the art of lore magic

1,600 Xbox employees were hit directly by the recent Microsoft layoffs, with an additional 1,600 from Xbox still planned for a total of 3,200 employees. This has included/will include those under the ZeniMax umbrella, including Bethesda, ZOS, id, and Arkane.

Jeff Gardiner claims that 35 were let go from Bethesda, and 95 from id.

According to ZOS Senior Content Designer Katherine Souze, this included "half" of the team in the Elder Scrolls Online content team, although she has since deleted the original post. We know this has included some very public facing people, including Lead Dungeon Director Mike Finnigan and Community Manager Gina Bruno.

Over this entire era of layoffs in the games industry, there has been a regularity to it that has become predictable. Across the industry, teams have been devastated if their project failed with the studio often shutting down. But successes can see the same thing happen.

Perhaps the only positive thing that can be said is that no studios seemed to have been closed for once. Studios were released and returned to independence or sold instead of just being shut down.

As gamers, we haven't really felt like this practice and atmosphere in the games industry has been producing more and better games from the AAA space.

If the new CEO of Xbox is right and the involved restructuring of their management leads to more good games that come out quicker, that will be fantastic. But the past waves of layoffs haven't managed to do that at all, there's no reason to think they'll suddenly work this time. The safe bet is that these layoffs are just not going to stop.

A list of people we know who have been laid off at ZOS and Bethesda:

ZOS

Community Manager Gina Bruno

Lead Dungeon Director Mike Finnigan

Writer Designer Andrew Siañez-De La O

Writer Designer Julianna Comstock

Senior Writer Designer Jeff Grubb

Project Art Director Marc Hudgins

Senior Concept Artist Christina Cornett

Senior Animator Ami DeLullo

Animator Evan Van Biert

Senior Tools Engineer Robert Bailey

QA Tester Page Branson

Producer Ethan Koltz

Environmental Artist Brandon Rush

Associate Sound Designer Andrew Jordan

Senior Sound Designer Daniel Costello

Associate Sound Designer Sebastian Theodoro

QA Tester Trevor Bream

DevOps Engineer William Novak

Realtime FX Artist Jacob Wynn

Senior VFX Artist Anelise Mize

Lead Designer Ed Stark

Senior Encounter Designer Morgan Goin

Encounter Designer Erinn Fecteau

Senior Encounter Designer James Audet

Tools Product Owner Sydney Thibeault

Senior Software Engineer Dustin Thurston

Live Game Lead Gregory Roth

Content Manager Milo Webb

QA Manager Erik Marby

Narrative Director Bill Slavicsek

Lead Narrative Designer Richard Baker

Writer Designer Alexandria Baker

Writer Designer Ameya Vinayaraj

Bethesda

Community Manager Jessica Clark

Game Designer Simon Préfontaine

GRC Engineer Wayne Saunders

Associate Quest Designer Griffin DeClaire

Quest Designer Stephanie Zachariadis

Systems Designer Jean Paul Salman

Gameplay Engineer Anne Barrett

Monetization Designer Kevin Benavides

Lead Systems Designer Jacob Naasz

Senior Build and Release Programmer Anthony Ford

Lead Quest Designer Joshua Moretto

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Ultimately, I just cannot stay in Indonesia. Every day is already a struggle just to stay alive and to be blunt, I won’t survive an other year here. This envornment is not only toxic, it is going to kill me. I have tried to find a way out of this situation but there’s nothing here in Indonesia that I can do. It’s all dead ends. My only hope is to go to Europe, find work, and start to build up a life that I can actually live. The irony of course is that to find a job, you need to be in Europe, but to go to Europe you already need to have a job offer. Catch 22. So, my best chance is the Chancenkarte, a job seeking visa in Germany. Unfortunately in order to even qualify to apply, I need to have just over €13,000 show money to prove that I am a legitimate job seeker. Money which I do not currently have.

I have tried every resource and connection I have at my disposal to get out of this pit but nothing has worked and despite my skills and capacities, and dozens of wonderful people in Europe who would happily vouch for and help support me, my passport and myopic migration laws are holding me back. This is my last ditch effort to save myself. If I can raise enough money to apply for a job seeking visa, I can finally escape this nightmare I’ve being held in, move to a stable country, get the help I need, find work, pay off my family, and be free to live my own life.

Any help, no matter how little, is a step in the right direction for me. I am not expecting money for free; as a Social Anthropologist with an MA in Humanitarian and Environmental Crises from the UK, I have been offering editing, proofreading, and university-level academic coaching services for over four years. I am a hard worker and do not expect handouts. If you find yourself in need of my services, any donation above £100 will come with editing assistance for any 2500 word essay.

I don't think you're doing purity testing or anything similar, and the effort is admirable, but I think believing that people that buy the game don't care about palestine is wrong, I think it's more that they don't see the use in trying a boycott that will fail.

