Asha Sharma’s visit to Bethesda’s office in Rockville, Maryland, to see The Elder Scrolls VI met a protest from Communications Workers of America members outside the building. The scene paired a game leadership visit with the fallout from Microsoft’s July layoff plan, turning a routine office stop into a public labor confrontation.
Scabby and red flags
During the protest, union workers brought Scabby, the giant inflatable rat, and raised red flags to stand in for each person laid off by Xbox. Nathan Hahn, a OneBGS-CWA union member, said the display was meant to make the job cuts visible to Sharma at the office itself.
“We heard that Microsoft leadership was coming to our office this week, and decided to make our presence visible at the office to show how our developers have been impacted by these devastating layoffs,” Hahn said in a statement sent to Game Developer. He added that a separate team of laid off developers planted flags outside, “one flag for each laid off dev.”
3,200 jobs in July
In July, Sharma said Microsoft planned to eliminate 3,200 jobs across its video game division by the end of the current fiscal year, and the cuts began immediately at Obsidian, id Software, and ZeniMax Online Studios. That made the Rockville protest part of the fifth round of mass layoffs at Xbox in three years, not a one-off reaction to a single office visit.
Hahn said the goal was to force leadership to reckon with the people behind the tally: “We’re mobilizing to fight back against these layoffs not just to ensure impacted Xbox devs and testers get treated fairly, but to remind our company and game studios everywhere that layoffs like this cannot continue.”
Save Our Devs rallies
The protest followed numerous Save Our Devs rallies outside Xbox offices in the United States and Canada just weeks earlier, and more rallies were set to be held on August 18, 2026, outside Xbox studios in Irvine, Austin, Dallas, Seattle, Albany, Rockville, Hunt Valley, Montreal, and Minneapolis. One El-Balad read on the dispute points to how Bethesda has kept The Elder Scrolls VI on the front burner even as the layoff fight spreads across Xbox’s studio footprint.
The sharper question now is what Sharma actually saw inside Bethesda beyond the game glimpse, because the union made sure the visit carried a second message: The Elder Scrolls VI sits inside a company still absorbing the cost of 3,200 planned cuts, and that math is not going away quietly.
