Xbox

Ubisoft announced that several of its biggest (and smallest) hits from the past decade are available on the Xbox PC app. Also, those who already own digital console titles listed in the Xbox blog post can play them on PC for no additional cost via the Ubisoft Connect app. Sounds like Ubisoft is positioning itself for Xbox’s PC-like Project Helix.

After a PS5 outage last week, now it’s apparently Xbox’s turn for problems, weeks after a massive wave of layoffs. The Xbox Live status page says an outage was first reported at 11PM last night and is still ongoing, preventing some account sign-ins and stopping people from playing their games, whether from a disc or a digital copy.

How could anyone have known that LeBron James would choose Philadelphia as his next NBA team? Well, there were signs.

After Microsoft brought four original Xbox games to PC earlier this week, a reverse engineer found that the company is powering them with Xenon Fusion — the same emulator that enabled backward compatibility on the Xbox 360. This might be laying the groundwork for Xbox 360 games on PC, as the XWine1 account on X figured out how to get some 360 titles running with “varying degrees of success.”

The new $149.99 VelocityOne Flightstick II upgrades the original with a new full color screen at the top of the joystick, 38 mappable inputs, and Hall effect sensors. It’s joined by the $149.99 VelocityOne Dual Throttle featuring two levers with adjustable tension, 35 programmable inputs, and an LED throttle indicator.

The OneBGS union said in a post that Bethesda laid off some of its Canadian employees on July 17th, weeks sooner than employees were warned the layoffs would happen, PC Gamer reports. That same day, Bethesda announced it’s working on Fallout 5.

As Microsoft continues its Xbox “reset,” the pared-down Game Pass bundle that arrived recently as a benefit for Discord Nitro is now also included in the 7.99 monthly / $59.99 annually Quest subscription. The starter edition also includes 10 hours of cloud gaming access to try some of the 50-plus games it unlocks before downloading them.

Aftermath wrote about a rally on Wednesday at ZeniMax’s office in Rockville, MD. ZeniMax, which oversees studios like Bethesda, was hit with 379 cuts in the state of Maryland as part of the broader Xbox layoffs.

379 positions were cut in the state, according to a WARN notice obtained by Game Developer’s Chris Kerr. The cuts include major layoffs in Rockville, where the Bethesda Game Studios HQ is located.

The studio, which was hit hard by this week’s Xbox layoffs, says that it still has “the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for.”

Game Developer reports the OneBGS union is holding the rally in support of laid off developers on July 15th at ZeniMax offices in Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal, as the union announced in an email to members:

The Xbox CEO, who announced mass layoffs at Xbox this week, will assess “the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”

That includes “key, high-performing people in the trenches” working on The Elder Scrolls 6, IGN reports. One Bethesda staffer told the publication that the layoffs have had “a crushing effect on morale,” and one said that the QA department was “decimated.”

96 of the layoffs were at the id Software office in Richardson, 40 of the layoffs were for remote workers that reported to that office, and 22 of the layoffs happened at the Bethesda Game Studios office in Austin, according to a WARN notice obtained by Game Developer.

I missed this yesterday, reported by Kotaku. The studio will apparently keep working on Grounded 2 and DLC for The Outer Worlds 2, but “plans beyond that are up in the air,” Kotaku says.

The Wall Street Journal reported the number on Monday. Bloomberg corroborated it on Tuesday, adding that the subscribers figure is “4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024.” At one point, Microsoft had hoped that the service would have 100 million subscribers by 2030 — it seems unlikely it’ll meet that bar.

The total number of jobs impacted “could be as much as half the development team,” and a community manager has already shared that the game’s roadmaps “will be shifting,” according to Kotaku.

With Sony ending production of PlayStation discs, one commenter points out that it confirms there’ll be no PS6 disc drive, ending backwards compatibility for physical games — though at least Microsoft is working on a fix for that.

Xbox is expected to make some tough cuts soon, and it already dropped a new franchise from IO Interactive, but OD will continue to be part of Xbox’s publishing lineup, according to IGN.

That’s what the company told Bloomberg for its story about exiting a partnership with IO Interactive. “We expect to invest about the same in content as we did last year,” Xbox says. “What’s changing is where we’re investing and the kinds of projects we’re backing.”