"Scabby," along with hundreds of red flags outside Bethesda's headquarters made Microsoft's latest Xbox cuts difficult for visiting executives to miss.
Xbox leadership had some unexpected company waiting for them at Bethesda Game Studios' Rockville, Maryland headquarters this week: a giant inflatable rat named Scabby, hundreds of red flags across the grounds, and workers determined to make the impact of Xbox's layoffs visible.
Members of the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS-CWA) organised the protest around the leadership visit, taking the demonstration both inside and outside the office.
"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," Bethesda technical producer and OneBGS-CWA member Nathan Hahn said in a union press release reported by Kotaku.
Why was there a giant inflatable rat outside Bethesda?
Scabby was brought to Bethesda's headquarters as a symbol of the union's protest against Xbox's mass layoffs. The giant inflatable rat is commonly used at US labour protests, and was just one part of the action Bethesda workers organised around the leadership visit.
Hahn said workers initially put up posters around the office, but management told them the posters could not be placed outside their cubicles. They then brought balloons inside their cubicles, while a separate group of laid-off developers planted around 800 red flags outside the office, one for each developer who had lost their job since July.
"Each flag was a public reminder of how many people management cut from our teams - not just our colleagues and coworkers, but our friends at the end of the day," Hahn said in the union press release reported by Kotaku.
The Bethesda Game Studios Union also posted footage of the flags on its official Bluesky account, where it called them a "welcome gift" for the visiting leadership, and said they honoured Xbox game workers laid off in 2026. "We refuse to let executives forget what game studios are actually made of: their workers," OneBGS-CWA said.
Microsoft's latest Xbox restructuring will cut roughly 3,200 jobs, with around 1,600 employees already laid off in July. The cuts, part of Xbox's "great reset", have also affected studios including Double Fine, Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, and Arkane Lyon.
"We're mobilising 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," Hahn said in the press release, adding that workers were fighting to protect their colleagues and the future of the games industry.
