Xbox layoffs mean that Elder Scrolls Online's roadmap is "shifting" just two days before Season One's release... the plan put in place for the MMO after the last round of cuts

Back to the drawing board

Yesterday brought the news that Microsoft were cutting 1600 staff, spinning out four studios, and finding a further 1600 jobs to cut in the year to come. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in an email to staff that she was "making reductions" and "shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects".Today, we're starting to learn what those cuts mean for the teams that Xbox retained, and the projects they were working on. The most public and immediate of these is Elder Scrolls Online.

In January, Zenimax Online Studios, the makers of Elder Scrolls Online, announced they would be ditching yearly expansions and moving the MMO to a seasonal release model. The team were just two days ahead of releasing Season One when Xbox hit them with layoffs so severe the release roadmap needs to be rebuilt.

In a post to the MMO's forums, Jessica Folsom, associate director of community, explained that the launch of Season One would go ahead but "Looking beyond Season One, the roadmaps we previously shared will be shifting."

Folsom couldn't say when that new roadmap would be released, only that the team "want to take the time to evaluate the work in front of us and then lock down an updated schedule."

At the time of the announcement of seasons, Elder Scrolls Online's executive producer Susan Kath stated the shift wasn't a result of 2025's layoffs, telling me "Seasons is not in any way a response to that. 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 said the team realised releasing chapters every 18 months was too slow a cadence of new content to keep their audience entertained. Along with a shift to more frequent releases, with new seasons coming every three months, the team hoped to be more communicative of their plans. The roadmap they published in January covered a year's worth of updates.

However, according to one developer impacted by yesterday's layoffs, the cuts have impacted half of the MMOs active development team. A growing list of staff known to have left the studio paints a picture of how wide the cuts have been: writers, designers, programmers, artists, community managers, producers, operations managers, and many more.

In January, Zenimax Online Studios explained how much fundamental work was required to overhaul the Elder Scrolls Online, updating the 12-year-old MMO. Now those issues are laid bare but the team doesn't have the resources to commit to their original plan to deliver those fixes. Yesterday's cuts have left the team remaining at the studio in an extremely difficult, potentially impossible position.

Over the past few months, as rumours of Xbox's restructing plans trickled out and Sharma gave interviews and made statements at different events, the picture that was forming was one of focusing on series that sell. Halo. Gears of War. Fallout. The big games in the Xbox stable. However, one of the largest series Xbox owns is the Elder Scrolls. So it is distinctly strange at a time where their stated aim is to double down on a series where The Elder Scrolls 6 is still a long way off, that they would apply such sweeping cuts to the only team putting out new Elder Scrolls material.