Xbox cut 268 more jobs on September 22, and the fallout reaches far beyond a headcount number. The next mainline Halo game is leaving Halo Studios for a newly formed team inside Activision. Xbox is merging Playground Games and Turn 10 into a single Forza studio. And Ninja Theory, the team behind Hellblade, is now facing outright closure after two separate buyout deals collapsed.
Matt Booty, Xbox's EVP and Chief Content Officer, laid out the changes in a memo published on Xbox Wire titled "Continuing Our Reset." The cuts hit Halo Studios, other Xbox Game Studios teams, and the management layer sitting above them. Combined with the studio divestitures completed since July, Booty says Xbox has now covered roughly three-quarters of the restructuring it announced earlier this year. That plan targets around 3,200 job losses in total, about a fifth of the division's workforce.
"I am deeply grateful for what our colleagues have built, and I know how difficult today will be for those leaving and the teams around them," Booty wrote.
Halo's next game won't be made by Halo Studios
Activision is standing up a dedicated internal team to build the next mainline Halo title, described as separate from ongoing Call of Duty development. Halo Studios itself isn't disappearing, but its role shrinks to community support and live operations for games already out. The next campaign will originate from a studio with zero prior Halo pedigree, working inside Activision's production pipeline rather than the one that shipped Halo Infinite and this year's Halo Campaign Evolved.
Activision's remit is expanding well past Call of Duty and Halo. Rare (Sea of Thieves) and World's Edge (Age of Empires) are also moving under Activision's supervision, folding two more long-running Xbox franchises into the publisher's orbit. For a studio system built around distinct creative identities, that's a lot of consolidation into one label in a single announcement.
Forza merges, Ninja Theory nears the exit
Two other franchises are directly affected:
- Forza: Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios are merging into one studio. Playground has carried Forza Horizon since its UK-based inception; Turn 10 built Forza Motorsport from the ground up in Seattle. Combining them under one roof could streamline a series that's split its yearly release cadence between two very different racing philosophies, arcade open-world versus sim-leaning track racing, but it also raises the question of whether future entries move closer together in tone, or whether one side of the franchise loses resources to the other.
- Ninja Theory: Xbox says two separate agreements to sell or spin off the Hellblade studio have fallen through, and the company has begun a formal consultation process with employees over a proposed closure, while still "exploring other paths forward." Ninja Theory had used June's Xbox Games Showcase to unveil a new Hellblade-universe project, Senua, partly as a pitch to prospective buyers. With both deals dead, that project's future, and the studio's, is now uncertain.
Arkane, maker of Redfall and Deathloop, remains in a separate, ongoing consultation that Xbox expects to run through the end of the year, with no resolution announced alongside this week's cuts.
What this means going forward
Xbox has a companywide town hall scheduled for October 6, where leadership is expected to review the reset's progress and lay out the platform's forward lineup. For players, that meeting should answer the bigger open questions this announcement leaves hanging: what an Activision-built Halo actually looks like, and whether Ninja Theory survives its consultation period at all. Until then, three of Xbox's most recognizable franchises are mid-transition, and one studio's survival is in doubt.
