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Microsoft is laying off 1900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees (8% cut from the Gaming Division)

Hopefully someone makes a compilation of all of the journalists that cheered this merger on while many said this would happen they said it was just "fear mongering" but suddenly switched to "well this was inevitable". Jez saw that he was wrong and seems to be one of the only ones being honest about the whole situation I've said this before about him in many situations he'll swallow his pride and actually tell the damn truth. Destin, Ryan McCaffery, kinda funny etc. coverage was all trash with zero nuance just straight up cheerleaders because Microsoft needed a win I really can't stand our current state of media they just seem to be all compromised.
 

kyussman

Member
8% seems like an awful lot to go.....so everyone involved in the aqusition must have known this was coming,they knew they were taking on a lot of people they had no use for.
 
Do you work for them? How do you know that there will be less QA?
And your suggestion is what? To keep unnecessary workforce? Because if they are being laid off is because MS sees them as unnecessary. Real world isn’t charity and it isn’t like MS would go bankrupt anytime son

Your first comment cancels the second unless you work for Microsoft. You don't know if those people were unnecessary, redundant, or clones. It is Sesame Street logic that if you buy a company and cut off projects/workforce/customers you are harming the market. More so if MS "would not go bankrupt anytime soon". It's even worse if they did it despite not needing to do so. Utterly disgusting from an ethical standpoint.

As for charity, it's kind of ironic you mention it, given that XBOX exists only because of Microsoft's funding. As an independent business unit it is an absolute mess. Your assumption that this is the right decision is based on faith, not on facts.
 
And your suggestion is what? To keep unnecessary workforce? Because if they are being laid off is because MS sees them as unnecessary. Real world isn’t charity and it isn’t like MS would go bankrupt anytime son.
Throwing out 2000 people across a variety of companies that you just bought 3 months ago doesn't seem like there was much care or thought put in. They're specifically canning QA and outsourcing it.
Do you think this mass firing in huge swaths without due care and understanding is good for morale? Good for productivity? You think anyone in any of these teams is going to be feeling great when there friends and teammates were binned for no understandable reason, and they all could be on the firing line next? Especially when said company is publicly celebrating historic profits and market caps as they reach the status of the richest company in the world.

All these companies were profitable as they were. There is a reality where people come and go, people are right for a team or company or not, etc, but that is not what this is. It isn't about being a charity, that's not what anyone is saying, you complete simpleton, and you know it.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Throwing out 2000 people across a variety of companies that you just bought 3 months ago doesn't seem like there was much care or thought put in. They're specifically canning QA and outsourcing it.
Do you think this mass firing in huge swaths without due care and understanding is good for morale? Good for productivity? You think anyone in any of these teams is going to be feeling great when there friends and teammates were binned for no understandable reason, and they all could be on the firing line next?
All these companies were profitable as they were. There is a reality where people come and go, people are right for a team or company or not, etc, but that is not what this is. It isn't about being a charity, that's not what anyone is saying, you complete simpleton, and you know it.
They do not need the QAs and Internal reviewers they have in Activision-Blizzard, I hear the team they used for Redfall is available and they are not even that expensive. Win win, am I right?

;)
 

FrankWza

Member


Watching Al Pacino GIF by NETFLIX
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
The thing also is that this is likely just the initial wave of restructuring. They'll do more almost certainly as they merge and realign everything into operations as a whole.

And this, of course, is assuming nothing unexpectedly impacts their current plans and direction. If performance dips for any reason its not reasonable to expect them to just carry on regardless, running a service-based business like Xcloud/GamePass is by its very nature dynamic. If, for example, a studio is spending a lot of money to produce titles that aren't moving the needle then they inevitably will intervene in some fashion.

One of the most concerning aspects of things like GamePass is that KPI's aren't necessarily obvious. Yes, you can look at overall subscriber count, retention, engagement, supplementary spend, etc. But the actual figures for both performance (P&L) and expectation per studio/unit are not going to be easily verifiable by external sources - front facing communication is always going to be filtered through a PR lens. Upshot being that if the top brass aren't happy with a certain team, its likely that the first time there's any indication of this is when they are downsized, merged, or disbanded.

