Elder Scrolls Online’s Future Hangs in the Balance as Reports Claim ‘Half the Team’ Has Been Laid Off

It has been suggested in recent reports that ‘as much as half’ the team at ZeniMax overseeing the support of The Elder Scrolls Online, the enormous, twelve-year-old MMORPG, has been laid off. This has prompted immense concern online, especially given the game’s recent turnaround in operating model and the establishment of a solid roadmap that now faces significant changes.

In the last year, ZeniMax Online Studios, the team sustaining ESO’s roadmap, has seen tribulations surface in the form of redundancies and an ebbing and flowing player base, but the most recent changes to hit the game were taken positively.

I sat down with the game’s leadership team at Summer Game Fest and heard nothing but good things about the game’s prospects, but things have changed now.

The Elder Scrolls Online is a stalwart MMORPG in the space, having stood firm for more than twelve years and serving a massive audience. It’s a persistent and epic title that takes almost every region of Tamriel, The Elder Scrolls’ fictional universe, and makes them fully explorable for players.

It’s a substantial game with plenty of meat on the bones, and this year, it underwent a monumental change. ZeniMax introduced seasons to the game for the first time more than a decade ago, drastically altering the game’s operating system in a way that was received fairly positively by fans.

They also added a feature called the Night Market, a notoriously tough experience designed to satiate the hunger of late-game players and min-maxxers. Again, that was a hit, and when speaking to the team at Summer Game Fest, they reported that concurrent player counts were approaching levels not seen since the game had a boom during 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic.

I also learned about the plans in store for the future, including better onboarding for new players to make the game more accessible and a full rework of the game’s tutorial stages.

Now, a report from Kotaku has suggested that these plans are about to be thrown into disarray. It was claimed that sources at ZeniMax Online Studios have stated ‘half the development team’ could have been laid off, and that the roadmap is going to undergo some tweaks to accommodate that.

Earlier today, XBOX’s CEO, Asha Sharma, dropped a bombshell, explaining how the company is about to enter its most significant restructuring in history. We know that 3,200 people are going to lose their jobs, four studios have been let go from the XBOX ecosystem, and spending is being slashed across the board, all in a bid to recoup immense losses.

The Elder Scrolls Online’s future was still looking bright up until today. It’s now impossible to say what’s going to happen next with this beloved, multi-platform MMORPG that was just turning over a new leaf.

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