Xbox Layoffs Gut Age of Empires Studio World's Edge, Canceling Its Next Unannounced Project
By CriticalPixel ·
World's Edge spent the last few years pulling off one of gaming's quieter comeback stories. The Age of Empires team took a franchise most people wrote off in the 2010s and turned it into one of the best selling strategy series on PC again, with Age of Empires IV pulling in new players and Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition still shipping paid expansions like The Viking Sagas this month. None of that mattered on September 22, when Xbox folded the studio into Activision as part of a wider reorganization that also merged Obsidian into Bethesda and handed the next Halo game to Call of Duty's own studio. The public memo undersold what actually happened inside World's Edge, and the fuller picture only came out days later from the people who lived through it.
What Actually Happened at World's Edge
Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty's internal memo, posted publicly on Xbox Wire, described the reorg in careful corporate language. Activision would expand its remit to World's Edge and Rare, and a small team would keep supporting live games and the community. What Booty did not say was how many people that covers. As PC Gamer reported, former World's Edge creative director Adam Isgreen, posting under his longtime handle Tempus Chaoti, said just under half the studio was let go, himself included.
Senior software engineer Andrew Martz went further on LinkedIn, writing that the reorg canceled the studio's next project outright and that he was part of the resulting layoff, only seven days after a promotion he had earned took effect. He said he had been promoted within the senior engineering band on September 15, then laid off on September 22, seven days after the promotion cleared, as part of the same reorganization that shifted his team under Activision's management. That detail undercuts the framing of a clean structural move and points to a studio cutting staff regardless of individual performance or a fresh raise. World's Edge is the studio Microsoft rebuilt specifically to keep Age of Empires alive after Ensemble Studios closed in 2009, and it delivered Age of Empires IV, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, and Age of Empires Mobile under that mandate. Losing a studio's next unannounced project and a large share of its staff a week after positive personnel decisions is not the kind of streamlining Xbox has been selling in public.
The Same Reset That Hit Halo and Obsidian
World's Edge is not an isolated case. The same September 22 memo confirmed 268 roles cut across Halo Studios and central Xbox functions, put Obsidian under Bethesda's management, and merged Playground Games with Turn 10 into one studio focused on Forza and Fable. Two separate deals to spin off Ninja Theory as an independent studio fell through, and Xbox says it will now begin consultation on a proposed closure. Undead Labs transitioned to a new publisher and will still ship State of Decay 3 day one on Game Pass, which is the rare piece of good news in the memo. World's Edge was not named beyond the ownership chart, which is why the fuller picture only surfaced through personal posts from the people affected rather than through any Xbox statement.
Reaction Is Still Forming
Public reaction has been limited so far, since most of the detail is coming from personal LinkedIn posts rather than a viral news cycle. The comments that have appeared read as sympathetic and tired rather than shocked. Game programmer Squirrel Eiserloh responded to Martz with condolences, and another developer used the thread to point toward an open role at Epic Games in Bellevue. That pattern, laid off developers absorbing the news quietly while peers post job openings in the replies, has become a routine across the industry this year, and it repeated again here almost immediately.
CriticalPixel Take
Age of Empires is one of the only real time strategy franchises still moving serious units on PC, and World's Edge earned that position by shipping good games on a tight, disciplined team rather than by burning through headcount. Canceling whatever they were building next and gutting the roster a week after promoting people is not a studio finding efficiency, it is a studio being used as a cost center to make a balance sheet look better before the next earnings call. Xbox keeps framing every one of these moves as part of a plan that will leave the platform stronger, but the actual pattern this year runs through id Software, Ninja Theory, and now World's Edge, and the common thread is talented teams losing work they were proud of for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.
What happens to the Age of Empires franchise now depends on how much of World's Edge survives under Activision's management, and whether the surviving team gets to keep working on the series that brought it back from the dead. The Viking Sagas expansion for Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition is still shipping this month regardless, since that project was already finished before the layoffs hit, but whatever World's Edge had planned after it is gone. Anyone who cares about the franchise's future should expect a much quieter few months out of the studio, and a lot fewer people left to build whatever comes next.
Sources
PC Gamer: Xbox layoffs gut Age of Empires studio World's Edge
PC Gamer on X sharing the World's Edge layoffs story
Xbox Wire: Continuing Our Reset memo from Matt Booty