Xbox bet that Game Pass would be the future of gaming, and we're all paying for it

By all appearances, 2025 was going to be the year Xbox turned things around. Doom: The Dark Ages, no less than three new games from Obsidian Entertainment, Indiana Jones on PS5, another post-acquisition Call of Duty, and the absolute whopper of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. After two years of mass layoffs and studio closures, it seemed like things had calmed down.

Nope: Last week's layoffs of 9,100 people company-wide at Microsoft, with a chunk of those at Xbox, joined the layoffs of 6,000 employees in May.