Former Elder Scrolls Online chief confirms Microsoft's 2025 bloodbath drove his departure from ZeniMax: 'Project Blackbird was the game I had waited my entire career to create'
Former Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor has revealed his reason for unexpectedly leaving ZeniMax Online Studios in July 2025 after nearly 20 years with the company, and it will probably come as no surprise that Microsoft's summertime bloodbath is to blame.
Microsoft laid off roughly 9,000 people on July 2, 2025, many of them from its Xbox division—a massacre made even more grotesque by the words of Xbox chief Phil Spencer, who said as the axe fell that the company's gaming business had "never looked stronger," The cuts also included multiple cancellations including the Perfect Dark reboot (and the closure of the studio making it), Rare's Everwild project, and an unannounced MMO in development at ZeniMax, codenamed Blackbird.
Happy New Year everyone. I’ve been pretty quiet the last six months, but I posted this message on LinkedIn late yesterday just to give everyone an update. I’ll put it here just to make sure it gets around
— @thefiror.bsky.social (@thefiror.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-02T16:47:19.324Z
The loss of Blackbird is what spurred Firor, an industry veteran who co-founded Mythic Entertainment in 1995, to walk away from a studio he helped launch in 2007.
"Project Blackbird was the game I had waited my entire career to create, and having it canceled led to my resignation," Firor wrote in a January 1 message posted on LinkedIn. "My heart and thoughts are always with the impacted team members, many of whom I had worked 20+ years with, and all of whom were the most dedicated, amazingly talented group of developers in the industry."
Firor also said that he is not "directly involved" in any projects being put together by former ZeniMax employees, such as Sackbird Studios, founded in October 2025 by a group of former Elder Scrolls Online and Project Blackbird developers. "I am advising some of them informally, but I am not leading them," Firor wrote. "They are in good hands with their respective leaders and I can't wait to see what they come up with."
Firor said he still hasn't determined what his next big step will be: He's been advising and investing in small teams and startups, "but I have not yet seriously contemplated spinning up a new development studio."
As for The Elder Scrolls Online itself, new ZeniMax boss Jo Burba said in August 2025 that "the game isn’t going anywhere," but it sure doesn't sound like morale at the studio is in a good place: Describing the post-cuts ZeniMax as a "carcass of workers," senior QA tester Autumn Mitchell said a few weeks after the layoffs that "Microsoft just took everything that could have been great about the culture and collaboration and decimated it."