15 ms·
Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
- flanbiscuit 3y agoI know someone who was part of this layoff at Blizzard. His entire team of 200+ people were let go. He said he found out when he arrived at work and saw lots of people standing in front of the building not being able to swipe in. He tried his badge and it was denied so he turned around and went home. What a shit way to find out you've been laid off.
- DanHulton 3y agoWho could have predicted this? /s
- trollied 3y agoI get you're trying to be sarcastic, but it's how acquisitions work. You don't need two HR departments, two sets of IT support, two sets of facilities managers etc etc. They build this in to the numbers when they're weighing up the cost of acquisition & profitability.
- chucke1992 3y agoEA laid off tons of workers and it hasn't been acquired so...
- iammjm 3y ago"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
- AlexandrB 3y ago> I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com https://playstormgate.com
- iammjm 3y agoHave you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/
- AlexandrB 3y agoNo, I hadn't. This also looks great! Nice to see some action in this space - RTSs have been life support for the last little while.
- whoswho 3y agoAs a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.
- jprd 3y agoPreach!
- solardev 3y agoAs another grown ass man (well, more or less) who also played those games, what really bothers me is that dude's haircut. It's like a grease tsunami had sex with a chia pet. I miss the 90s, can you tell?
- gary_0 3y agoIt's kind of weird how much of the gaming industry still caters to the teenage boy demographic.
- graphe 3y agoWhy it it strange to cater to a demographic and not stranger to shotgun everyone into liking something?
- CobaltFire 3y agoQuick web search indicates that Activision Blizzard was 13,000 before MS bought them and Zenimax was 2,300. I have no idea how they split that layoff up, but 1,900 of ~15,300 (or 12.4%) is more accurate.
- fxtentacle 3y agoI recently saw that ZeroSpace is raising money. Looks like StarCraft 2 and the investor brochure confirmed that there's lots of ex-Blizzard on the team.
- lrae 3y agoAre you mixing it up with Stormgate? ZeroSpace doesn't have much if any ex-Blizzard on the team, do they?
- xnorswap 3y agoBe careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?". While D3 had it's fair criticism at launch for a number of reasons, it still at it's core had a fun gameplay loop. With the itemisation fix in Reaper of Souls they managed to turn it around and make a really fun game. Even in the launch state it felt like it was made by people who enjoyed gaming but had made some questionable decisions especially regarding the auction house. D4 in contrast feels more fundamentally flawed. It feels like a game made by people who have been described what makes a game fun but don't play games themselves. It's hard to put into words what feels so off about it. You can criticise that a player goes into the same tilesets, kills the same mobs for the same rewards, but at it's core that's true of a lot of ARPGs which are fun. You can criticise itemisation, but even that doesn't capture what's so off about the game. It just doesn't have the right dopamine releases while playing. There's little to get excited about when loot drops. You might get some "green arrows" but upgrades don't feel impactful. A few up arrows don't change how you play. When levelling up, your character doesn't really undergo a transformation from a player struggling to kill mobs in one way to clearing screens of mobs in a different way that you've grown and progressed into. You fairly early get your skills and you kill the same mobs in the same way but now the mobs have X,000 hit-points instead of X hit-points. I might myself get criticised for this post by people saying that fun is subjective, that this is just my opinion. But fun isn't just subjective, there's a core to computer games, and in the latest season the mechanics they added were to take some of the generally agreed least fun parts of competitors and wrap them up in something that doesn't even deliver a large reward for doing it. Twitch isn't always a reliable metric, but when hardcore ARPG fans are visibly bored and itching to play a different game, that isn't a good look. Season resets should be an exciting time for a clean start with a new character and exploring new play-styles. Instead, around 10 levels in, everyone realises they've already unlocked all the skills they'll use this season, that they've now essentially experienced most the content they'll see this season.
- asylteltine 3y agoI agree. D3 at launch was meh but over time became excellent and super fun. D4 at launch was good but then it wore off and everyone I know stopped playing even one person who was a d3 fiend.
- wseqyrku 3y ago> 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. Sorry what?
- iammjm 3y agoWhat I meant to say: a game studio dropping 2000 employees seem like A LOT until you consider it's Microsoft and it's "just" 8% of their workforce.
- wseqyrku 3y agoYou're looking at it just like how Microsoft did, either way 2000 people lost their jobs. And I'm down voted for some reason.
- asylteltine 3y agoThe blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago"No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes
- eigenket 3y agoIts not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.
- oblio 3y agoHe didn't mean they died, he meant that they no longer work for Activision Blizzard.
