Last year, Microsoft cancelled an MMO that was in the works at ZeniMax Online Studios, developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, as part of wider layoffs. It was codenamed project Blackbird, and following its canning, ZeniMax Online founder Matt Firor resigned from the company he’d worked at since 2007. Firor’s now shed some more light on his feelings about the cancellation of the game he “had waited [his] entire career to create”, as well as how Microsoft currently operate.
“How do I feel about it? I think it’s a missed opportunity,” he told MinnMax. “For me, for [ZeniMax], for Bethesda, for Xbox. I think it would have been a fantastic game, but I understand the reasoning that went into [the cancellation]. This is why making games is always a heartbreaking business.” Explaining that the idea with Blackbird was to invest on building a new engine early on that would make it easier and more cost-effective to add to the game and provide live-service support in the long term, Firor explained:
We’re a number on a ledger and if that number is large it is ripe for for analysis shall we say and that number was always large. Over the years we always explained why we were frontloading a lot of cost and and what they were going to get for it. Eventually, the industry just got to a point where it looked to the people there and elsewhere in the industry that [Blackbird] was just a very large bet and they needed to hedge their large bets.
Firor went a bit deeper into how that corporate mindset, while not unique in his mind, applies to ZeniMax and Bethesda’s current overlords. “A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level is frankly not that stimulating to them, right? They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount and this isn’t Xbox,” he said. “This is like all public companies, right? They want reliable, forecastable business. The entertainment [and] the video game industry just doesn’t work that way sometimes.”
As for Blackbird itself, which is reported to have been a sci-fi noir looter and shooter with lots of vertical swooshing about, the veteran developer also explained that his decision to resign over its canning came from two places. “I needed to send a message that I didn’t agree with it,” he said. “And second, it was a pretty devastating blow. It’s like, this is the game I came up with the concept for, right? I came up with the world design for. Obviously, people took it and ran with it and made it a thousand times better.” He also asserted that in addition to being good fun, the early version his team had gotten to a playable state was “much different than anything else out there”.
Sadly, at least some of the folks responsible for making it were left in limbo in the immediate aftermath of its cancellation, according to a statement the ZOS United-CWA union put out in July 2025.
