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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."