- solardev 3y agoI just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness. Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE). With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
- oblio 3y ago> With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. I have bad news for you :-) The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.
- 3y ago
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoIf you love Starcraft just a quick reminder that the Korean Brood War scene is still going strong, and is now getting bigger. BW is a near perfect game and it's clear with how they handled SC2 "Blizzard" is not going to make anything close to BW ever again. I would highly recommend checking it out if you love Starcraft. For starters, Artosis casts a pro-level ladder game every day on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos If you like that, the main BW tournament is called ASL and happens a couple times a year. The next one should be starting relatively soon.
- oblio 3y agoYou're bringing back memories of Jaedong :-))
- thinkingtoilet 3y agoHe's still playing! He is often in the ASL.
- cauthon 3y agoI’d love a brood war remaster
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago... They already made one. And it crowded out every historical playthrough video of the original Brood War on YouTube, such that full playthroughs of the original are impossible to find. And so, through grasping at the straws of rehashing old stuff they can't make anew, they ruin the old stuff that was good. :D
- dehrmann 3y ago> BW is a near perfect game It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.
- antisthenes 3y ago
- doktrin 3y ago> I need Starcarft 3 badly This feels at least tangentially relevant : https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/ https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/ I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
- picadores 3y agoBehavioural hacking people is certainly cheaper then making them happy, and the ultimate hack - is heroine. The final form of all unchecked buisnesses is virtual drug dealing. Invest now into the ultimate society meltdown..
- pfdietz 3y agoOr, consumers grow more and more resistant to the BS. Ultimately, we insist on authentic experiences, not virtual fakery.
- pdimitar 3y agoThis is true but I'm observing more and more casual players and just regular humans begin to catch up and become resistant. They understand they're being addicted and milked and started pulling back.
- jasonlotito 3y ago> but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games. Increasingly? Have you seen what mobile games make? Blizzard didn't make Diablo Immortal for the fans. They made it for the money. And people paid. If you remotely believe in money talking, than yes, the market has been actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games for a LONG time now.
- otikik 3y agoAs long as they don't fire the Starcraft 2 intern I am good.
- dehrmann 3y agoI bet they could get Lowko to do it for free.
- araes 3y agoThe 22,000 number makes it look better, yet if they're "mostly" coming out of the Blizactivision employees, then the real math is ~1900/9200 (Wikipedia article number), or 20%. So, welcome to Microsoft, there goes 1/5 of your coworkers.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoYikes, how many are artists replaced by LLMs?
- dvngnt_ 3y agoit hadn't replaced much yet since it's hard to make consistent high quality art
- two_in_one 3y agoLLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)
- iammjm 3y agoNo, the art that LLMs are generating is already amazing and getting better each month. There's even LLMs that generate whole videos.
- Wevah 3y agoThat’s genAI, though, no? LLMs specifically deal with language.
- super256 3y agoI think you are confusing large language models with diffusion models.
- iammjm 3y agoYou are right. Anyway, I was intending to respond not necessarily to the LLM part of the post, but to the AI "don't compete with artists" -part. My point being: I think current generative AI capabilities to be VERY much competing vs artists (or at least people, who "manufacture art", like creating illustrations, graphics etc.)
- yreg 3y ago
- oldpersonintx 3y ago1900 salaried workers with good benefits laid off from Activision 19000 to be hired by Chipotle to make burritos for minimum wage By the labor stats, this is a net gain of 17100 jobs
- sph 3y agoIt literally is.
- otikik 3y agoAlthough the gaming industry doesn't have a good record, they are probably better than Chipotle. https://jacobin.com/2021/05/chipotle-nightmare-employer-wage-labor-union-health-safety-workers https://jacobin.com/2021/05/chipotle-nightmare-employer-wage...
- gruez 3y agoDo you have any data that shows this is actually what's happening? For the economy as a whole, inflation adjusted wages have been slowly creeping up since the end of the pandemic, which seems contradictory to what you think is happening. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
- maerF0x0 3y agoi believe their point was about the statistic, but its also roughly the case that the salary/value of jobs created < jobs lost here > While the headlines have been filled with news of layoffs in tech, the vast majority of jobs in the last six months have been created in health care and social assistance, the government, and leisure and hospitality. https://archive.is/1vizJ#selection-561.0-568.0 https://archive.is/1vizJ#selection-561.0-568.0
- mikeortman 3y agoIt blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
- ramesh31 3y ago>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming? The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
- phreeza 3y agoThat sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?
