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"We kicked off the Season work at least 12 to 14 months ago."
Following last week's announcement that long-running MMO The Elder Scrolls Online would be moving away from traditional major expansions to focus on smaller seasonal updates, developer ZeniMax Online has insisted the big shake-up is in no way related to last year's sweeping layoffs at parent company Microsoft, which heavily impacted the studio.
Last July, in a year that saw Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella boast "record performance" and a revenue increase to $281.7bn, the company announced mass layoffs affecting over 9000 employees across the company, marking its third round of significant job cuts since 2023. The move - which impacted numerous Xbox studios including Rare, Turn 10, The Initiative, and Raven Software - was accompanied by multiple project cancellations.
ZeniMax Online Studios' in-development sci-fi MMO Project Blackbird was one of the games impacted, and its cancellation coincided with nearly 200 job cuts at the studio. But following last week's announcement that The Elder Scrolls Online would be shifting to smaller seasonal releases, executive producer Susan Kath has insisted the two events are unrelated.
"Seasons is not in any way a response to [the layoffs]," Kath recently told RockPaperShotgun. "We kicked off the Season work at least 12 to 14 months ago. We started making the changes in the team to move in this direction, knowing that this was our intent."
Kath describes 2025 as a "hard year for the studio", but acknowledges Blackbird's cancellation could be seen as a positive for ESO. "Ultimately, we had a lot of people doing double duty on those projects, splitting their time between projects," she continued. "[They] are now devoted 100 percent to Elder Scrolls Online. So, in fact, in some capacities, we actually increased the number of folks available as we came out of that because they weren't managing two products anymore. They were only devoted to one title."
ZeniMax first publicly discussed the idea of smaller updates for The Elder Scrolls Online shortly after the layoffs. In September, studio game director Rich Lambert told GamesIndustry.biz the MMO was in "a bit of a transition year", and that the team was now looking to get "smaller, more bite-sized things out quicker". The aim, he said, was to launch these smaller updates roughly every six to nine months, compared to the 12-15 month release schedule for traditional expansions. And last week, ZeniMax formalised its plans, announcing a move to smaller, quarterly - and free - seasons, starting 2nd April, which will also see many earlier paid expansions rolled into the base game. This change coincides with the introduction of a seasonal (but not time-limited) battle pass, featuring a free tier and two paid extensions.
In a press briefing attended by RPS ahead of the announcement, Elder Scrolls Online game director Nick Giaomini insisted the shift would give the team the "flexibility to make our game more exciting and invest in addressing long standing pain points, add features and improvements players have been asking for, and update and iterate on the core game, rather than always just chasing something brand new."
"To say that [the layoffs] didn't impact us wouldn't be right," Giacomini added. "We're putting on a strong face. We're human. It absolutely impacted us. But, you know, the team rallied. We're excited about the future. We're excited that we're making all these big changes."
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