Its pretty much inevitable in my opinion that this is going to happen sooner or later, because its a totally normal thing for corporations to regularly review performance for entities under their remit. Phil Spencer might offer a longer leash to certain studios and properties, but they'll never get free-reign forever! Because if he did, he wouldn't be in the position he is as its totally antithetical to corporate business practices.
 
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kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
The thing also is that this is likely just the initial wave of restructuring. They'll do more almost certainly as they merge and realign everything into operations as a whole.

This mass firing was mostly directed at ABK. I don't think anyone working at Bethesda or MGS will feel safe when Xbox management is making so many drastic changes.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
QA is going to be automated via use of AI we have heard about this for some time, same with lots of dev work, it will be supported by AI tools etc. On top, coming back to you analogy, these 2 painters might have been experts in painting specific surfaces only that you no longer will support (no need to keep switch or playstation developers in some teams if you will release majority of your games on Xbox and PC).
Your theory isn't valid because the idea is to make these games available to more players and on more platforms. That means MORE QA work will be needed than ever before, not less.

And AI QA is not there yet. It's a moot point.

zT3UfXg.jpg
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
MS shouldnt be laying off ANY developers or QA people. HR people, marketing folks, and other admin jobs i understand but seeing cuts like the ones at dev studios is bizarre considering how they needed every single one of those devs to ship out MW3 in a year and a half. what happens now?

Redfall, Starfield and Forza were delayed by a year so clearly they couldve used more devs and testers. why lay off these people?

This kind of cost cutting makes sense over at indepedent studios like Striking Distance studios, but not at $3 trillion companies. No one would want to work at Microsoft, at least no one worth a damn.
 

DrFigs

Member
MS shouldnt be laying off ANY developers or QA people. HR people, marketing folks, and other admin jobs i understand but seeing cuts like the ones at dev studios is bizarre considering how they needed every single one of those devs to ship out MW3 in a year and a half. what happens now?

Redfall, Starfield and Forza were delayed by a year so clearly they couldve used more devs and testers. why lay off these people?

This kind of cost cutting makes sense over at indepedent studios like Striking Distance studios, but not at $3 trillion companies. No one would want to work at Microsoft, at least no one worth a damn.
i think they were moving away from yearly cod releases anyway.
 

Heisenberg007

Gold Journalism
MS shouldnt be laying off ANY developers or QA people. HR people, marketing folks, and other admin jobs i understand but seeing cuts like the ones at dev studios is bizarre considering how they needed every single one of those devs to ship out MW3 in a year and a half. what happens now?

Redfall, Starfield and Forza were delayed by a year so clearly they couldve used more devs and testers. why lay off these people?

This kind of cost cutting makes sense over at indepedent studios like Striking Distance studios, but not at $3 trillion companies. No one would want to work at Microsoft, at least no one worth a damn.
100% agreed.

As for your question "what happens now?" the answer is rather simple.

Xbox will still produce and release games at the same clip. Those games will just have less budget, ambition, and polish. This has been the trend for XGS games in the last decade under Phil Spencer's leadership.

That is his vision - to make more AA, less ambitious game. Even AAA developers like Arkane, Bethesda, and Obsidian were relegated to making Redfall, Starfield, Grounded, and Pentiment. Now that ABK also comes under XGS, they will suffer the same fate -- as per Phil's vision -- and produce more AA and AAA games with smaller scopes and budgets.
 

twilo99

Member
Considering how bloated the gaming division is 8% weight loss isn’t really sufficient so I expect another round of layoffs by end of the fiscal year.

Musk got rid of ~50% of Twitter’s headcount and that’s around where you want to be when things get out of hand. Microsoft aren’t as ruthless so they will just have to suffer the consequences, but I think they can get to around 15% and that’s still better than nothing.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
MS shouldnt be laying off ANY developers or QA people. HR people, marketing folks, and other admin jobs i understand but seeing cuts like the ones at dev studios is bizarre considering how they needed every single one of those devs to ship out MW3 in a year and a half. what happens now?

