Feels like a weird decision from a business point of view, too, to gut your studio right as you come up with new projects for it to tackle.

Maybe those devs aren’t needed in the early stages of these new projects and they expect to be able to rehire when they are. That’s still short-term thinking, but at this point, I would be surprised, if anything at Microsoft happened even with just this much rationale.

There’s probably one decision that they need to milk their cash cows some more, and an entirely separate decision that they need to bolster their numbers for shareholders to be happy with this quarter. And the only time those decisions crossed paths, is in some middle manager who’s told to make the impossible work…