Btw I hope the boycott succeds I sincerely don't think it will, I myself am not buying the game for a while and will probably pirate it, but it's my personal choice and I don't see the use in shaming people for playing it as it won't win them over and will most likely make them bitter towards the cause, people are fickle and selfish by nature, and the same thing happened with hogwarts legacy. People said it revealed those who played ad unworthy allies, but I don't think we should exclude people by worthiness, you don't win by having "quality" you win by having "quantity".

That's just my two cents on the subject though

consumer boycotts can and do work. a few highlights taken from here (emphasis my own):

Affirming the role the BDS movement has played in the Israeli economy’s “spiral of collapse,” as 130 leading Israeli economists describe it, in September, the Chairman of the Israeli Export Institute said: “BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape.” He added, “Economic boycotts and BDS organizations present major challenges, and in some countries, we are forced to operate under the radar.” Israel’s projected annual GDP growth rate for 2024 is 0%, according to leading credit rating agency S&P, and some 60,000 Israeli businesses are projected to have shut down during this year of ongoing genocide. Global sales of McDonald’s, a prime BDS target, “fell by 1.5% between July and September, the biggest decline in four years, more than twice the size forecast by analysts. It followed a 1% drop in the April to June period.” In October, fossil fuel giant Chevron, a priority target of the BDS movement, halted a $429 million expansion of an Israeli-claimed fossil gas field amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and its brutal bombings in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond. In August, in a significant BDS win, French insurer AXA was forced to sell its investments in all major Israeli banks. In November, Carrefour closed all branches in Jordan due to BDS pressure. Carrefour’s partner in most of the Arab World, the Majid Al Futtaim Group, reacted to BDS Jordan’s boycott pressure by ending all business with the French retailer in Jordan. In November, the Boycott PUMA campaign confirmed that, following relentless BDS campaigns worldwide, the German company had ended its complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime. In December, the Strauss Group, a complicit Israeli multinational food and beverage corporation, was forced, due to an effective BDS campaign, to sell off its shares in the US-based company, Sabra, which mass produces the culturally-appropriated popular Arab dip, hummus."

looking further back, boycotts, divestments and sanctions played a crucial role in dismantling the apartheid state in south africa. from here:

Boycotts may have been a form of activism that was easier to implement on a variety of different scales, but it provided a very extensive impact on apartheid in South Africa. The very threat of boycotts of South Africa in the 1984 Olympics pushed the leader of the IOC to go against the Olympic Charter and keep South Africa out of the Olympics – making the decision as early as 1981. This showed the power the boycotts had built up, and the authority they carried. The boycotts were seen as being so effective that even the IOC would not be able to withstand their financial and diplomatic fall-out. South Africa would finally rejoin the Olympic community in Barcelona in 1992, “following the commencement of governmental talks to finally bring an end to apartheid.”

that targeted boycotts can be extremely effective is not up for debate. but i think the crucial thing to acknowledge here is that they are one of the most easy and accessible forms of protest because they do not require you to actually do anything.

your argument would hold water if i was demanding that everyone go out and start blowing up embassies or setting themselves on fire. but BDS is literally just asking people to do nothing at all.

this isn't a moral purity thing, it's a statement of fact that boycotts only work if people participate. and they fail because of the exceptionalist arguments you're spouting here: "it's my personal choice." ok, sure. it's my personal choice to not get vaccinated. it's my personal choice to vote conservative.

the other thing is that microsoft is one of the more egregious targets on the BDS list, for reasons better outlined here. i know that this isn't the fault of the folks working at bethesda, who will be several degrees removed from the heinous shit happening at the top. but BDS has specifically listed Microsoft's gaming division as a key component of the boycott, for the very fact that video games are perhaps the easiest product for the average consumer to opt out of.

tldr;

boycotts are effective

they are easy

they only work if people participate

BDS has specifically named bethesda

people should therefore boycott bethesda

palestine is more important than a video game. these are real people with families, hopes, and lives being slaughtered, dismembered, displaced, starved, kidnapped, tortured, subjected to disease, deprived of basic medical care and freedom of movement, raped and blockaded. this is no different than any other genocide. remember that.

Whether we like the idea or not, excitement or not, should not ultimately matter right now because we should not be supporting them in any way.

Hey all, Crips for Esims for Gaza has been purchasing E-sims for people in Gaza and need help to continue their advocacy!

We link them in our Hi Nay episodes but want to remind people to help out if they can and donate! They're an offshoot of the E-sims for Gaza program created by Mirna El-Helbawi, and allow you to, if you are overwhelmed by the E-sims purchasing process, streamline it.

You donate to Crips for Esims for Gaza, and they do it for you. Help these fantastic disabled activists if you're able!