The Elder Scrolls fans furious as new game cancelled out of the blue

The next project from the developer behind one of the most popular Elder Scrolls titles has just been cancelled, following reports that several members of staff have been let go.

You may have already heard this bit, but here’s the relevant recap if not: yesterday afternoon, Microsoft announced that roughly 9,100 staff members across several different teams, including Candy Crush developer King and Bethesda Softworks, have lost their jobs.

The bad news, unfortunately, did not end there.

Rare’s next title, Everwild, has been cancelled following news of the layoffs. Then the news hit that the Xbox-owned developer The Initiative had been shut down, and their upcoming Perfect Dark reboot has also been cancelled.

Microsoft’s firing spree didn’t end there, however, as we’ve now learned that ZeniMax Online Studios’ next title, which was working under the title Project Blackbird, has also been scrapped. Man, you know things are bad when I have to look up a synonym for “cancelled”.

This news comes via Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in a post on Bluesky, in which he stated that “This morning, Zenimax Online Studios told staff that their MMO project Blackbird was canceled and abruptly deactivated the team's access to Slack.”

The report was later corroborated by PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk, who noted that several ZeniMax Online employees have revealed that they’ve been fired in posts on LinkedIn.

ZeniMax Online Studios is best known for developing The Elder Scrolls Online, which they’ve been supporting with constant updates since its release back in 2014. According to several sources, they’d been working on Project Blackbird for roughly eight years (prior to its cancellation).

I usually like to end these news posts with a silly little joke or some kind of recap, but doing either in the wake of an eight-year-long project being cancelled and thousands of people losing their jobs doesn’t seem appropriate this time around.

Maybe you should have reconsidered that 66 billion dollar acquisition of Activision-Blizzard if you don’t have enough money to pay your employees, Microsoft.