- usrnm 3y agoLarian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game
- blackmesaind 3y agoMany of the assets were reused from previous work (DOS 1/2). They did put in an insane amount of work over a very extended period, though.
- saos 3y ago> It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft Always on the table after an acquisition. Especially close to earnings I hope severance is nice for all impacted
- djmips 3y agoI have an former colleague that got laid off by Microsoft just over a year ago, joined Blizzard, and just got laid off by Microsoft... again.
- crazygringo 3y agoExactly. One of the major benefits of acquisitions is to reduce duplicated roles/teams and therefore save money. You don't need two HR teams, two teams of accountants, etc. +1 on wishes for good severance!
- saos 3y agoYeahh its happened to me in past, my first ever job out uni. The company got absolutely gutted week after acquisition was finalised. It's painful but you eventually move on in life.
- JohnFen 3y agoHaving been through a few acquisitions, I have learned the truth of this. Eventually, I learned that if a company I work for announces they're being acquired, the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities. Even if I'm not laid off (which I haven't been yet in these situations), I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted. It's the perfect opportunity to reassess to determine if I fit into the new company and to scout around for something I may fit better in.
- saos 3y ago> the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities. Yeah there’s a level of discernment you get from that point on
- jacknews 3y agowhat was that saying, "embrace, .." I forgot the next part
- mort96 3y agoThere's a lot of weird criticism of MS there but this is the first time I've seen them criticised for not doing EEE?
- jacknews 3y agoEh? I'm saying they are exactly doing EEE, at a corporate level This extinguishing of a bunch of taken-over staff might be a natural consequence of the 'merger' (duplicate roles and all that), but the embrace itself was totally invalid if you ask me.
- mort96 3y agoThe part which comes after the embrace is extend.. ..and it's a very specific strategy, about "embracing" an existing standard (integrating it into their products and pushing it), then adding a bunch of non-standard "extensions" to the standard, which "extinguishes" the standard and the other implementations because now everyone's writing against Microsoft's proprietary version instead of the actual standard. Think "Works best in Internet Explorer" web pages which used ActiveX controls (Microsoft's "extension" to the web), or Microsoft's Java implementation which omitted the standard JNI and introduced Microsoft's own proprietary FFI solution to make sure Java programs written for Windows wouldn't work on other systems. I struggle to see the connection to this ActiBlizz/Xbox case. EEE doesn't stand for "embrace then extinguish".
- darkwizard42 3y agoThis felt inevitable, probably tons of duplicate roles eliminated as systems are integrated. Something tells me a lot of game design and eng we’re not affected.
- beernet 3y agoWell, engineers have been very much at the top of every layoffs list these past 24 months. Not sure who is speaking to you.
- crazygringo 3y agoDo you have information on this particular acquisition though? Layoffs made post-acquisition are totally different from business climate layoffs. A major part of acquisitions is eliminating redundant positions/teams. You don't need two HR or accounting departments, and the new combined department isn't going to be twice as big. Whereas if they intend to keep putting out games at the same pace, there are little to no efficiencies to be found in laying off designers and engineers. (It does sound like they've canceled one of the games though, resulting in some layoffs there, but unclear in which departments. Acquisitions often involve a change of strategy as well, so that could affect designers/engineers if they can't be absorbed by other games in development.)
- CSMastermind 3y agoReached out to some of my friends over there and it seems like news of impacted divisions is just started to roll out. But at least at the time I'm writing this comment engineers think they could be impacted and are waiting to hear if they are.
- ulfw 3y agoAcquifire
- manuel4sk 3y agoWill the next Call of Duty be impacted?
- hbn 3y agoIf things went wrong in the process of producing a CoD game it might turn out fun
- Spartan-S63 3y agoI’d argue every time they allow Sledgehammer Games to take the lead on a CoD title, it goes wrong. MWII was a breath of fresh air amidst an over abundance of twitchy ultra-arcade shooters. It struck a balance between the arcade experience we expect, but deliberately slowing it down such that reaction time didn’t dominate gameplay. In contrast, MWIII from SHG is a step backwards to such an extreme that along with Vanguard, I don’t think they’re qualified to be anything but a support studio for the CoD franchise.
- romanovcode 3y agoAsking the real questions here.
- thiago_fm 3y agoActivision Blizzard games are on a downtrend for quite a while. I imagine now post-layoff how it feels to work there, if before there were already plenty of cases of abuse. Hope the laid-off folks have a better outcome long-term. Such a terrible acquisition from Microsoft. I doubt the IP is worth that much, so many people are full of those grindy lootboxes games looking to something new and fresh. If I could short that acquisition, I would go all-in.
