The lows continue: the president of Zenimax Online Studios resigns

Matt Firor slams the door after the events surrounding Microsoft.

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The aftermath of the terrible day for Microsoft employees yesterday is still present 24 hours later. One of the many cancellations listed yesterday (which include Perfect Dark and Everwild) was the Blackbird project, the MMORPG that little was known about and was in the hands of the experienced teams at Zenimax Online, whose president, Matt Firor, has just resigned.

Firor was in charge of the studio for over 18 years, in fact, since its founding, and will leave the direction to Jo Burba, who will also have the support of executive producer Susan Kath and Rick Lambert, game director. The official statement from the executive does not mention the cancellation of the current project but rather focuses on what has been achieved with The Elder Scrolls Online, which has been a very profitable success, although it had a turbulent launch that managed to reverse and consolidate as one of the best titles in the genre today.

A highly uncertain future

Firor’s experience has always revolved around MMOs, he was a co-founder of Mythic Entertainment where he spent 10 years as a producer for Dark Age of Camelot. While Firor bids farewell to the Microsoft sphere with a resignation and not a layoff, the decision comes jointly with the decision of those in Redmond to close entire studios like The Initiative and cancel projects that were highly anticipated by fans and were quite advanced. Turn 10, the talented studio behind the Forza sagas, would also have seen its payroll reduced by 50% according to reports.

The layoffs appear not to have affected Microsoft’s hardware division, at least not this time. This decision seems to reinforce the idea that those in Redmond are betting on a new generation of consoles for the future, something that is also reinforced by the agreement with AMD and the new proposal for a portable console that will try to make up for this rather forgettable era for the brand, which still has much to explore in terms of what’s to come.