It brings me no pleasure to say this as a guy who has been an Xbox customer since the original system, but Microsoft might be the worst video game company on Earth, and there’s one guy central to it all.

Today, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News reported that Microsoft will lay off 3,200 employees between now and next year, and divest into five studios. It has already come to light that Compulsion Games and Double Fine have been spun off, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs will be sold off.

Arkane Studios will “begin a consultation process” while Microsoft hopes to spin off or sell the studio. Fortunately, Arkane is a French studio, so their labor laws will force Microsoft to make sure the developers are taken care of, rather than the bullshit American labor laws that allow corporations to treat their employees like shit.

Xbox’s CEO Asha Sharma put out a company-wide note Monday morning, saying, “We must reset Xbox.” Schreier follows:

Last month, Sharma wrote in a memo to employees that Xbox’s “accountability margin,” the metric Microsoft uses to reflect profit margin, had fallen to 3% and that annual revenue had plummeted. “Going forward, this cannot continue,” she wrote then.

Heaven forbid, profit margins fell to THREE PERCENT. How are Microsoft shareholders able to afford to care for their families with that? Of course more studios need to be shuttered and employees need to be laid off.

Last year, Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, and I wondered aloud how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former Xbox head Phil Spencer weren’t among them. Spencer ultimately left the company, and could largely be seen as the reason these layoffs are happening with his developer spending sprees, but it’s a wonder how Nadella still has a job with all of his shortcomings as a CEO.

This is now Microsoft’s seventh round of major layoffs since Nadella became CEO back in February 2014. The company has spent over $100 billion in AI development and is home to what is, quite possibly, the worst of the bunch in Copilot, while also spending money on OpenAI and Claude to make up for its own AI’s shortcomings. Now imagine how many games and studios $100 billion pays for.

Microsoft is failing everyone. Nobody wants Copilot, nobody wants AI shoved into their operating system, nobody wants a vibe-coded Windows 11, nobody wants Xbox to lay off employees, nobody wants anything Microsoft is doing.

The one pro-consumer product they had, Xbox Game Pass, was gutted and had its price increased. Subscribers responded by cancelling in droves. Then, magically, once Sharma showed up and lowered the price again, subscriptions went back up. Funny how that works?

Look, I know this is America, where humanity is sacrificed in the name of shareholder value, but I’m pretty sure the first gaming company that puts people over profits will have a lot of profits to count. Will that sate the hunger of their beloved shareholders? Probably not, but it’s nice to dream.

If you’re a disgruntled current or former Xbox employee who wants to chat, please reach out to me at jeff@gameoni.gg and please be sure to visit Amir Satvat’s ASGC website for career resources.