// PC GAMER — GAMING
5 promising games recently cancelled by Microsoft
If you wished for more pizazz at this year's Xbox Showcase, there's lots of it buried in an growing graveyard of cancelled Xbox games.
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Microsoft has spent the past few years laying off thousands of workers from its collection of game studios, which ballooned under former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Now it's set to cut more jobs and close more studios as part of new CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset."
That years-long Xbox cost-cutting campaign has led to more game cancellations than we know about, ending huge projects that, at least on the surface, were exciting.
Were these "hard decisions" genuinely the pragmatic ones? The 2020s certainly have been marked by some massive flops, and it's possible that some of these projects were money pits. A couple of them were especially risky propositions: big, hard-to-make online games.
But as Microsoft doubles down on console exclusives and tries to hurry along heavy-hitters like The Elder Scrolls 6, I've got to wonder if it was wise to toss so much in-progress work, some of which was highly praised internally.
It's the risky games that are the most exciting, and while Gears of War: E-Day looks impressive in ways, it's not exactly an electrifying proposition this far removed from the 2010s. Given how profitable Microsoft is as a whole—it's making billions even as it dumps money into AI—was it really pragmatic not to let some of its best cooks cook?
Here are five of the big games Microsoft recently crossed off the upcoming list.
We first heard that Blizzard was making a survival game in 2022. Codenamed Odyssey, it had been in development for almost five years at that point, and Blizzard devs on and off the project were hyped about it.
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