Redfall, Starfield and Forza were delayed by a year so clearly they couldve used more devs and testers. why lay off these people?

This kind of cost cutting makes sense over at indepedent studios like Striking Distance studios, but not at $3 trillion companies. No one would want to work at Microsoft, at least no one worth a damn.
When it comes to employee cuts it doesn't even matter if it's a company ready to go bankrupt or MS or Apple oozing in money.

An employee will be kept if he or she is worth keeping. If someone gets gassed it simply means you didn't make the cut. It could be work, attitude, your salary is way too high because you've been here for 20 years etc...

Think of it like sports. Who makes the team? The players who collectively are deemed the best players at a budget cap. Now what people want is every company to be like the Yankees or Dodgers with seemingly unlimited budgets where they sign every all star player for $30M per contracts. But thats not how life works at 99% of companies.

Production/warehouse workers are often kept because if the demand is there you need to keep them because that kind of role you cant force someone to make double the products from the same machine. But for a lot office jobs, adding on extra rows to a spreadsheet can make zero difference. I've been at my company for over 10 years and every year or two we add more brands and products. If the products have increased 50% since I was hired, there's no doubt my workload hasnt increased 50%. It's probably been around the same since when things get too spreadsheet analytical, expectations for people are to do the best you can and if means breadth vs depth, it's understandable.

For the 1900 people cut, if there's lots of programmers and game making people getting gassed it means the quality of product sucks, too many people, or not enough demand, project cancelled. This kind of role is like the blue collar roles or Xmas rush hiring sprees for two months. There's a direct correlation to production and service that is needed. While at Walmart head office, they arent going to hire extra office dudes for two months. Just because sales spike 30% in December doesn't mean a company needs 30% more office people. You cant expect to dump on an employee to do double the programming work. But for the HR or support role person, they can be dumped easier.

But it'll be interesting to see how the split is (if it's ever told). And also how many of these roles are transitioned to outsourcing. Outsourcing isnt just an assembly line or telemarketing or IT kind of thing. Companies hire sales brokers to help them drive sales if it's not worth the hassle or cost to hire an internal account manager for big money. That's how a lot of smaller stores get serviced. They either buy it themselves from wholesalers, or a sales broker in charge of 10 small accounts calls on them, and the big corporation hiring them pays the broker company a 4% cut of every dollar sale generated. it's kind of like commission. But instead of the person getting the money, the broker company gets it and the person gets paid a salary from broker management.
 

DrFigs

Member
Considering how bloated the gaming division is 8% weight loss isn’t really sufficient so I expect another round of layoffs by end of the fiscal year.

Musk got rid of ~50% of Twitter’s headcount and that’s around where you want to be when things get out of hand. Microsoft aren’t as ruthless so they will just have to suffer the consequences, but I think they can get to around 15% and that’s still better than nothing.
Clearly there's a huge problem w/ bloat at these companies. Does MS gaming division really need 22,000 employees. i mean idk. Twitter apparently didnt need half of its employees (it's downfall is more about Musk imo). I think both things are true: that of course large layoffs were bound to happen and will continue to happen because of the merger, but also a lot of these tech companies have too many employees. If Activision/Blizzard were already moving away from yearly cod releases, toys for bob was making games that were bombing, and Blizzard's game was in development trouble and was probably going to be cancelled anyways, a lot of jobs would have already been in jeopardy to boot.
 
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ulantan

Member
Has Colt Eastwood or any of the other Phil sycophants spun this to blame Sony/Playstation yet??
Let me look at the script hold on. "This wouldn't have happened if sony didn't have the call of duty marketing rights tricking people into buying a playstation. They were forced to buy ABK for that reason alone. Hopefully Phil can balance the market by buying sega to replace the employees lost."
 

devilNprada

Member
Doesnt report profits for the Xbox division

This is an Xbox thread. I was obviously talking about MS reporting about Xbox.

I'm not moving goalposts, I just expected you to use your brain
Nice try but, no need to be insulting...
The post you quoted was total MS revenues!

