Rogue Roundup for July 10, 2026
What an awful week for the games industry. Layoff season is here once again, and it's struck an apocalyptic amount of Xbox employees and studios.
We do have more stuff to talk about this week than just the layoffs, but it took up a good chunk of our bandwidth.
The week started with Jeff's breakdown of the Xbox layoffs, which includes a divestment of five studios under the Xbox banner – several of which just showcased new games at Xbox's most recent fake E3. 3200 employees from the company will lose their job before this year is out. But to somehow make things worse, only 1600 of those people lost their jobs on Monday, leaving everyone in the company to wonder if they're next – a feeling they'll be having for the next 6 months and, potentially, right into the Christmas season.
Tom checked out the playtest for Hunger, a brutally punishing new extraction game that seems to stretch the definition of fun, even if it's doing something both unique and interesting. One to watch!
Cass is out at TennoCon this week, checking out Warframe stuff. But before they left, they popped in to remind people how cool Warframe is – even though it's a little bit inscrutable.
Remember when they got Werner Herzog to do an ad for the game? Incredible.
Cass also wrote about Captain America's dick this week.
Xbox released Doom: The Dark Ages: Revelations earlier this week – just in time for them to destroy over half of id Software's workforce. Ryan checked out the DLC and wrote about how great it is while also lamenting that so many of its devs are watching players celebrate their triumphs from the sidelines.
Finally, Ryan did another pass on the Steam sale and came back with a niche recommendation: Final Fantasy. Ever heard of it? There are a lot, turns out, and they're all pretty damn good.
You should check them out ... even if the sale is over. You know what, wishlist them for the next Steam sale!
It's been a staggeringly bad week for the industry, on both the development side and the journalism side. For this week's co-op section, we're going to leave you with writing about those we lost from the layoffs this week.
- Riley Macleod wrote about the layoffs at Fandom and GameSpot over at Aftermath, which included our beloved Chris Grant, founder of Polygon.
- Jason Schreier put together an extremely comprehensive breakdown of the Xbox situation over at Bloomberg.
- Rebekah Valentine wrote about the Bethesda union's protests to Xbox's layoff over at Kotaku.
As always in this industry, hopefully next week will be better. But that's becoming increasingly difficult to believe.