- shmatt 3y agoYou have to wonder, if there is an exact duplicate of a role, do they settle it in a 1v1? Mortal Kombat?
- notpachet 3y agoI once had an eng manager that made his reports fight with kendo swords. Maybe he was just 12 years ahead of his time.
- jmyeet 3y agoWhen this was announced my question was "is Microsoft buying Call of Duty or are they buying Activision-Blizzard?" CoD is a reliable cash cow and driver for consoles with an annual game release. It makes a lot of money. Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Blizzard IP mostly not being on consoles. It's worth noting that Microsoft just became the second $3 trillion market cap company. Yet we still have the same old playbook of raising prices and cutting costs, employees be damned. I do wonder if Microsoft will try and replace artists with AIs to further save costs.
- trzeci 3y agoYou might be surprised what is the real money printer in ABK.
- blasphemers 3y agoYea, if the acquisition was only about one thing, it was definitely mobile
- jmyeet 3y agoI'm aware of Candy Crush being a money printer but we're talking about Activision-Blizzard. CoD is important not only because it sells a lot of copies (and, more importantly, cosmetics in-game) but it's one of those titles that's key to selling more consoles. There's a synergy between CoD and Xbox.
- dehrmann 3y agoCandy Crush?
- safog 3y agoFAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be amazed but then you start noticing the minor flaws and how much effort it takes to make it good enough. It's still possible that some jobs will get replaced, not every NPC detail needs to be hand drawn perfectly, but let's see.
- pimlottc 3y agoFAO?
- nvr219 3y agofor attention of
- riley_dog 3y agohttps://fluentslang.com/fao-meaning/ https://fluentslang.com/fao-meaning/
- dmoy 3y agoFor the Attention Of
- reaperman 3y ago"For Attention Of" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fao# https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fao#
- jasonlotito 3y agoApparently, something that can be replaced with the word "For". It's odd, because FAO takes a LOT more text to get it's point across compared to "For" even though technically they are both the same number of letters. Consider also that "For" sounds natural, but in this case, FAO does not.
- 3y ago
- chucke1992 3y agoA lot of people. Interesting that Ybarra left.
- seydor 3y agoLast time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different
- bostonsre 3y agoIs it all due to inflation and the interest rates? Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Or anyone know why this is happening?
- tyree731 3y ago> Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Yes, but then the stock price would go down, which obviously isn't allowed.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago? Not allowed. It is done all the time. Companies can issue new stock. or? are you being sarcastic about c-suit not wanting 'stock price to go down'? which could be a consequence of issuing new stock?
- gtirloni 3y agoThe latter for sure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 3y agoissuing stock and selling it into the market doesn't make the stock price go down. Raising money for this activity on a large scale is why the stock market exists. The value of the existing company "before" remains the same, and the sale of the new shares brings cash into the company at the selling price, so those new cash assets exactly balance out the dilution of ownership. If anything it might increase the value of the company if shareholders believe that the same "profit multiplier"/ROE will be applied to the new cash, for example if a profitable restaurant chain sells new shares to get the cash to open and operate new restaurants in new locations. Of course, changes to the share price are due to changing expectations so that will occur as information about the pending transaction is incorporated into the hive mind and not necessarily at the moment of share sales.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago[flagged]
- eterm 3y agoGetting laid off shouldn't "Destroy the life and dreams" of anyone. It's a short term set-back, and in many countries there are protections in place to make sure that even in the short term people aren't dramatically affected. Don't tie your self identity or worth to the company you work for.
- gmerc 3y agoI assume you are not US. Health insurance is tied to your job. Without it, things can turn to ruin very quickly and not in your control - just takes one uninsured driver crashing into the family van.
- SoftTalker 3y agoLayoff may include continuation of health insurance and other "severance benefits" for some period of time, if not you would be eligible for CORBA, if not that you would be eligible for a healthcare.gov plan.
- gmerc 3y agoThey did but the courts are stacked against them
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago[flagged]
- squigglydonut 3y agoAn acquisition is a killing of a competitor. We need new businesses for job growth.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoI keep hearing of huge lay-offs. I wonder, is this the result of LLM’s making everything just so much quicker to code develop? I mean as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 came out, it was the first question on people’s minds so I am guessing that it’s all related and with each advancement in AI there will be more layoffs. Maybe the future consists of multibillion-pound companies which only have 1 staff member (the cleaner) to get into those hard to reach places that the robot can’t get to.