"They only made 219 billion in revenue in 2023, so times are tough."
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Clearly there's a huge problem w/ bloat at these companies. Does MS gaming division really need 22,000 employees. i mean idk. Twitter apparently didnt need half of its employees (it's downfall is more about Musk imo). I think both things are true: that of course large layoffs were bound to happen and will continue to happen because of the merger, but also a lot of these tech companies have too many employees.
It's definitely a tech heavy trend of big layoffs the past year or two. SAP is restructuring 8000 people this week into role transitioning or redundancy firings and they make great money and a lot more stable kind of company than gaming.


It's probably a big combo of post covid fallout, binge hiring the past 5+ years, AI knocking on the door, and also very important... follow the leader. I said it before yesterday. During the global crisis meltdown in 2008 shit loads of companies were letting people go, but in reality it was mainly the big banks with gross mortgages and bad debts who were heavily hit. But as my bro said (head of finance), when there's a trend to do something like firing people it's a good time to do it too even if the company is doing fine. The company blends in with the other companies and they can always just blame the current reason.

The key difference is tech is a very volatile industry, so employee binge hiring and firing goes with it. You can google it now how many people Coke, Pepsi and Procter and Gamble have laid off the past few years. There are some. But were talking 100s, maybe 1000. And each of these companies have around 100,000-300,000 people. So layoffs can happen anywhere even after post covid sales drop. But the key is some industries are just more stable in the way they keep employees.

Tech is something where it seems if a team isn't needed anymore, instead of transitioning them to another project, a company who cant find anything to do will just gas the whole studio. Other kinds of companies have more spread out responsibilities. so even if one product line gets shut down, you dont shut down the entire office. There's other work to fill the void.
 
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TheBomb

Member
Look once the merge was completed. Activision had their way of doing things. That has changed now. Simple as that.
 

twilo99

Member
Clearly there's a huge problem w/ bloat at these companies. Does MS gaming division really need 22,000 employees. i mean idk. Twitter apparently didnt need half of its employees (it's downfall is more about Musk imo).

Gaming studio needs are obviously different compared to a social media team like Twitter, but overall what Musk did with Twitter finally showed how bloated things can be and he also showed how to deal with it.

22000 employees is ridiculous if you consider the output so.. no, they certainly don’t need that many.

The key is to retain the talent and let go of redundancy, HR, marketing, etc.
 
Your first comment cancels the second unless you work for Microsoft. You don't know if those people were unnecessary, redundant, or clones. It is Sesame Street logic that if you buy a company and cut off projects/workforce/customers you are harming the market. More so if MS "would not go bankrupt anytime soon". It's even worse if they did it despite not needing to do so. Utterly disgusting from an ethical standpoint.

As for charity, it's kind of ironic you mention it, given that XBOX exists only because of Microsoft's funding. As an independent business unit it is an absolute mess. Your assumption that this is the right decision is based on faith, not on facts.
So you’re saying that MS fired these people just because they are evil? In 12 years they have increase the number of employees by +121k… but no they are the embodiment of evil, hiring +121k people just for the pleasure of let them go right after 😂
 
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poppabk

Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
If they think supporting the merger protected their members then bless their hearts.
Their members still have jobs. Under Bobby Kotick, who knows - he wasn't exactly a man of the people. You only have to go back to 2019 for when Activision last laid off 8% of its employees.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster


The big mistake of the Conover stuff is thinking that MS' needs to wait for its competition to die off before showing its hand!

They don't, and they won't. They'll just slowly boil the frog through ratcheting up subs and closing every loophole in their paywall over time. Whilst trimming the fat by removing anything that doesn't play a role in furthering their corporate strategy.

Loss-leaders are so called because they front the offer, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. The business model remains fundamentally the same, its just a means to attract more attention and traffic.

The real question is whether the big properties they've acquired will last the course? Will they grow the business overall, or will they be held back by the limitations of the service mothership they're attached to. My gut feeling is that the mobile/live-service stuff will do fine, but those coming from a console base will wither on the vine because they are fundamentally mismatched with the service offer.

I suspect they'll be hamstrung by the dilution/devaluation effect of launching standalone titles within a subscription model. That Palworld is blowing up in spite of being on GamePass, not because of it, should prove the validity of this point.
 
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