According to Gamasutra and VentureBeat, as part of its move to cut 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, Microsoft has axed hundreds of positions from its game division.

The Flight Simulator studio, dubbed ACES, suffered big layoffs yesterday, which marked the cutting of the first 1,400 jobs. The franchise is one of the longest running game series in existence, with the first game, “Flight Simulator 1.0,” released in 1982 and the most recent, “Flight Simulator X,” hitting store shelves in 2006.

"Following our annual strategy review process, [the Interactive Entertainment Business] is making adjustments within our business to align our people against our highest priorities, and the closure of Aces is once of those changes," a Microsoft spokesman in an e-mail.

In addition, it appears that about 30 percent of the company’s video game testers have been cut. Also, next week, the game group is expected to undergo a management restructuring.

In the past year or so, Microsoft has shut down or divested itself of a lot of its hit-making studios. It recently decided to close Ensemble Studios, maker of the Age of Empires strategy games, and spun out Bungie, the maker of Halo games, in a move that gave Bungie more creative freedom to make games that didn’t run on the Microsoft Xbox 360 or PC platforms.

However it appears that Lionhead and Rare studios out of which the former just published “Fable II,” as well as its Forza Motorsports studio, haven’t suffered any extreme measures coming from Microsoft.