Microsoft just deleted roughly 3,200 jobs out of Xbox — about a fifth of the whole division — closed or spun off a handful of studios, and in Montreal it fired a dozen unionized developers at Bethesda over a three-minute video call where they weren’t allowed to ask a single question. Sit with that for a second. Not the 3,200. The three. The people who built the worlds a lot of us disappeared into for a thousand hours — Doom, Fallout, the games that got some of us through a couple of bad winters — got less time to absorb losing their careers than it takes to sit through a loading screen. The union that represents them, CWA Canada, put it plainly: used, abused, and discarded. The workers there have their own name for it now — the stressful annual routine — because this happens every summer, like weather.
Now weigh that against the money, because it makes the whole thing obscene. Microsoft isn’t a company scraping to make rent. It’s worth somewhere north of three trillion dollars, and it has told its own investors it plans to spend around 190 billion dollars this year on AI data centers — warehouses of chips it’s betting will one day generate the games it just fired the humans for making. So the money was there. It was always there. It simply got aimed at a server farm in the desert instead of at the animator in Montreal who hand-colored the thing you actually loved. Nobody at that valuation cuts people because they have to. They do it because a spreadsheet said the margin looked prettier without them, and because they’ve decided that firing the people who make the art costs them nothing worse than a slightly awkward Tuesday.
But the annual part is exactly where the story turns, because the workers stopped filing out quietly. They unionized — the studios the industry swore would never organize, organizing anyway. They’re demanding real severance, recall rights so laid-off staff have a way back in, and a seat before the axe swings instead of a three-minute call after it lands. Bethesda’s own people are marching under a banner that just reads Save Our Devs. That is the correct response to being treated as a rounding error by the richest company in human history: make yourself impossible to round off. Don’t swallow the line that this is just the industry, just how it goes. A market didn’t schedule that call. A person did, on purpose, then logged off to go check on the AI budget. Root for the ones holding the picket sign. The trillion-dollar company will be fine — it always is. Make sure the animator in Montreal is too.