- fourside 3y agoI would not blame LLMs for the current wave of layoffs. Maybe in the future, but these are more likely corrections from all the hiring and growth we saw during the pandemic.
- maerF0x0 3y agoi agree. I think LLMs may more likely be responsible for these jobs never coming back. ie, in the past jobs would come and go with the cycle, but now some fraction (maybe 1/1, 1/2, 1/3) of them will not come back ever because they simply wont need as many people to support the next record revenue.
- ajkjk 3y agoOf course it's not because of LLMs. This happens after every acquisition. Anyway do you think LLMs are magic or something?
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoWhat a daft thing to say. For my projects, I have decreased the dev time from things that would have taken me three months to build down to at max 1 month using LLM’s. I have built around 50 plugins for Woocommerce which I would never in a million years had the time to build. Magic? No, it’s like having a small team at my finger tips (and for no extra cost than the £75 I pay OpenAI each month).
- 3y ago
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThis might not be any indication of markets or microsoft stock, or forecasting a downturn. This could purely be isolated to "blizzard" had some "issues" and "we need to clean house".
- lmeyerov 3y agoOuch, first Disney/Pixar, now Microsoft / Activision Blizzard For #webgl folks ready to beyond entertainment & ads, we may be able to help turn lemons into lemonade: - Opening: Senior webgl infoviz engineer to help us build the next gen of our infoviz & genAI platform for data-intensive analytics missions. Also involves our GPU cloud backend for server acceleration, and broader data viz tasks. - Background: Graphistry has long been in front for scaling visual graph AI, and we are now on to the next 100X. Behind the scenes, we're one of the key principals who started what became the massively popular hashtag#ApacheArrow and NVIDIA hashtag#RAPIDS as just a means to the ends of our platform connecting cloud GPUs <> client GPUs - Global remote friendly For more info, chekcout louie.ai (genAI data-intensive analytics) + graphistry.com/careers
- mannycalavera42 3y agothe video on louie site is too small and I cannot click on the fullscreen button in the bottom right corner
- Log_out_ 3y agoHow does this not get repercussions by the shareholders? The IP they bought with Activision is stale already and they send notoriously cheap and overworked gamedevs packing..
- pipes 3y agoThis reminds me of when Microsoft bought Rare. One of greatest game creators of all time, who seemed to be the perfect fit as 2nd party Nintendo developers. Suddenly they couldn't produce anything noteworthy. I've no idea why. I just wish they'd been GameCube developers instead. That console needed them and to me was a better fit for their types of games. Oh well.
- ouraf 3y agoMicrosoft bet all their chips on kinect, and Rare was spearheading game development for that device. When it didn't work as well, they gutted Rare. They bet on the wrong horse then. Activision blizzard recently released one of the worst rated call of duty games, diablo Immoral with obscenely predatory micro transactions, ruined overwatch forcing the original game into a sequel model no one asked for and is still reeling from a controversy involving years of employee abuse, including sexual offenses. Gutting the management of ActiBlizz is a good bet. Too bad they got hit by the same wave of layoffs of many other studios and tech companies.
- pipes 3y agoInteresting, I didn't know that about kinect. Though I think rare were responsible for the mii like avatars which I think everyone liked. God knows how they managed to mess up perfect dark zero so much. Probably because free radical guys had left by that stage. I loved time splitters 1 and 2 too. Now I'm just rambling :)
- pfdietz 3y agoAbandonment of Odyssey linked to problems with the in-house Synapse engine. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/microsoft-cancels-big-new-blizzard-game-after-six-years-of-development?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcwNjIxNTI0MiwiZXhwIjoxNzA2ODIwMDQyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTN1U0MllUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.9Gwo6Y_jTvRVIgasZr9e7aY_DjHEB8cGUHT8Kgg-ETg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/microsoft... A good old fashioned software debacle.
- hiccuphippo 3y agoOn the bright side, I wonder how many new studios will spawn out of this?
- InCityDreams 3y agoThat will grow and follow the same pattern(s), or try new business models?
- duluca 3y agoThis is the new normal in 2024. Hearing about a layoff and reaching out to friends to check if they're safe from it. It's pretty messed up that world's richest companies are using layoffs as a mechanism to fix their balance sheet. My company never went for this lever. Also when you point out flaws in hiring processes at these large companies they swear up and down that it's absolutely necessary. So much waste, so many people chewed out in the process. Clearly there has to be a better way.