Stunned devs left scrambling for livelihoods in wake of layoff bloodbath | Hacker News Reader

Stunned devs left scrambling for livelihoods in wake of layoff bloodbath

pcgamer.com

34 pointsbelter13 comments

I see Microsoft has entered the 'extinguish' phase of another business venture.

What an absolute waste of talent and potential. But as always, if M$FT can't beat em', they can certainly try to kill em'. Though in this case, I have to wonder if it is a natural side effect of how poorly the Xbox and their Game Pass investments are doing.

These layoffs are 1900 people out of 22,000 people in the gaming division, or 9% of the group. It's sad for the people involved, but this seems pretty standard, honestly, after a big acquisition. The combination of "people whose jobs are redundant after the acquisition" and "underperformers who Blizzard hadn't fired because management was distracted by the acquisition" could account for the whole 9%.

From what I can tell, there's very little of either of those categories represented here, at least not in any systematic way.

Based on what I've seen from people within Blizzard, there was absolutely no performance-based layoff here. This was entirely from a high-level "pick the roles you think you don't need anymore" perspective.

It's also not at all clear that it represents any meaningful consideration of who is "redundant" after the merger. A significant amount of those 9% came from eliminating the roles working on the canceled survival game.

I did hear that they also eliminated an entire customer service office in Texas—it's possible that was considered "redundant", but it's also possible they've just decided to outsource that particular bit of customer service.

No; as with many, many layoffs-in-good-times (which generally includes layoffs-after-a-merger), this is primarily just the people at or near the very top reaching down and slashing with big machetes and very little careful aim in order to juice the stock price.

This is not a one-time action though. MS had even bigger layoffs a year ago

If any industry needs a union it's gamedev.

Also tech to be fair.

They just need the monopolies and the cartels broken up. A union is only a valid response to market power abuse and market power abuse comes from a company holding too much of the market. Instead of unionizing, we need to move much closer back to the way we dealt with these large corps prior to the Rehnquist supreme court (not all the way back but probably 80% of the way back, they were breaking up regional gas station chains at one point, which is a little too far for me).

Given the culture of complete rot and toxicity at AVB and Microsoft's recent acquisition, these are perhaps the least surprising of the mass layoffs.

MS has returned $0.20 to shareholders with this action.

Well, on the plus side, Microsoft's stocks should see a nice bump for "doing the hard thing". /s

All this after a wildly profitable year ($10B is a number I heard) by Activision Blizzard.

We don't know what their profit for the year is, the Q4 results aren't out yet. Even more, we're unlikely to ever know, since Microsoft is unlikely to break them out at that granularity.

But we can say with absolute certainty that they're did not make anywhere near $10B of profit last year. Activision doesn't even make that much in revenue! Their 2022 profit was $1.5B.

Good info, thank you!

The brilliant engineers laid off would simply form new companies or join existing ones to drive competition and innovation! Which in turn will provide better choices and prices for customers and consumers! The marketplace is working. /s

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