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Microsoft cuts 1,900 staff at Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Microsoft is cutting 1,900 staff across the Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard teams as the latest in a wave of layoffs across the game industry.

On top of that, Blizzard’s president Mike Ybarra and its chief design officer Allen Adham — the cofounder of Blizzard — are leaving the studio. And Blizzard’s survival game is no longer in development. The moves are the first major cuts in the wake of the $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October. It also comes after a leadership reorganization to deal with the new company structure.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.