// PC GAMER — GAMING
The Elder Scrolls Online's devs are pushing through hard times after layoffs and delays: 'We didn't want to rush to just hit a date'
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This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
The Elder Scrolls Online's developers have had a rough couple of years, starting with the scrapping of Project Blackbird in July 2025, which also led to 62 employees being laid off. Then, in July of this year, Xbox's reset tore into the studio's numbers, with a whopping 213 employees laid off from Zenimax Online. Overall, Zenimax Online's dev team dropped by roughly 60% in one year.
Which is a terrible blow, given I spoke to its development team back in January and was told it had rallied—and things were, for a while, really looking up. Refreshes to animations, a new seasonal structure, and a heaping help of experimental gameplay. Which made the aforementioned 2026 bloodbath both confusing and deeply disheartening.
I spoke with a few developers from the game to check in on how they were doing: "It is challenging," says game director Nick Giacomini, "something like this, it affects us. It affects all of us and the developers at a personal level. So we can't just pretend like it didn't happen and that it hasn't impacted us. We're human.
"At the same time, we still love this game. We love our players, and we love contributing to this and continuing to make it exciting, giving players something to look forward to. We're committed to doing so."
Giacomini himself dropped a letter to the community back in July, which echoed a lot of that same resolution—while also making the difficult choice to postpone a lot of the game's updates to 2027. "With what happened," Giacomini tells me, "That required us to take a look at schedules, see what's possible, and things needed to shift. And one of the underlying principles with that was that we didn't want to rush to just hit a date, right?
"We want [the] player experience to be as rewarding as possible to continue to surprise players and get them excited. And had we rushed it, would have put that at risk. So we wanted to give the team the space to be able to do it right, which necessarily meant pushing dates out for some things."
Giacomini says that, despite everything, the studio's not just in damage control mode: "I was just in a meeting earlier today about our plans for the end of 2027 and early 2028. So we're not just trying to figure out what to do now. We very much have an eye toward the future and how to continue to grow and excite players in this game."
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