It started with an internal mandate: 70 to 80 percent of daily work time should use AI tools, climbing toward 100 percent. At King, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Candy Crush, nobody questioned the direction. Level designers and copywriters threw themselves into building generative AI tools for level iteration and text generation. They trained the systems. They refined the outputs. They made them better every week.
Then the layoffs came.
Roughly 200 employees — about ten percent of the studio's workforce — were told their jobs are at risk in early July 2026. The cuts landed hardest on level design, UX and narrative copywriters, user researchers, and the London-based Farm Heroes Saga team, where around half the staff — including senior leadership — were placed on gardening leave ahead of a planned September departure.
"Most of level design has been wiped," one staffer told Mobilegamer.biz. "Which is crazy since they've spent months building tools to craft levels quicker. Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams."
Another source put it more bluntly: the copywriting team was "completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating."
"The fact AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it's all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall," a staffer said. "If we're introducing more feedback loops then it's crazy to remove the developers themselves — we need more hands and less leadership."
Morale was already at an all-time low before the cuts. Afterward, one employee told journalists it was "in the gutter." Multiple sources described the messaging from leadership as scripted and tone-deaf — "literally being read like a script in the calls, which is like a slap to the face."
The layoffs are part of a broader Microsoft workforce reduction of roughly 9,000 roles companywide, framed publicly as "restructuring to position for success in a dynamic marketplace." For King's workers, the reality is more concrete: they spent months building tools that made their own jobs obsolete, and then they were shown the door.
The irony isn't lost on anyone. A now-deleted LinkedIn post by an Xbox producer advising laid-off colleagues to "lean on AI" for career planning and emotional clarity only intensified the backlash.
A new organizational chart is promised for September, after union negotiations conclude. Until then, the remaining workforce is in limbo — watching the tools they built reshape the studio, and wondering if they'll be next.