Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

Yeahh 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.

> 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

My first three SysAd gigs got acquired, all three were for the worse.

I'll disclose one long enough ago: HostGator

100% start looking, the company will fundamentally change

Sure, hopefully for the better, but I'm batting 0

> I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted

This is a great point. I've been through two acquisitions and both times the company was a noticeably less pleasant place a year later.

To me the Warcraft III Reforged saga dispelled any illusion Blizzard would still hold off on releasing unfinished/unpolished games

> 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.

There are many ways to increase profits. Diluting existing shareholders by increasing outstanding shares should not be a bandaid for inefficient application of capital, which would juts cause a vicious cycle.

One view is that it's related to labor hoarding.

A lot of people exited the labor market (disabled or killed by COVID, pulled the trigger on retiring, etc.). Unemployment was very low and it was very difficult to hire. And companies had opportunities for growth, but taking advantage of those opportunities required workers, which were hard to get.

So companies responded by hiring whenever possible and keeping more employees around than they normally would. If there was less work to do, they'd reduce hours instead of letting employees go. Better to pay more labor costs now than to be stuck unable to get employees later. You pay a cost (larger payrolls) to reduce a risk.

Hoarding can be kind of self-reinforcing because as everybody grabs what is available (job seekers), it becomes more scarce, so people want to grab up even more.

But hoarding tends to stop eventually. Companies don't want to pay more for payroll if they don't have to. Once they feel the risk is gone, they'll aim to adjust things back to normal.

Once layoffs start, they could have a domino effect on labor hoarding. If a bunch of companies do layoffs, then other companies think, "Well, if we did need to hire, we could get some of those laid off workers." And then they reevaluate their own situation.

If this is what's happening, then it will take some time for it to play out. Eventually all the hoarding-related layoffs will have been done.

Stock issue dilutes ownership and lowers share price. Why would people paid in stock do that when they can just offload labor? Also, they'd be competing with market makers, winkwinknudgenudge.

It blows my mind that people aren't hiring like mad with high interest rates. It seems like just parking a bunch of money somewhere and letting it accumulate interest would pay for salaries. Shoot, for 10 million dollars you could pay the entire salary of 2 developers without touching a dime of the actual money.

Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.

Right, reduce headcount, adjust balance sheets, extract profits with fewer people.

Coming from both a place of kindness and a place of selfishness:

1. Please keep at it. We need more people with experience staying in software. I don’t know your financial situation, but software is huge and something will land!

2. Based on this comment, I highly recommend likely not ever starting a company. It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous. And even though it’s hard times in the macro, it’s actually way harder for many compounding reasons that are not obvious until you do it.

Again, coming from a place of love.

Same, in 20+ years doing this, I've never seen it this bad.

Downturns is the best time to build a startup. When things turn around, you hopefully have found product market fit and can ride the up wave.

Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups.

It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.

  Due to some GREAT legislation

" In 2017, then-President, Donald Trump, signed the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs act, which overhauled tax codes and reduced tax – for example, it reduced the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 37%. To make the bill pass strict budgetary rules, the Senate used a process called reconciliation: adding in tax code changes that delayed tax increases. These delayed increases “balanced out” the tax reduction.

One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law. "

Have 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/

With the advances in AI, I really hope coop vs AI gameplay will be made better.

Hey Microsoft, no StarCraft 3 please. This will be a huge distraction and will surely cause an AI Winter.

And even if they did, after they failed so miserably at remastering an RTS they'd already made I don't trust them to make a good one from scratch. Nor do I trust them not to screw over the mapmaking and modding communities after the license changes they made in SC2 and WC3 Reforged

Anything coming out of modern Blizzard will be garbage, like with Bethesda.

Your best hope is that they license the IP to a company that actually cares, like Bethesda did with Black Isle for Fallout New Vegas.

Stormgate looks like it was developed a decade before SC2, not a decade after

Are you mixing it up with Stormgate? ZeroSpace doesn't have much if any ex-Blizzard on the team, do they?

I 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.

Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on.

My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.

