Xbox chief executive officer Asha Sharma went from being the new face of Team Green, leading the platform into a new era, to being no different from the last in the eyes of players in the blink of an eye. After making Game Pass cheaper, re-centering console hardware and bringing exclusives back, Xbox fans praised her quick action and transparency. Now, however, with multiple studios reportedly being closed and more mass layoffs looming, she and her regime are no different from Spencer's. Industry veteran and analyst Joost van Dreunen calls it "the job she was actually hired to do": making […]

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Update 15/06/2026: A report from The Verge claims that Ninja Theory is being shut down by Xbox, and that the next-best hope for the studio's future would be for it to find another studio to acquire it. The report reiterates that Compulsion and Double-Fine remain in negotiations to spin-off as independents, though that is seemingly not an option for Ninja Theory. This comes a little more than a week after Ninja Theory revealed the next entry in its Hellblade series, Senua, a game that we may never get to play, if the studio is ultimately shuttered. Original Story: The scale […]

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Ever since Bloomberg's report that there would be layoffs at Xbox at the end of the month, the entire video game industry has been on high alert. Waiting in horror to see how bad the layoffs would be this time, with initial claims pointing to them being potentially as bad as when Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees at Xbox and shuttered Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin in 2024. Or perhaps even as bad as the layoffs last year, which cut 9,000 employees across Microsoft and also drastically impacted the Xbox division. Today, we're hearing more bad news that is starting […]

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