After a few weeks of positive buzz around Xbox thanks to a Kojima partnership and Disk to Digital, they just couldn’t help themselves. We’re back to covering the never-ending chaos of Xbox’s restructuring. Necessary? Probably. Heartbreaking for hundreds of people who now don’t have jobs because upper-floor execs mismanaged their treasure trove of studios and IP? You betcha. Here’s a full rundown of the latest update from the Xbox team.

In the Xbox Wire blog, Xbox Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty outlined the next chapter of the company’s restructuring. The headline is a loss of nearly 300 jobs at Halo Studios and other teams. It’s another massive number of job cuts, which Booty says only puts them “roughly three-quarters of the way” to their total expected position eliminations. It’s one thing to announce you’re planning layoffs, but stringing them out like this has been particularly brutal to watch.

Part of those layoffs come as Xbox restructures the studios and who they report to in the Xbox Game Studios ecosystem. World’s Edge and Rare will now sit under the larger Activision branch, and Obsidian has been restructured into Bethesda. Halo Studios will continue to operate and support the Halo community, but the next mainline game in the franchise will come from Activision. It appears all teams joining a larger Xbox wing will continue working on ongoing projects.

King is now also leading Microsoft Casual Games, a team deeply embedded in Xbox’s mobile and live operations. Lastly, Playground and Turn 10 will come together as one studio, working on both the Fable and Forza franchises. Undead Labs, Compulsion, and Double Fine will continue as independent studios, but unfortunately, Ninja Theory did not find a new agreement and will be dissolved.

It’s a massive amount of not-so-amazing news, and the future still looks uncertain for Xbox. Does a Halo game from Activision get you excited? Let us know in the comments what you make of all the consolidation.

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