When I want to talk about video games, there is one guy at the top of my list.

My name is Jason Schreier. I'm a reporter at Bloomberg News and the author of a bunch of books,

including the most recent Play Nice, The Rise Fall and Feature of

Blizzard Entertainment, and I'm a co-host of the Triple Click Podcast.

Jason's probably forgotten more about the gaming industry than I will ever know.

So when the news broke that Microsoft was laying off thousands of people in its

Xbox division, I called him up. Xbox got a new CEO back in February, Asha Sharma. And my summer,

it was clear that she was going to make some big changes. I think around June, it became clear

how big the scope of this was going to be. And then I reported at

Bloomberg a couple of stories that we did, a couple of big kind of breaking news stories we did. One was

that there was a huge cut coming, huge layoffs coming. We reported that shortly after Xbox had

their big kind of blowout summer showcase in Los Angeles where they announced the upcoming games for the next year or so.

We reported that, and then we reported shortly after that,

that there were some studios in negotiation to be divesting from Xbox,

basically trying to avoid getting shut down by trying to negotiate either independence,

trying to find buyers, that sort of thing.

In addition to the job cuts, Xbox is spinning off five development studios.

A lot of what's going on is basically a reversal of what Xbox was doing over the last

decade under its previous CEO. They went on a spending spree, bought up a bunch of everything from

small kind of like indie style game studios to massive publishers like Activision Blizzard,

which was the big high profile purchase that they did a few

years ago for $69 billion. Something Asha Sharma pointed out in her most recent memo about the cuts

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