Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees in Its Games Division | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees in Its Games Division

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>“We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most, so we are refining our Prime benefit to increase our focus there. With these changes in our business approach come changes to our resourcing, resulting in the elimination of just over 180 roles"

what an awful PR statement. "y'all wanted free games, so you'll get it at the cost of 200 employee's livelihoods!". Weird to use "we're listening to consumers" as a justification to screw over their own workers.

Pretty standard defence in the "consumer welfare" model of antitrust that developed in the 80's

doesn't matter if you use your position to fuck over your suppliers and workers, so long as consumers don't see a price increase. this particular action may not be an example of trust behaviour, but amazon overall is perfectly moulded to the consumer welfare legal environment so I can see this as having that verbiage leaking through

I think they've found their sweet spot as a publisher rather than a development house.

It's hard to make successful games, and just throwing large sums of money and people at a problem doesn't guarantee success.

See: Rings of Power

People say season two was better than season one but season one was so bad I can’t bring myself to watch season two.

Season 2 hasn’t been released yet.

Ha, I was thinking of Wheel of Time series. This is what I get for commenting while on NyQuil.

Publisher in this case being the middle-man abusing monopoly power, as is the end game for pretty much any company in under-regulated capitalism.

I think if the last few years have shown us anything, it's that tech companies aren't good at making games. They just don't know how to do it.

Making games is hard. Your failure modes are the union of software and entertainment failure modes.

Honestly, I find it impressive that any good games are ever made.

hold my beer.

Especially at the wage and wlb offered by the industry.

That’s what makes it hard to compete.

It’s passion industry wages similar to working on special effects in Hollywood. These industries of course take advantage as much as they’re able. A lot of the pay is measured in “cool job” units.

I think a good lesson is that when Microsoft got into gaming they had a real long term commitment and took it seriously. They put in the work to understand it.

In contrast, Amazon and Google felt they could buy their way in based on a playbook that might have worked with other verticals. That unsurprisingly failed.

And even then they haven't been great at making games over the long term. To the extent that they have now pivoted to buying whole publishers with well established multi-billion dollar portfolios.

I haven't even heard of the divisions people were laid off from. Does anyone have any background information about what these groups were attempting to accomplish?

Not sure, but I remember clearly this Simon Wardley (of Wardley mapping) blogpost from 2016, which thinks Amazon's Lumberyard will kill Unity and Unreal (amongst others) by doing their normal Amazon play for game development.

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/02/what-to-do-about-amazon...

That didn't happen - these predictions and strategies don't always work.

I feel that Amazon absolutely was positioned to do exactly that, but rather then have the focus and the will to make a real engine, they pivoted to a minimum viable product for a entirely run of the mill game and then was surprised when AAA studios weren't impressed with their big talk about the future.

If they would have held the initial course and built a world class engine, this could have actually changed the world.

But Amazon doesn't have the backbone anymore. They're afraid of making and sticking with the big bets. In a decade, I don't know that Amazon will be seen any differently then Google is today.

Tangentially related, I just recently found out that Lumberyard actually was spun out[1] into the open source Open 3D Engine[2] under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation. It's a nice surprise to see that Lumberyard didn't just die out, and is joining the ranks of open-source engines.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220614090421/https://aws.amazo...

[2]: https://o3de.org/

Prime Gaming was primarily providing in-game content for Prime members in games like GTA 5, as well as monthly free games. There were efforts to turn it in to a publishing arm like Netflix is doing but as far as I know they have been shuttered.

Layoffs are always a bummer, and folks in gaming have more than their share to deal with (it seems, I don't actually know how it compares with other industries).

However, seeing the Crown channel go isn't a big surprise. In fact, learning that it is Amazon-produced makes its content make more sense; even as a 39 year old, the programming felt cringy in an overly-produced corporate way.

Is this really news? That's about one one hundredth of a percent.

Of what?

Their workforce

It's a much larger percentage of their Games Division specifically. This might be a big indicator of where Amazon is headed in regard to video games.

I don't know if I have ever read a more generic, boilerplate quasi-condolence paragraph than this one:

  This isn’t a decision the leadership team came to quickly; it was the result 
  of extensive considerations and road mapping for our future. We are proud of 
  the work the teams have been doing, pushing into new areas with weekly content 
  on Crown Channel, and finding more ways to help publishers reach new audiences 
  with Game Growth. But after further evaluation of our businesses, it became 
  clear that we need focus our resources and efforts to deliver great games to 
  players now and in the future.”

Very chat gtp

The robotic takeover has already begun; it's just more nuanced and less obvious at this stage.

