Ironically at one year to the day after Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Activision Blizzard for around $69 billion and Microsoft prior to announce its Q3 2023 earning reports in the coming days, Microsoft announced that layoff will be starting this week along next quarter, confirming reports that they were bound to cut 4.5% of 220,000 active employees.

That 4.5% can be traduced as 10,000 people being let go.

For Microsoft Gaming and Xbox there is also an impact and after a Xbox Engineer admitted and the deleted a tweet (to be later noticed by many outlets), Xbox Game Studio and its family of developers (Bethesda included) will be impacted on the 4.5% job cut and being 343 Industries is the most impacted studios and non gaming business with high impact will also be the VR/AR staff under the HoloLens program and hardware business with Surface brand.

Unfortunately, layoff will be a common thing in the coming weeks.

In the middle of all this, Bloomberg is also reporting that Joseph Staten will also leave 343 Industries but will stay within Xbox Game Studio.

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His entrance in 2020 at 343 Industries was to help the studio to comply with the new release date of late 2021 of Halo Infinite and it is unknown what will be his new task within Xbox.