Bethesda Will Reportedly Shift Focus Over To Its Biggest Franchises

The news hit this morning like a brick through a window you forgot you still had. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs — 1,600 now, 1,600 more over the next year — and Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax is getting hit hard. id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios are trimming staff. The Bloomberg report from Jason Schreier says the whole ship is turning toward Bethesda's biggest franchises.

I don't know about you, but I read that and immediately started counting on my fingers. Elder Scrolls. Fallout. Starfield, I guess, though that one's still finding its footing. Doom. That's the list now. That's the entire bet.

And look — I get it. From a business perspective, this is the obvious move. Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for ZeniMax. They've got a console ecosystem to prop up, Game Pass subscribers to retain, and a mountain of debt from the Activision acquisition. Of course they're going to point at the things that print money and say "more of that."

But here's the thing nobody in the C-suite wants to admit: Bethesda's best games have always been the weird ones. The ones that didn't make sense on paper.

Dishonored. Prey. The Evil Within. Even something like Wolfenstein: The New Order — a game about killing Nazis in an alternate 1960s — was a risky revival of a dormant franchise that Arkane and MachineGames turned into something genuinely strange and beautiful. These weren't safe bets. They were experiments that happened to work.

And now those studios are gone. Or hollow. Or being pointed at a whiteboard that says "Fallout 76 seasonal content" and told to get to work.

This is where the connection hits me, and it's not a happy one. Remember when EA bought BioWare? Remember when everyone said "this will be fine, they're just getting resources"? And then within a few years, the studio that made Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights was making Anthem. A live-service game about flying around in mech suits. Not because anyone at BioWare woke up one day desperate to make Anthem — but because the spreadsheet said that's where the money was.

Bethesda is on that same path. The math is the same. The logic is the same. And the result will be the same: a gradual erosion of the very identity that made these franchises worth owning in the first place.

The thing is, Fallout didn't become Fallout because someone decided it should be a big franchise. It became a big franchise because someone at Interplay in 1997 was weird enough to think "what if we made a post-apocalyptic RPG where you can blow up a town and then feel bad about it?" The franchise status came from the weirdness. Not the other way around.

I'm not saying we won't get good games out of this. id Software is still making Doom, and Doom is basically unkillable at this point — it's been rebooted so many times it's practically a phoenix wearing a demon's face. And sure, Elder Scrolls VI is coming eventually. But what about the space between those games? The weird stuff that doesn't fit the brand? The projects that don't have a sequel attached to them?

That space is where Bethesda used to live. And it's closing.

So who is this for? If you're someone who only plays Elder Scrolls and Fallout, you're probably fine. You'll get your games. They'll be big and polished and full of the same bugs Bethesda has been shipping since 2002, because some things never change. But if you're someone who played Prey and thought "this is the most interesting immersive sim I've touched in years" — you're losing something. You're losing a developer that took risks because they could.

And once that muscle atrophies, it doesn't come back.