Obsidian Reportedly Lost Around 25% of Staff As Part of Xbox Layoffs - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 6 days ago / 2,268 Views
Xbox announced today major layoffs that have seen 1,600 employees laid off today, multiple studios divested, and another 1,600 set to be paid off by June 2027.
Kotaku is reporting that The Outer Worlds, Avowed, and Grounded developer Obsidian Entertainment has been hit with layoffs, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.
Around 60 to 70 employees have been laid off at Obsidian, which is roughly one-quarter of the entire studio. Producers, artists, designers, programmers, QA testers, writers, and others have all been cut. This includes those who have worked at the studio for over a decade. The art director on The Outer Worlds and the only recruiter at the studio were among those let go.
One source said employees that will remain at the studio have not yet been given formal guidance on how their existing projects will continue with so many laid off.
Development on Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2 DLC will continue, but plans beyond that are uncertain.
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.
More Articles
ID Software have also apparently lost about half of their staff, leaving mainly just leadership and artists/designers. Their coders are gone, testers gone and the tools team for ID Tech engine is gone.
Looks like they will just be a support studio, probably for people like Machine Games.
These guys are 1 more failed release away from being gutted or "divested". 1 more flop like avowed or outerworlds 2 and they'll be arkaned or ninja theoried.
Out of all the major Sony exclusives on Steam, only Stellar Blade beat Veilguard. Hilarious really. Stellar Blade isn't even first party.
I really think the gaming community has been underestimating how bad Sony and Xbox have done this gen.
the problem is their peak profits came from subscriptions and hardware sales and their 30 percent take on each piece of software sold, not from game sales that they made themselves
maybe that works in the short term, but why should i care about their ability to rip people off with taking 30 percent of every game sold, and extra high hardware prices?
i'd rather hand them my money because there was a game I wanted to play that they made!
Most is not from their own branding, if Sony ever loses 3rd party, unlike Nintendo, they cannot survive.
Stellar Blade is my favorite Sony exclusive on Nintendo Switch 2.
EA and Bioware get a bad rap, but Microsoft has done even worse on Steam:
Sea of Thieves: ~70k-100k+ (live service multiplayer).
Forza Horizon 5: ~50k-80k range.
Grounded: ~30k-50k.
Others (Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment) lower, under 20k
That's how bad it has been going. Not a single Sony or Microsoft hit outside of Stellar Blade as far as I'm aware.
Mentioning Forza Horizon 5, but not Horizon 6 which had a peak of 306k is a choice.
I think Horizon 6 is a terrible game. Very bad actually. My entire family bounced off of it immediately and were very disappointed.
Fair enough Microsoft sold one game well on Steam (actually I missed one other one, Starfield was a success at launch, little did people realize how bad the game was, also).
My point was all the other Xbox games did much worse than Bioware, MUCH WORSE, and they should have all faced repercussions a long time ago.
It's such a bad game it has a 90+ on meta and 4.6 average Steam score. Either way, your opinion on the game is irrelevant to the point. You're also missing Halo Infinite, MCC, Sea Of Theives, all the FH games, Flight Sim, games, Ages of Empires, and Grounded have found success on Steam. Certainly a good number of games haven't been successful, but you are underselling it for both Platforms. Helldivers 2 was very successful for Sony. I'm pretty sure all the Spider-man games have sold millions on steam.
Forza Horizon 6 is a bad game, I don't care what metacritic says. Name any reputable reviewers lol.... All the reviewers are random sites that nobody even visits. Form your own opinion.
Halo Infinite is free to play and has nobody playing it. It is universally considered a massive flop.
Grounded and Grounded 2 were both not successful. Huge failures with 1/3 the player count of Veilguard. Indie level.
The media are not honest about it. Spiderman games sold extremely poorly on Steam also. Spiderman 2 was universally disliked. It peaked at 28,000 players.
Those are fine numbers for small studios, but not blockbuster numbers. I think that is where the confusion lies.
These 300 million dollar games need to hit at least 150,000 concurrent players at launch otherwise they are definitely not succeeding on Steam.
Starfield and Forza Horizon 6 did sell well.
I think the problem for Starfield is that it sold based on the previous game, Skyrim. They won't get that chance again.
I was playing Starfield a week early, and it was ok, i gave it a 7/10 despite the horrific problems, but I used a lot of mods to fix the game. They never fixed it themselves and I have given up on that company. I shouldn't need to spend a few days modding Starfield to fix their own game.
at least it was easy to mod as it used the same framework as Skyrim...
Steam isnt the Industry plus you chose to ignore FH6.
