Microsoft almost 2,000 jobs cut This affects the entire gaming department on January 25th and impacts employees at Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and Xbox. And now we’ve learned that an in-development survival game from Blizzard codenamed “Odyssey” has been canceled and most of the team working on the game has been laid off.
In a statement about it Bloomberg on January 25thsaid Blizzard spokesman Andrew Reynolds OdysseyThe development of is complete, allowing the company to “focus on projects that hold the greatest promise for future growth.” While Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier noted: “most of the team” was fired, Reynolds responded that “some of the people on the team” were being moved to other projects. Many of the people who worked on the gamewhich has been in development for six years, went to X/Twitter to deliver the unfortunate news that They were fired.
Read more: Microsoft is cutting nearly 2,000 jobs for video game workers
Odyssey It begins in 2017 with a pitch from almost 20-year Blizzard veteran Craig Amai. Blizzard apparently bet big on the project and assembled a team of over 100 people to work on it, but everything remained a mystery until January 2022 a short blog postthe company announced the game, saying it was set in “an entirely new universe” and posted job openings for roles in art, design and programming.
One of OdysseyThe biggest obstacle was the engine. The project was prototyped in Unreal Engine, but noisy Bloomberg, Blizzard executives wanted the team to use a different system that would support the ambitious plan of having 100 players in the game world at the same time – and Unreal couldn’t handle it. So came Synapse, an internal engine the company developed for mobile games. This engine came with a number of problems that led artists to continue working in Unreal despite knowing that the work would be discarded anyway due to the switch to Synapse, resulting in a waste of resources and time.
Despite the difficulties in prototyping, the team aimed for a 2026 release. However, since the Synapse engine is not yet ready for production, Odyssey was canceled and the team was largely gutted.
“As difficult as these decisions may be, experimentation and risk-taking are part of Blizzard’s history and creative process,” spokesman Reynolds said. “Ideas find their way into other games or, in some cases, become their own games. Starting something completely new is one of the most difficult tasks in gaming and we are extremely grateful to all the talented people who supported the project.”
My city Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have reached out to comment.
Read more: Not even Call of Duty developers are safe from layoffs
The Xbox layoffs come just three months later Microsoft has completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Last year, Microsoft has cut 10,000 jobs, including folks from 343 Industries, Bethesda Game Studios and The Coalition. After a difficult year for the industry, 2024 is already off to a bleak start More and more developers are losing their jobs.
