battle between survivor’s guilt and waiting for the other shoe to dropI would reiterate people will not make a good video game under these conditions but that assumes any of these ghouls care
Jason Schreier of Bloomberg shared the same sentiment, saying that Blizzard employees are being left hanging until further notice.
Case in point: the staff of Blizzard Entertainment were told today that they won't hear how the reorganization impacts them until "further communications"
Others pointed out that the cuts come as Microsoft continues to pour billions of dollars into a pursuit of AI that seems to be growing increasingly desperate, including notable AI industry critic Ed Zitron, who had some harsh words for all involved:
(Image credit: Ed Zitron (Twitter))
This sounds insane until you remember that Microsoft is ALL IN on Ai. These folks believe most of us will be out of work in the next 5 years, drawing from UBI. What will we do with all that time? XBox hopes we'll spend our time & money with them. Dystopian thinking.www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...
Sure Microsoft may have fired thousands of people and gutted its games division but at least it had more money to pour into Copilot, the 4th most popular AI, a product nobody wants or likes except rich executives, that is constantly losing horrendous amounts of money
But AI-focused employees aren't immune: Kevin Flynn, a commerce growth and AI product manager who said he'd increased "PM AI adoption from 12% to 91% in 3 months by building a PM specific AI harness," revealed on LinkedIn that he'd been let go.
"The last four years have been brutal in the industry," Epic Games lead level designer Scott Maclean said in his own post about the layoffs. " I’ve not seen anything like this in my 25 year career. I keep expecting it to normalize, to balance out, but that seems to not be the case."
Keith D. Boney, a former user researcher at Bethesda whose entire team was impacted by today's layoffs, shared a similar thought, writing that "this recurring trend in the Games industry is one that is extremely detrimental to psychological safety, let alone fiscal stability."
There's more, of course, but the inherent absurdity of supposedly serious executives talking nonsense about entertaining "more than a billion people each day," which PC Gamer's Harvey Randall aptly described as "delusional," has a way of making it all feel a bit futile.
Layoffs like this, which have become par for the course since Microsoft swallowed up Activision Blizzard in 2024, are outrageous and heartbreaking, and there has to be a better way. But as we careen from "never looked stronger" to "our business today is not healthy" over the course of a single year—both of them resulting in layoffs—I find myself wondering if we're ever going to find it, or if we're just going to keep howling into the social media void until there's nothing left.
HiAnime was one of the largest and most popular free streaming sites for anime until its sudden closure earlier this year. Now, authorities in Vietnam have arrested seven people allegedly involved in the pirate site’s operation, as reported by Torrent Freak.
With a layout reminiscent of legit streaming giants like Netflix and Crunchyroll, HiAnime offered thousands of anime titles to watch for free. The site saw well over 150 million visits each month, making it a top target for anti-piracy groups. These arrests came after years of investigations into the piracy ring by organizations including U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Department of Justice, and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). ACE’s members include major names like Amazon, Netflix, Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures, and Paramount, to name a few.
In March 2026, HiAnime posted a goodbye message in plain text across its domains before going dark. Now, Vietnamese authorities have arrested four alleged ringleaders and charged them with copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with a pirate streaming network that operated over 100 websites, including HiAnime. Three people were arrested on charges of copyright infringement only. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security's anti-corruption and economic crime unit, the group offered more than 26,000 unlicensed titles across the network of sites, allegedly generating around $12.8 million via advertising revenue.
HiAnime had been battling against efforts to remove the site and its domains for years. The popular anime piracy site was previously known as Zoro and then Aniwatch, before rebranding itself to HiAnime in 2024. Back in 2023, ACE managed to take over the Zoro.to domain but not before the pirate site had relocated to Aniwatch. It seems the HiAnime rebrand may have also been made to counter moves against the pirate site, as it coincided with India’s blocking of several pirate sites including Aniwatch (as also reported by Torrent Freak).
Just days before HiAnime went offline in March this year, the U.S. Trade Representatives (USTR) released its annual review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy, which namechecked HiAnime on page 33. Then in May this year, the USTR classified Vietnam as a Priority Foreign Country over its failure to adequately address online piracy and launched a trade investigation (USTR press release).
Although acknowledging the Vietnamese authorities’ previous efforts to take down pirate sites operating in the country and to arrest the perpetrators, page 44 of the USTR report implied that the punishments had been too lax. The report made specific reference to the fines and suspended sentences handed out in the Fmovies case: “Vietnam recently had an uptick in criminal prosecutions against piracy operators in collaboration with U.S. enforcement authorities and stakeholders, which the United States hopes will continue. However, despite having criminal laws that provide for substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright infringement, the defendants in recent criminal prosecutions received suspended sentences and were only ordered to pay relatively low financial penalties.”
The seven men in the HiAnime case are currently awaiting trial. If found guilty of the money laundering and copyright infringement charges, their punishment might be stricter than in Vietnam’s previous online piracy cases.
Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.
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