ZeniMax workers rally to save ‘spirit of the studio' after Microsoft cuts

Welcome signs on the road into Maryland bear a slogan chosen by the governor. The last guy went with “Open for business.” In 2023, the new governor updated the signs with his own motto, the one I saw driving to Rockville on Wednesday to cover a rally in support of ZeniMax workers laid off by Microsoft. “Leave no one behind.”

It fit the occasion. ‘That’ day, organizers with the Communications Workers of America union hosted the Save Our Devs March at ZeniMax studio offices across the US and in Canada, including outside one in Rockville. The rally drew current and former ZeniMax employees and a bevy of well-wishers who gathered around noon in the sweltering heat on a strip of grass by the parking lot, a red cluster of activity in an otherwise sedate office complex. Over the next two hours, they would express, in a range of tones, their fury with Microsoft and their determination to win concessions for laid-off workers — better severance, better health benefits, privileged consideration for future openings — who were stepping into the unknown. Maybe more importantly, they milled about, catching up with friends and former coworkers, commiserating, hugging, holding back tears.

On July 6, Microsoft announced massive layoffs across its games division. 1,600 people lost their jobs that day; another 1,600 are set to be laid off at some undisclosed future point. The ZeniMax studios, which are owned by Microsoft, were hit particularly hard. By the union’s count, at least 440 positions across the company’s holdings, which include Bethesda and id Software, were eliminated. At ZeniMax Online Studios, the cuts were deep and wide-ranging, hitting studio leadership as well as QA testers, animators, food service workers and others, GameFile reported Wednesday evening.

Startlingly, this is ZeniMax’s second brush with cuts in as many years. As people were ambling in, I spoke to a former Bethesda QA tester named Chase Carter. He’d worked on Fallout 76, Starfield, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Deathloop — “the list goes on,” he told me. It was only halfway through our chat that I realized he was actually a victim of layoffs from one year prior: “I was part of the layoffs the year before,” Carter said. “I remember when I found out one of my coworkers got laid off, I’m like, ‘Oh god, if that guy got laid off, I’m done for.’ And I was.”

As more people arrived, Nathan Hahn, a technical producer at Bethesda and a volunteer with the union, led the crowd through a few sample call-and-response chants: When we fight — we win! Whose power? Our power! What power? Union power! Later, he brought out a guitar, getting the crowd involved in a “Solidarity Forever” singalong.

Many attendees came with homemade signs: Don’t Test The Testers; My Trough Runneth Over With Microslop; FUS RO JOBS; Microsoft Gaming Layoff Division. One person wore a keffiyeh. Another wore a tricorn hat. Most people just wore red, the color of the CWA. Every five minutes or so, a passing van or truck would honk in support, prompting loud cheers and clapping from the crowd.

“We’re out here protesting these illegal layoffs, fighting to bring the company to the table so that we can, first off, get our jobs back,” said Tyler Fischesser, a software engineer at Bethesda. He was carrying a sign that read “Bring Back Our Bargaining Committee,” and said he was the one member of his four-person union bargaining committee who hadn’t been laid off. (He nursed a suspicion, he told me, that Microsoft had targeted union members in its cuts. He wasn’t the only person I spoke to who held that view.)

“But second off,” Fischesser added, “if the company insists on going forward with this, [we’re fighting to] get better severance, get better health benefits, get better recall rights, and force the company to place affected workers in news roles throughout Xbox and Microsoft.”

He said the cuts — and even just the rumors of cuts before July 6 — had made it difficult to focus on work. “Knowing that the ax is about to fall, and knowing you’re about to lose a lot of your friends and colleagues, it’s very difficult,” Fischesser said. “Going forward with these cuts, the future of our projects are in jeopardy. There’s a lot up in the air across all the studios.”

The mayor of Rockville attended the rally, offering brief and quiet remarks in support of the workers; a Rockville city councilmember attended too. One speaker drew muted, confused applause when he mused aloud: If Donald Trump wants to save jobs in his backyard, why doesn’t he come out here?

While he’d retained his job, Hahn told me the layoffs were a major disruption. “As a producer, my role is to build roadmaps that help us see when we’re gonna get the game done. And obviously, all of those are out the window if you no longer have the people there to do that work.”

“Our studio has a custom game engine that is built upon that legacy of people with a vast amount of experience being able to update it and build it. And a lot of those folks were kicked to the curb,” Hahn said. “So now there’s folks standing around, not sure who to ask that question that they would have asked that person who had those decades of experience.”

When asked, every attendee could point me to a former coworker whose contributions to ZeniMax had been invaluable — and whose talents Microsoft had chosen to walk away from. Talk to her, they’d say; she designed the armor worn by the Dragonborn in the Skyrim key art. Talk to that guy, with the cowboy hat and handlebar mustache; he designed a bunch of Bethesda’s iconic weapons. 

