During yesterday’s bloodbath, it was revealed that multiple people at Zenimax Online Studios had been laid off, and that the company’s unannounced game, codenamed Blackbird internally, had been cancelled. Now, we know Blackbird was a sci-fi looter shooter, and just a few months ago had “blown away” both Phil Spencer and Matt Booty.
That’s according to gaming’s trusted journalist Jason Schreier of Bloomberg. In his latest newsletter, Schreier revealed that last night he was shown the same vertical slice of Blackbird which Phil Spencer and Matt Booty went hands-on with in March of this year.
Apparently, the meeting with the two Xbox bigwigs and Blackbird’s team went extremely well. In fact, Phil Spencer was “enjoying the game so much that Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, had to pull the controller away so they could keep the meeting going, according to two people who were in the room.”
Schreier writes that the slice of game he got to see revealed a sci-fi noir shooter, “similar to films like Blade Runner” in terms of graphics. It was to be an online looter-shooter with plenty of verticality thanks to grappling hooks, wall climbing, double-jumps and air-dashing. ” It was a slick-looking demo with alluring visuals and battle sequences,” said Schreier.
Schreier notes that the game’s development kicked off back in 2018 but did end up on the back burner due to the continued success of The Elder Scrolls Online. However, in recent years, development got back on track and expanded to 300 people. Schreier says the aim was a 2028 release.
After the meeting in March in which ” Executives had nothing but complimentary words for the project,” the team put together a plan to ” flesh out the vertical slice and then build out more content for release.”
Then, a mere 4 months later, the entire game is scrapped and team was left facing uncertainty because apparently Microsoft couldn’t even get firing people right. Schreier says the team came into work to discover disabled Slack accounts and “project update” meeting scheduled in which Blackbird’s death was announced.
Schreier claims that “The next few hours were marked by chaos and confusion as employees found themselves in a kind of limbo status, waiting to see what was going on.”
There were no Emails, no messages, nothing to indicate team members had actually been laid off. It took another day to find out what was going on. It turns out that due to the unionization late last year a full contract hadn’t been completed, so Microsoft was having to negotiate with the union, resulting in “job purgatory.”
So there we have it. Not quite the full story, but at least a chunk of it. Blackbird was shaping up nicely it seems. It echoes what happened with Everwild, another game that was a victim of Microsoft’s rampage, except in the case of Everwild, Phil Spencer publicly spoke about it just a few weeks ago, describing how good it was and how happy he and Matt Booty were that they could give the developers the time they needed to finish it.
To me, this is a reminder that the order to cull Xbox came from much higher than Phil, because if we take his words and Schreier’s report at face value, he killed two games he was personally hyped about. Of course, this is not an excuse, nor forgiveness for Phil and his cohorts. The buck has to stop with management, after all – they bear the responsibility of leading Xbox to this position.