Enlarge / Tesla's Shanghai factory in 2023. (credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup . This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters .

"As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity," Tesla CEO Elon Musk told employees in the memo.

Enlarge / Adam Jensen of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided , taking in the news that no last-minute contrivance is going to save his series from what seemed like inevitable doom. (Pun credit to Andrew Cunningham). (credit: Eidos Interactive)

Embracer Group, the Swedish firm that bought up a number of known talents and gaming properties during the pandemic years, has canceled a Deus Ex game at its Eidos studio in Montreal, Canada, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier .

The game, while not officially announced, has been known about since May 2022 . It was due to enter production later in 2024 and had seen two years of pre-production development, according to Schreier's sources. Many employees will be laid off as part of the cancellation.

Embracer Group acquired Eidos Montreal, along with Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix Montreal, for $300 million in mid-2022 , buying up all of Japanese game publisher Square Enix's Western game studios. That gave Embracer the keys to several influential and popular series, including Tomb Raider , Just Cause , Life Is Strange , and Deus Ex .

Enlarge / Blizzard shared this image teasing a now-cancelled game in 2022. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment/Twitter)

The survival game that Blizzard announced it was working on in January 2022 has reportedly been cancelled. The cut comes as Microsoft is slashing jobs a little over four months after closing its $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition .

Blizzard's game didn't have a title yet, but Blizzard said it would be for PC and console and introduce new stories and characters. In January 2022, Blizzard put out a call for workers to help build the game.

The game's axing was revealed today in an internal memo from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer seen by publications including The Verge and CNBC that said:

Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos )

Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wasn't kidding when, earlier this month, he said more layoffs are coming . The latest group to be hit is Alphabet's X Lab, which is losing "dozens of employees," according to a new report from Bloomberg . This is something like the 11th Google layoff announcement we've covered in the past 12 months and the fourth one this month.

The X Lab is Alphabet's "moonshot" experimental group, which is responsible for wild concepts like a wearable head-up display , a self-driving car , smart contact lenses , flying Internet balloons , and delivery drones . This is the age of Google cost-cutting, and you'll notice none of those projects is a rip-roaring commercial success. On Google's financials, the X Lab is part of Alphabet's "Other Bets" group, which burns through around a billion dollars every quarter. It's a research arm, so the hope is that spending all this money will someday lead to new revenue streams. For the short-term Wall Street types, though, it's a money loser, quarter to quarter, and that makes it a prime candidate for cuts.

Bloomberg has a copy of the memo announcing the cuts to the X Labs staff, and there's more in there than just layoffs. X Lab CEO Astro Teller writes: "We’re expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital. We’ll do this by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency." Basically, Google wants these money losers to find their own funding somewhere else, at least partially.

Enlarge / Google is looking pretty dilapidated these days. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google's cost-cutters are still working overtime, with more layoffs this week and cuts to Google Assistant functionality.

First up, The New York Times reports Google laid off "hundreds" of workers in "several divisions" on Wednesday. Core engineering, the Google Assistant, and the hardware division all lost people. The report says that "Google said that most of the hardware cuts affected a team working on augmented reality." AR cuts are eyebrow-raising since that's quickly going to be one of the highest-profile teams at the company this year, as Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm team up to battle the Apple Vision Pro. FitBit was apparently also a big loser, with 9to5Google reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman and "other Fitbit leaders" have left Google.

Over the years, Google has rarely laid off workers, but since January of last year, a new focus on cost-cutting has made layoffs a regular occurrence at Google. The purge started with an announcement of 12,000 layoffs in January, which took until at least March to complete. Then there were more layoffs at Alphabet companies Waymo and Everyday Robots in March, Waze layoffs in June, recruiting layoffs in September, Google News cuts in October, and now these layoffs in January. There are rumors of more layoffs happening this month, too, focusing on the ad sales division.

Enlarge (credit: Unity)

When Unity laid off 265 Weta Digital engineers in November, the company warned that more layoffs would be necessary in the near future as part of a plan to "refocus" on the company's core game engine business. A large chunk of those changes became real on Monday as the Unity Engine maker told the SEC that "it plans to reduce approximately 1,800 employee roles, or approximately 25% of its current workforce."

"This decision was not taken lightly, and we extend our deepest gratitude to those affected for their dedication and contributions," Unity Director of PR Kelly Ekins said in a statement to The Verge . Ekins added that the layoffs will be spread across "all teams," and a company spokesperson told Reuters that this round of layoffs will be complete by March, with additional internal changes coming thereafter.

The massive staffing cuts come after over 1,300 layoffs already implemented across the company in multiple waves since June 2022 (including those November Weta Digital cuts). Despite that, Unity's statement to the SEC says these further cuts are necessary "to position [the company] for long-term and profitable growth."

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images )

Google was once a company that lavished its employees with perks and didn't do layoffs, but that's not the Google of 2023. Even after the 12,000 layoffs from about January to March , a second round of Waymo layoffs in March, and the Waze layoffs in June, Google is now doing another round of layoffs. This time, it's in the recruiting division. Semafor was the first to report that Google is laying off "hundreds" of people in its global recruiting organization as part of an overall plan to reduce the number of people it hires in the near future. If you don't have job openings, you don't need recruiters.

CNBC received a recording of the internal meeting, with Brian Ong, Google’s recruiting vice president, telling employees the new round of layoffs was "not something that was an easy decision to make, and it definitely isn’t a conversation any of us wanted to have again this year.” Ong justified the decision, saying, “Given the base of hiring that we’ve received the next several quarters, it’s the right thing to do overall.”

CNBC reports Google has learned from its previous layoffs and will not instantly cut off laid-off employees from access at Google. The ex-Googlers will be granted access to the office for an extra week and online services for longer. Google employees often have more than just a paycheck wrapped up in their employment, with Google offering services like on-site medical facilities. Laid-off employees now have a chance to talk to providers and come up with some kind of post-employment health care plan.

Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Late last year, Waze faced serious questions about its future at Google when, as part of Google's company-wide efforts at cost-cutting, Waze lost its status as an independent company. The mapping app was forced to merge with Google Geo (aka the Google Maps division) even though the two apps supposedly remain mostly independent. Six months later, CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports the job cuts have arrived, and Waze will be losing some employees.

Google Geo's VP and general manager, Chris Phillips, announced that Waze's ad platform would be shut down in favor of Google ads and reportedly told employees that the move "will result in a reduction of Waze Ads monetization-focused roles in sales, marketing, operations, and analytics." It's not clear how many of Waze's 500 employees will be affected. Google has been doing all sorts of layoffs lately, with the biggest batch—12,000 jobs—announced in January .

If there's anything Google is good at, it's advertising, so it certainly makes sense for Waze to adopt Google's ad platform. Waze has a lot of redundancy compared to Google Maps, and it's unclear how far Google wants to take this logic. Right now, the company maintains two separate mapping apps with similar features and similar layouts. Waze has 140 million monthly active users, but that's not much compared to the billion-plus users of Google Maps. You could certainly argue for a full-blown merger, but Google told CNBC it "remains deeply committed to growing Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app and its thriving community of volunteers and users," which should calm the fears of Waze users a bit. Remember, though, mergers and shutdowns come at you fast at Google, like when the company most recently said Stadia " is not shutting down " two months before announcing Stadia would be shut down .

Enlarge (credit: Canon)

Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April . The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.

But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.

Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were being acquired by Gear Patrol , an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.