In a July 6 statement announcing the layoffs, CEO of Xbox Asha Sharma groused that “in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management.” But on the ground in Rockville, that claim was viewed skeptically. (One person wondered how 14 layers of management would even work.) The people who had lost their jobs were, in many cases, beloved long-time coworkers responsible for some of ZeniMax’s most profound successes — the sorts of games and features Sharma said Xbox should be pivoting back to.

“Id [Software], they’ve just been through a 10-year period of three absolutely fantastic Doom games. Critically acclaimed. Everybody loves them,” said Jay Woodward, a 19-year veteran of Bethesda Game Studios. “And this is the reward. It seems very strange.”

When I asked Woodward, an AI designer who was caught up in last week’s layoffs, to share something he was proud of working on at the studio, he kicked it all the way back to Skyrim. “If you did any work with the AI system in Oblivion,” he said, “everything was a very small set of predefined packages. And then in Skyrim, we have the customizable package system where you can sort of build procedures and branching nodes and whatnot into your own, essentially, behavior tree.” Woodward said he and another tools programmer, Shannon Bailey, built that system.

Woodward did see something of a silver lining, though. “I am the father to two wonderful kids,” he said. “And I am happy to be in the role of dad, and doing dad stuff for a while here.”

Christiane Meister, who started at Bethesda in 1999 and designed the Elder Scrolls’ iconic Khajiit and Argonians (“they’re kind of my kids,” she said), began to notice a change after ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in 2021.

“It was like a corporate business trying to take over art,” she said. “A video game is art. It’s not TPS reports, you know? And that’s the way we were headed.” Meister was laid off last week, too.

Stephanie Zachariadis, a former quest designer at Bethesda, was hired after working as head writer on Fallout: London, a Fallout 4 mod. In her five years at the studio, she was one of a small team working on the Lombardi Family and the Munis faction in the Atlantic City DLC for Fallout 76 — and was excited for a “big piece of content” she was working on for one of the studio’s “current projects,” she said. Last week, she was laid off.

Zachariadis said she was dismayed to see sometimes-hostile reactions to the laid-off workers online.

“I do a little doomscrolling,” Zachariadis said. “And I see people saying, like, ‘the devs, they just don’t care.’ … We cared a lot. And sometimes it’s so devastating because we can’t say, like, ‘trust me, there’s things you don’t know are happening, I wish I could tell you, but — we are fighting for this game to be amazing, and we care a lot.’” 

The workers at the rally were, of course, immediately concerned with securing people’s livelihoods. But more broadly, the union rally was part of a bigger fight “for the spirit of the studio,” she said. “Corporate greed is destroying our games and our livelihoods.”

“I think what’s important to understand is that we were all very close friends,” she said of her former colleagues. “And while we’re all still going to see each other, we were really looking forward to releasing a game together. And now we’re not sure what’s going to happen.” Before we parted, Zachariadis said I absolutely must speak with Dane Olds, a lead weapons artist who got laid off. (Reader, I missed him.)

By 2 p.m., the crowd had thinned considerably. After remarks from the mayor, union organizers and a handful of workers, and a smattering of songs and chants, the not-yet-but-maybe-eventually-laid-off had returned to the office.

Last week, Microsoft hit half of its target of 3,200 cuts. 1,600 workers remain to be laid off. Already, the ZeniMax studios have been bled of swaths of talent. Those who haven’t been cut will have to contend with the constant looming threat of more layoffs, another total disruption coming down the pike, inscrutable and unpredictable to anyone outside of Microsoft’s executive suite.

A few small clusters of former employees, organizers and supporters remained, chatting in the shade, sipping on water and Gatorade. “There should have been a sign that said ‘Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?’” someone muttered, prompting weary laughter.

One last thing…

Here’s some stuff I liked recently, in no particular order.

Did a guy in a video say “Donk”? — The New York Times | A story that’s just barely about the Counter-Strike phenom Danil "donk" Kryshkovets, and otherwise almost entirely about adjudicating what’s true for the purpose of settling bets on prediction markets. Really weird! Surprised this one didn’t really make the games press.

He Won’t Stop Building a Map to an Imaginary Place — People Make Games | What a delight to spend 47 minutes with Jerry Gretzinger!

The Woman in the Photo Wanted to Be Alone. Instead, She Went Viral. — NOTUS | “After the photo, the woman went to her mother’s house. She didn’t say anything about the masked men. Instead, she told her mom she was going to church and the store, and she’d come right back. She did not come back.” This one really made me quite sad.

Finally, I was listening to these songs on loop while writing:

• Pick Up That Knife — Wednesday

• The Brightest Light — Dallas Good + Richard Reed Parry

• Don't Smoke Government Weed — Vegan Vampires

• K-JAH Radio — GTA 3, The Scientist

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