At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.

people need to get used to the idea that brand-name recognition doesn't mean anything anymore once said brand no longer represents what it once did. very few game development studios perpetuate the internal mindset they became known for, as its constituent developers get ship-of-theseus'd out. sure, you might have some fans of the old brand now working there, but merely being a fan of something doesn't necessarily confer the ideology and mindset of those who created the thing you were a fan of. as time goes on, you get to the point where studios hire fans of the latter-day output of the studio, rather than the earlier stuff, such that the studio drifts farther and farther away from its former identity. then, especially after a massive corporation like Microsoft buys the studio out completely, the studio becomes a mere husk of its former glory—completely different people with an entirely different mindset continue to wear its skin.

perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.

For me the big problems were 1) no power spikes, unique gear is mostly irrelevant except for a couple pieces that unlock certain builds. In D2 you’d find some crazy unique early on that makes you completely OP for a few levels, and those spikes really made things memorable. 2) too easy, and the auto-leveling on monsters. On WT2 where you start the game is just too easy and even the +2 level strongholds are not hard. If you do any side quests you quickly get to the point where you have leveled past the area minimums so there is nowhere to go to get +5-10 challenges that are actually fun. It takes so long to unlock WT4 that I was bored by the time the challenge started to pick up. I realize the hardcore players are going to do an optimized route to get to WT4 in a shortish grind, then the game begins, but just playing the game as it is presented the difficulty curves are completely wrong.

Kind of amazing to see a 2-day old season already abandoned by a majority of the players...that's how bad the new season is.

It's just sad I guess this is an example of post consumerism. Maybe making games for the sake of profit and not fun it was just a matter of time.

I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.

You might remember the release of D3 with rose-tinted glasses ?

Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.

Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).

Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.

I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.

Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.

The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.

But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)

What 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.

"No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes

Its not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.

I 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...

Where has it gone south?

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.

It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.

Metzen is actually back on WoW as of recently.

WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo

You're bringing back memories of Jaedong :-))

I’d love a brood war remaster

> BW is a near perfect game

It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.

Behavioural 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..

> 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.

I bet they could get Lowko to do it for free.

Do 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.)

Yea, if the acquisition was only about one thing, it was definitely mobile

I'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.

Candy Crush?

That sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?

Larian 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

In times like this, it's important to remember that Skyrim was made by a team of around 100 people.

And we just had Starfield come out to demonstrate how little all that matters.

And barely 9,200 as of Dec 31st, 2019

The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places

As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.

Hey, I happen to like my Luxurious Niffen Hat! [1]

[1] https://ironstorage.blob.core.windows.net/public-images/luxu...

Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.

Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.

Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.

And at the same time you have best-in-class games created by one person. (Ok, two, if you add the various publisher/third party help.)

Interesting, 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 :)

I’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.

for attention of

For the Attention Of

"For Attention Of" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fao#

Apparently, 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.

I was about to say - https://www.google.com/search?q=FAO

> Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Home

(Obviously NOT what the original commenter meant, but no context!)

Curious if there are models trained to output 3d stl (or similar) files instead of 2d png

That lower left arm is much too long in the AI generated rendering. Granted, it’s also a bit too long in the drawing, but the rendering makes it even longer.

Probably reffering to midjourney version 6

Not unless they stop using copyrighted material it won't.

Remember, the legal cases are still ongoing.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't.

It took Amazon a decade to have a serious impact on the economy, even though it was working from day one. Now we have AI technology that's only half working. So what the impact will be and when is anyone's guess.

Couldn't conventional software have done this? And it didn't. So why would AI do it now?

Although the gaming industry doesn't have a good record, they are probably better than Chipotle.

https://jacobin.com/2021/05/chipotle-nightmare-employer-wage...

i 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

Eh?

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.

LLMs don't compete with artists, they are more about text.. (Large Language Model)

Ironically the image generators might increase pro-artist wages in the short term since there is less money in grinding low paying jobs now? The competition should fall abit.

Maybe at larger studios but smaller ones are transitioning especially in things like initial designs (ie: characters, etc.). Someone told me recently that "our Art Director is ChatGPT."

i 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.

What 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).