Juan Vaca, story director for Gears of War: E-Day, has been laid off from developer The Coalition shortly before the game’s planned October 6 release. Eurogamer reported the departure on September 23 after Vaca disclosed it on LinkedIn.
“I am part of this round of Microsoft layoffs and am open to new opportunities in games/film/tv,” Vaca wrote in the statement quoted by Eurogamer. He added that teams needing a director or storyteller should contact him. Eurogamer says Vaca joined The Coalition in 2022 and had worked on E-Day for more than four years.
The timing makes the departure unusually abrupt. Five days before announcing the layoff, Vaca had posted about E-Day going gold, the production milestone that indicates a release build is ready for disc manufacturing. The game was still scheduled for October 6 in Eurogamer’s report.
The Coalition’s full impact is still unclear
It is not known how many other developers at The Coalition lost their jobs. Eurogamer relayed Kotaku’s reporting, based on an anonymous source familiar with the situation, that fewer than a handful were affected and that their departures were apparently unrelated to the wider Xbox restructuring. That account has not been publicly detailed by Microsoft.
Vaca’s statement places his exit within a Microsoft layoff round, while the broader explanation comes from news reporting rather than his post. Eurogamer reported 268 job losses across Xbox and several organizational changes, including Rare and World’s Edge moving under Activision and Playground Games and Turn 10 being combined around Fable and Forza. The outlet also reported major changes affecting Obsidian, Halo Studios and Ninja Theory.
More specifically, Eurogamer reported that Obsidian would move under Bethesda, Halo Studios had been sharply reduced as future Halo development shifted to Activision, and Ninja Theory was heading toward closure after possible ownership deals fell through. Those changes span different studios and projects, so they provide the corporate backdrop rather than a direct explanation for staffing decisions at The Coalition.
Those wider moves show the scale of the upheaval, but they do not establish why Vaca or any other individual employee was selected. For E-Day, the confirmed development is narrower: its story director is out after the game reached its manufacturing milestone and before its scheduled launch.
