// PC GAMER — GAMING
Xbox lays off 268 more employees, merges Obsidian into Bethesda, and puts Activision in charge of Halo
Xbox says it's now "roughly three-quarters of the way" to completing its planned 3,200 job cuts.
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I'll believe it when I see it. In her announcement initiating Xbox's current sweeping restructuring, CEO Asha Sharma wrote that "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger"—a principle that had been lost at Xbox through redundant layers of management complexity that "slowed decisions, blurred accountability, and made it harder to deliver for players." Xbox, she said, was going to simplify.
It's now three months later, and Xbox's idea of simplification apparently consists of shoving entire studios under new management with the belief that a sufficient number of developers can produce a respectable Halo or Fallout or Fable just because someone says they can.
Meanwhile, its own developers maintain that sustained organizational chaos makes quality game production impossible.
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Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.
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