Xbox hands Halo to Activision as 268 roles go

Xbox is cutting 268 roles across Halo Studios, its other first-party teams and the management layer that oversees them. The cuts were set out in an internal memo from Matt Booty that Xbox then published on its own news wire, and they carry the company roughly three-quarters of the way through the restructuring it outlined earlier this year, once the studios it has divested are counted.

The memo frames the change as consolidation rather than retreat: fewer business units, groups that already work closely together aligned under one roof, and a slimmer publishing layer.

The next Halo game belongs to Activision

The biggest single shift is who makes Halo. Activision will expand its remit to cover World’s Edge and Rare, and it will develop the next Halo title using a new, purpose-built team kept separate from Call of Duty. A small group left inside Halo Studios will support the Halo community and the games already in the market, which turns the studio that carried the franchise for years into its caretaker rather than its developer.

Bethesda picks up Obsidian, which continues its current projects, Grounded among them, alongside the new Fallout game it is making with Bethesda Game Studios. King absorbs Microsoft Casual Games, uniting two casual operations under one label. Playground and Turn 10, creative and franchise partners for more than a decade, come together as a single studio responsible for both Forza and Fable.

Ninja Theory faces a proposed closure

The divestitures run in parallel. Compulsion and Double Fine returned to management in August with their intellectual property, back catalogues and runway funding. Undead Labs has now transitioned on similar terms and will release State of Decay 3 on Game Pass from day one with a new publisher behind it. Two separate agreements for Ninja Theory fell through, so Xbox says it will begin consulting employees on a proposed closure while it explores other paths forward. Consultation over Arkane is already under way and is expected to continue through the end of the year.

Booty told staff that the day’s focus should be on supporting the people affected, said he would spend the coming week with the studios, and pointed to an all-Xbox town hall on 6 October.

Our opinion

Handing Halo to the Call of Duty organisation is the plainest statement yet that Xbox is managing franchises and operating units, not studios. Halo is the brand that built the platform and the reason the word Xbox means anything at all in gaming, and it is now a title to be scheduled by a team that exists primarily to ship another one. That is a defensible industrial logic and a dismal piece of cultural accounting.

Ninja Theory is the more revealing casualty. A studio with a strong critical reputation and no breakout commercial hit is exactly what disappears when the spreadsheet leads, and the note that two separate deals fell through suggests the market for mid-sized studios has closed, not that one buyer got cold feet. Counting 268 roles rather than thousands makes this round look modest; the portfolio it leaves behind is where the real change sits.