News that Microsoft is considering closing three of its game studios — Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games — is awful, but what's truly alarming is that it doesn't stop there. According to Bloomberg, "several other studios across the portfolio are at risk of being shuttered." State of Decay studio Undead Labs hasn't shipped a game since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. Obsidian Entertainment is prolific, but last year's Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 underperformed. Rare had its big bet Everwild cancelled and can't survive on Sea of Thieves forever. At this point in Microsoft's dismally bungled adventures in gaming, it's best to think the unthinkable.

Studios are reportedly being given the option to buy back their independence (or find a new home), but even in a best-case scenario there will be large-scale layoffs. And while the focus is on studios at risk of closure, July is certain to bring mass redundancies right across the Xbox group, at Blizzard, at Activision, at Bethesda. Playground Games is riding high on the success of Forza Horizon 6 right now, but consider that the studio has been making Fable at enormous cost for nine years, and it might be hard for that game to ever make its money back. Nowhere is safe.

Well, maybe one place is safe. The last time this happened, a year ago — I say that as if this were a series of separate events, rather than an ongoing continuum of destructive mismanagement — I wrote about Microsoft's terrible record running game studios. Afterward, an Xbox representative sent me a polite note offering a few counterpoints, including the observation that Minecraft and Mojang Studios have thrived under Microsoft's ownership. I conceded that this was true, and it made me wonder what makes Mojang different.

It's possible that Minecraft is a lot more like the enterprise software that is at the core of........

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