According to a report over at Polygon, a number for paid support staff for Xbox from a third-party company called Affirma Consulting who worked out of Microsoft's offices have been laid off. In their place, Affirma has kept on-hand a number of volunteers called "Xbox Ambassadors" who normally work for prizes, the reports says.

While Microsoft has responded to the layoffs by saying they still have a core group of "highly-trained customer support agents" leading the Xbox Ambassadors volunteers, why any of the former paid employees were laid off at all has not been disclosed.

Polygon points out that the Xbox Support Twitter account has over a million followers and has more than 2.9 million Tweets made in relation to support, however, since the layoffs the account is largely Retweeting from the Xbox Ambassadors account.

It's not uncommon for companies to downsize, and it's important here to recognise that the employees let go didn't work directly for Microsoft, but third-party Affirma Consulting. And that details surrounding the layoffs isn't at all forthcoming, leaving a large gap in information. Still, it would be pretty annoying losing your job to a person happy to just get a copy of State of Decay for free, if that is at all how it worked out. But we don't think it's as cut and dry as that.