For two and a half years, Andrew Willis has worked as producer for id Software — the Richardson-based developer that makes popular video games Doom and Quake.
Now, he’s one of 1,600 Microsoft Xbox employees, 158 in Texas, who were laid off effective immediately last Monday in the first wave of a significant company restructuring that will eliminate 3,200 roles over the next fiscal year.
On Wednesday, he joined dozens of workers outside their Richardson office building to protest the layoffs at the “Save our Devs” rally, an event organized in several cities across the country and Canada by workers represented by the Communications Workers of America union.
"I don't think it's right what they're doing to these folks and to show people the door after so many loyal years of producing great value and providing service to the company,” Willis said. “We're going to use this time to organize and fight back.”
CWA represents about 4,000 Xbox employees nationwide, including about 146 of the 158 affected employees in Texas. The union is now in the process of negotiating an exit agreement with Microsoft, said David Marshall, executive vice president of the union’s Dallas chapter.
"CWA is gonna pull every tool out of our tool belt and stand with these folks during this layoff,” Marshall said. “Our plan is to seek legal counsel and see what we can do collectively to protect those workers that are being impacted by this announcement.”
Marshall said their legal teams are looking into the legality of the layoffs, which he said may be in violation of the status quo clause — part of a labor law that requires employers to bargain with their worker’s representatives before making changes during the negotiations stage.
“We are connecting with other unions, other locals, other industries, our legislators,” Marshall said. “Everybody that we can to help these workers transition forward, either through severance packages or finding them other open positions within the company to move and eliminate the pain that's caused from decisions like this.”
In a statement demanding enforceable layoff protections from Microsoft, CWA president Claude Cummings Jr. said the union has been “extremely disappointed” by the company’s inaction at the bargaining table, forcing workers to rely on their union contract protections.
“When Microsoft decides to treat the workers who built Xbox as expendable, it should know who they’re dealing with,” Cummings Jr. said in the statement.
id Software is one of several studios owned by ZeniMax Media, a video game publishing company that was purchased by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2020.
Willis said about 94 other id Software employees were also let go — about half the studio’s Richardson workforce. This includes workers who had worked for the studio for decades and are responsible for the creation of some of its most successful games, he said.
“The people that had that institutional knowledge of how to execute that; the people who have that information in their head are all gone,” he said. “It's really unclear to me how they'll proceed at the same bar that folks are used to."
Under Texas’ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, businesses are required to provide 60 days' notice of mass layoffs. This means Texas workers will still be paid until Sept. 4, but Willis said they are not working and have been disconnected from company systems.
Beyond the statement released by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma detailing plans to “reset” the company, Willis said workers were not given a clear reason for the layoffs. While the gaming industry has long been a difficult job market, he said the scale of the layoffs is beyond what he or his coworkers ever expected.
The layoffs came as Microsoft announced another $2.5 billion in artificial intelligence investments, which Marshall said raises concerns about the future role of creatives in the industry.
"(It) has us all worried that Microsoft is destroying the profitable video game industry in order to invest more heavily in an unproven AI technology,” he said.
Also laid off were five of the six members of the Bethesda User Research Team. Bethesda Game Studios is another studio owned by ZeniMax Media which makes game franchises The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. This includes senior user researcher Elisabeth Whyte, who most recently worked to increase user accessibility on some of the studio’s most popular franchises.
She said most of the people laid off were “critical to the success of Bethesda and ZeniMax.” As more workers are let go, she said the trauma of layoffs may drive talent away from the field.
"I want to have hope that the game industry will survive the repeated layoffs, but it's hard to be hopeful when so many of my talented coworkers aren't working in games anymore,” Whyte said.
Willis said he thinks the restructuring will "destroy a ton of a value” for Xbox by dismantling teams that have worked together for decades and have built the institutional knowledge required to operate the industry smoothly.
"These moves today, all bad. It makes lower quality games with less familiar teams, teams with less experience,” he said. “You chase people out of the industry who simply can't put up with the volatility of it, not because they're not great artists or great creators, but because they don't want to deal with being laid off every couple of years and having to find a new job while they worry about their kids and their mortgage."
While Willis said he hopes to stay in the industry, he is not sure what the future holds.
"I love games. It just brings me so much joy. And it's such a great art form that I think has so much room to innovate and grow,” he said. “... I'm just super passionate about staying in it. So I hope to, whether that's possible... I am just not sure."
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