Microsoft’s brutal rash of layoffs and studio closures after the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.4 billion is something of a grave marker in the industry, sweeping promising projects under the rug. One of those was Project Blackbird, an MMO by Elder Scrolls Online developers Zenimax Online Studios, which had been in production since 2018.
It also saw the departure of Matt Firor, founder of ZoS and director of the very same MMO. In a recent interview with MinnMax, Firor was asked about how he feels nearly one year on: “I think it’s a missed opportunity for me, for ZoS, for Bethesda, for Xbox, I think it would’ve been a fantastic game.”
It’s not just him, either. One of the more baffling things about Blackbird is how well-regarded it was internally, with Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer reportedly having to be pulled away from the thing. Firor adds: “You could be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people.”
However, the crushing weight of big business consumes all: “We’re a number on a ledger, and if that number is large, it is ripe for analysis, shall we say. And that number was always large, and over the years we always explained why we were frontloading a lot of costs and what they were gonna get for it.”
Earlier in the interview, Firor says the idea with Blackbird was always to build for the future—frontloading costs on systems that would make maintenance and development easier down the line. This is unpopular in the age of shareholders.
“It looked to the people there—and elsewhere in the industry—that that was just a very large bet, and they needed to hedge their large bets.”
Firor shows enviable composure and professionalism in regards to the people working at Xbox themselves, though:
“In general, the people at Xbox were awesome—it’s not a personal vendetta or anything, everyone there was mostly good to interact with on the human level. It’s just: Big business is big business. Microsoft is Microsoft, right? And a giant successful videogame on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them.
“They want a business they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount—and this isn’t [just] Xbox, this is all public companies, they want reliable, forecastable business … I don’t agree with some of the decisions obviously, but the reasoning behind them make sense on a ledger somewhere.”
Oof, if that doesn’t feel like a tone-setting statement for the last few years. It’s as though you can be laid off for blinking or breathing in the videogame industry nowadays—make a good game, make a bad one, it doesn’t seem to matter. Firor seems optimistic as he closes out the interview, though: “There’s a hell of a lot of good people out there that don’t have jobs right now, that can assemble very many very good teams, and I know that for a fact.”
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight
