On July 6th, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers, largely from its Xbox gaming division. This comes almost exactly one year after the tech giant announced it was terminating 9,100 employees. It’s now a disconcertingly routine occurrence in the tech industry: thousands of jobs gone in an instant, accompanied by little more than a corporate memo and some platitudes about AI.
The cuts are so imposingly large, the headlines so alarmingly frequent, and the tech companies so aggressive in their comms strategy that it’s easy to grow numb to the fact that there are real humans on the other end. To the fact that we now regularly see a small city’s worth of lives upended, careers cut short, and friends and colleagues thrown out of work. That an untold number of games, products, and works of art are suffering as a result. id Software, the studio behind some of the most legendary (and successful) game franchises of all time—Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake—was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. Executives laid off half the studio’s employees this month. The remaining employees have no idea how they’re supposed to move on, what the plan for them is moving forward.
I know this because this week I sat down with three Microsoft workers for a special edition of the Blood in the Machine show. Two of these workers have been impacted by the layoffs, one saw longtime friends lose their jobs. All three are fighting back.
All three have, at an exceptionally difficult moment, at personal and professional risk, stepped forward to share their stories, and to reveal what it’s like to work in the gaming industry, at a tech giant, in the age of AI and corporate consolidation. Both tech and gaming have been targeted by zealous managers embracing AI, and both have been made precarious by waves of destabilizing layoffs.
In our wide-ranging conversation, Morgan Goin, a level designer with ZeniMax Online Studios, who worked on games like Elder Scrolls, Autumn Mitchell, a senior quality assurance tester at Bethesda (the studio behind the Fallout games), and Chris Hays, a lead services programmer at id Software, candidly shed light on the crisis big tech is inflicting on games, how AI is impacting the industry, and how they’ve organizing to confront their trillion-dollar overlords through layoffs and hardship.
They’re all members of the Communication Workers of America, and the union has responded to the layoff news by organizing a series of protests, attended by hundreds, and filing an unfair labor practices complaint against Microsoft. I’m told we should keep our eyes peeled for a major event in August, too.
I’m still experimenting with the audio edition of BITM, but conversations like this one are exactly the ones I want to be having. I cannot thank Goin, Mitchell, and Hays enough for joining the show and sharing their stories and insights. For updates on their fight, you can follow the ZeniMax Workers Union on social media and find updates on the CWA’s website.
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OK! That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading/watching/listening. Until next time, hammers up.
