Award-winning actor Ben Starr, who has lent his voice to "Final Fantasy XVI" and "Light and Shadow: Expedition 33," accused Microsoft of containing many "lies" in its external communications before Xbox's massive layoffs. His remarks pointed directly at the overall strategy that has led to Xbox's current predicament, and Microsoft executives themselves admitted that the business is currently in "worrying health."
On July 6, Xbox announced the launch of large-scale layoffs, affecting 3,200 employees. About half of the positions have been eliminated immediately, and the remaining positions will be gradually completed during the current fiscal year, which will end in June 2027. This layoff will reduce the size of Xbox's 15,000 employees by approximately 20%. This is not only the largest structural adjustment in the history of the department, but also the largest wave of layoffs in the history of the gaming industry.
Ben Starr recently publicly condemned Xbox’s layoffs when he was a guest on the Quiet Meditation podcast. He accused Microsoft of making false statements years and even weeks before the largest layoffs in history. Starr said the first false claim dates back to Microsoft's acquisition expansion period in 2018 and 2019, when the company packaged industry consolidation as a means to protect creative studios. “It may not have sounded like a lie at the time, but it has now been proven that ‘consolidation is a good thing’ was a lie,” he said.
Starr urged viewers to look back at Microsoft's various press conferences at the time, which he called "arrogant" and re-examine the implicit promise behind them: By joining a large corporate parent company, developers would be guaranteed funding to build more ambitious projects. "Integration is a good thing, integration is protection," he summarized Microsoft's propaganda at the time, and then directly denied it: "This is simply not true." Additional background: 2018 was the stage of Xbox's aggressive acquisition and expansion of its game development territory. It successively acquired studios such as Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Undead Laboratory, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment, and inXile Entertainment.
“This may not have been a lie at the time, but now facts have proven that the idea that industry consolidation is beneficial is a lie.”
The second question Starr raised on the podcast was more timely. He criticized Xbox for announcing the third work of Ninja Theory Studio's "Senna" series at the June 2026 press conference, and also promoted that it would be added to Xbox Game Pass for the first time, but Microsoft had no intention of injecting funds into the project. His remarks seemed to echo a recent report from the game media Game File - the report stated that Microsoft announced this new "Senna" purely to attract potential buyers to the studio. Although Xbox later stated that it had indeed found a buyer for the studio, Starr believed that the announcement itself lacked integrity. "Is it so difficult to delete the published content of "Sena"?" he asked rhetorically. "From a public relations perspective, you are basically stating that you are willing to lie. Then how much can I trust you if you stand up and say anything in the future?" He also added that this is not "a problem of one individual", but a "marketing problem" at the company level.
Starr also criticized Microsoft for framing Compulsion Games and Double Fine as independent operations as a positive development. An internal "Reset Xbox" memo sent to employees on July 6 stated that the two studios will retain their intellectual property and game libraries, and receive sufficient financial support to launch the next project. "It's unbelievable how they can sugarcoat things like this," Starr said. He disagrees with Microsoft's characterization of the move as "good news" because many people he knows are in trouble because of it. “They lost their jobs and they didn’t even understand why,” the actor said.