Yesterday, Microsoft began retrenching its latest round, which aims to eliminate 9,000 jobs after cutting more than 12,000 employees in the last two years. The latest downsizing has inspired the studio closure and the cancellation of the game – including a blackbird, which includes an undeclared MMO in the development in Zenimax that Xbox officials were suddenly thrilled suddenly before killing the project.
Bloomberg Jason Shreyar Report The production for Blackbird began in Zenimax in 2018. A Destiny-Esk Third Person Shooter MMO with a Scifi Noir aesthetics, Blackbird was being developed by a team of 300 employees. Its gameplay put more emphasis on verticality and acrobatics, which offers traversal equipment such as hooks, wall climbing and air dash.
Blackbird was a hit with Xbox officials. According to sources familiar with its development, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, was so impressed by an internal demo in March that the Head Mat Booti of the Xbox Games Studio had to be drawn with his hands to prevent a meeting from holding a meeting. All signs looked highly positive, and the development of the game moved towards a temporary 2028 launch.
On Wednesday, those developers logged into the slack to see that accounts for the executive manufacturer and creative director of the game were missing. That morning later in a meeting, he was informed that Blackbird was “sheltered indefinitely.” The team later lost its dull accounts, leaving them in a kind of “job points” because Microsoft interacted with the Union of Zenimax, which was held on the services packages last year.
As a promising game project to appear from a proven MMO developer, the cancellation of blackbird is a disappointing, especially when Microsoft and Xbox are equally happy to describe their ongoing unprecedented successes.
In a memorandum sent to Xbox employees on yesterday’s announcement, the Spencer said that in the gaming division “there are more players, games and gaming hours than ever.” In 2024 annual report of MicrosoftCEO Satya Nadella said the company achieved “record performance”, which provides an operational benefit of $ 109 billion – an increase of 24% from a year ago.
