Former ZeniMax Online Director Left Following Project Blackbird Cancellation - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 January 2026 / 1,841 Views
Matt Firor, the former ZeniMax Online Studios Game Director and Studio Director, in a post on LinkedIn has confirmed he left the studio following the cancellation of Project Blackbird.
"The most obvious explanation is the correct one," said Firor. "Project Blackbird was the game I had waited my entire career to create, and having it canceled led to my resignation. My heart and thoughts are always with the impacted team members, many of whom I had worked 20+ years with, and all of whom were the most dedicated, amazingly talented group of developers in the industry.
"I cannot express deeply enough my respect and thanks for both the Elder Scrolls Online development team and the players that together comprise the most welcoming, best community in online gaming. I have successfully moved from the first group to the second, and now enjoy the game as an anonymous community member, and it is refreshing and fun. Long may both groups prosper!
"So what's next for me? Honestly, I still haven't figured that out. I'm not totally sitting on the sidelines. I have been advising some projects and startups in an unofficial capacity, and I've made some investments in small teams that I know will play a big part in changing the industry in the future. But I have not yet seriously contemplated spinning up a new development studio."
Project Blackbird was cancelled alongside Everwild and Perfect Dark in summer 2025. At the same time hundreds of Xbox employees were laid off.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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MS is bleeding talent in favor of AI
I hope anyone other than MS or Google succeeds in AI... they don't deserve the success and cant be trusted with the responsibility
I'll never forget all the comments Jim Ryan made that just seemed like sour grapes at thetime. Now he looks like Nostradamus.
well... Jim Ryan was pretty salty and judging by the projects he greenlit I don't think he had a great vision of the future either lol
No Jim Ryan was never a gamer and he relied on people like Herman to do that. Jim doesn't really greenlight projects. That's more of what Herman does. Jim was a good businessman though and he knows how to run a company. He called what would happen with Xbox and all these devspublishers pretty well. At the time I thought he was just being salty but nope he was right.
As far as not having a great vision of the future. Eh I don't know. You can really only point to their games output. Everything else has been fantastic. PS5 is their best gen financially, their main competitor is done and they essentially have the console space to themselves now. He even called out MS and said the series S was a mistake and he was right.
Profit margin is completely worthless because of the way digital sales are recorded. Every single thing on PSN is sold by Sony and then 70% is given to the publisher. If publishers sold the items directly and paid Sony 30%(similar to how physical sales work) then the profit margin would like triple. It’s basically just an accounting quirk.
PlayStation division is predicting a ¥500B operating profit for this year. That’s considerably more than Nintendo, and orders of magnitude more than MS regardless of what accounting tricks they use to make the division profitable.
That has nothing to do with what Jim Ryan said. He stated that MS wouldn't be able to manage all these studios and they would bleed talent because of it. Which has already happened. He also said the series S wouldn't work because historically it doesn't work and that's exactly what happened. They missed out on Black myth day 1 because of it and they missed out on Baldurs gate 3 because of it.