This comment is becoming a bit of a meme on these layoff threads. This paragraph actually seems less bullshit than many of the corporate messages around layoffs. “This was not a decision we take lightly, and we’re proud of the work these teams have accomplished, but we believe that if we are to succeed we need to take the business in a different direction.”

How would you improve it?

well for a trillion dollar company, it's kind of hard to suggest "if we are to succeed", but that's not the fault of your PR statement template. It's just plain impossible to pass off "we need to make cuts" when you make that much money.

I strongly disagree. They are probably looking at it from the perspective of their organization or division.

At what point (revenue/profit/capital) does a company become required to become a jobs program? I apologize for the inflammatory language in my question, but I genuinely can't distinguish it from your perspective.

They can hire or fire however they want. That's just business. But if a company posts a 10 billion dollar net income on an earnings call and also wants to pretend that they can no longer afford to pay 200 workers (which, even if they all averaged 200k comes own to 40m dollars, or less than half a percent of said net income), I'm not going to buy it.

I don't see a way to spin that, so I'd rather they be straight with me. Product X isn't make enough money to justify costs of labor, we are cutting expenses to it. Goodbye.

Amazon tends to have good severance so I'm not actually terrified of the engineers going homeless on the streets, but it's more of the way everything is done. You tend to get zero notice for it, you're cut off immediately from all your chats and emails, and you go through the normal charade with recruiters ready to talk about how sorry they feel just as their own studio laid off the last month. You're basically treated as a criminal that needs to be cut off ASAP despite providing value for months/years and you go back to more false platitudes and the usual annoying interview rituals where you pretend you totally care about the company and need to be humble about salary despite that being a big reason (or maybe only reason) you even looked at them.

I'm just tired of all the fakeness.

You didn't respond to my main point about whether its reasonable for an unprofitable organization within a profitable corporation to make this sort of move and use this sort of messaging.

which part of "they can fire or hire however they want. That's just business" doesn't respond to your main point?

>use this sort of messaging.

They are free to message it however they want. Doesn't mean I'll believe it's the real reason they did it. I somehow doubt they will get better free games for consumers (or any) as a result of this layoff.

What was the real reason they did this? We disagree, I understand that, but I’m not sure what you’re suggesting to be the real cause.

If I knew the real reason I wouldn't have left that comment. Could be a huge scandal, could be that division wasn't making the money expected.

The most likely and boring reason is that it's just more industry shrinking in response to the economy. Just because Amazon can afford to keep things running doesn't mean they won't penny pinch.

succeed? sure. but what do you do when you decide you're just not going to pursue an entire line of business after all? pay everyone in that division to just sit on their hands?

Just say that? "we are taking a different direction to X and X is no longer needed".

I don't understand why it's so hard to be frank. We're not dealing with children here.

“This was not a decision we take lightly, and we’re proud of the work these teams have accomplished, but we believe that if we are to succeed we need to take the business in a different direction.”

Maybe you should read the above quote again.

Nope, this implies there are feelings and care involved with the employees and that they gave a respectful layoff. We both know this didn't happen here. This isn't some happy parent cheering their kid on to do their best, nor even a sad partner breaking off a relationship. Just a business cutting corners. .

And again, "if we are to succeed", yeah, as if Amazon is going to fail if they don't make all the profits in every sector.

The weasel words here are the point. I'm tired of them.

"we need to take the business in a different direction"

that's the part you're conveniently leaving out.

Indeed, if amazon paid entire divisions of people to sit on their hands in areas they've decided not to pursue (and thus don't generate revenue from) then it would be very hard for them to succeed at remaining solvent.

Every exec that I've ever known to be involved in the decision to lay people off has taken it very seriously and absolutely has feelings and care about that sort of decision. There's room for nuance.

That's not how you do it, this is:

"Failure is growth. Failure is learning. But sometimes failure is just failure. I think... I'm sorry. I didn't think it would be this hard. But goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."

Gavin Belson, CEO.

For those of us unfamiliar, this quote is from a TV show, not a real CEO.

Don't get me wrong, it's a damned good parody, but let's not mistake fiction for reality.

Some real ones:

> None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.”

https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/letter-to-employees/

> We had to lay off 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.

https://www.boredpanda.com/ceo-fires-support-staff-after-ai-...

And because a picture is worth 1000 words, Braden Wallake's cryface selfie

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/wlg92h/ceos_lin...

Do you think that's what the team got? This is just PR babble.

> “We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most"

There is a lot to unpack in this statement. I for one don't really want monthly free shit clicker games.

No. We want New World to get more love, and be viable.

Definitely, it has so much promise as a foundation for even greater experiences.

Gamers complain about a lot of stuff, but I don't know anyone complaining about a lack of quantity of video games. There are 70K games on Steam and 460K games on the app store alone.

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