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News Microsoft lays off 1,900 staff from its video game workforce

And then rightoids get mad when we tell them why we need stronger regulations to avoid monopolies.
And even more butthurt when we explain how capitalism always leads to scenarios like this; where smaller companies are bought out by bigger ones essentially eliminating competition.

But not merely stopping at that, doing even more harm through layoffs justified by "cost reductions".
 
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Evil Lucario said:
I'm sure Phil Spencer and other executives will take a paycut to help weather the storm over at Microsoft, right?

Right?
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sagadego20 said:
https://fxtwitter.com/JezCorden/status/1750596402093216146
Note: reducing retail teams doesn't confirm Microsoft is quitting physical retail for Xbox games yet, they can outsource, and might be consolidating here. So, don't run with "Xbox is quitting physical" based on this.But, it does seem to be the industry trajectory. Writing is on…
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I barely see Xbox games in instores.so Xbox truly does intend to get rid of Physical
 
Wow, surprise surprise, Xbox isn’t some heavenly angelic company who orphan lost puppies and give out free food for the poor and shelter homeless people. If only we could have anticipated a company owned by Microsoft being evil
 
Is Nintendo the only major video game company that never lays off any staff? Nintendo from the looks of it have a healthy business model that allows them to steadily grow their staff numbers without ever having to lay off staff. That makes them pretty much unique in the gaming market today.
 
JazzPotatoes said:
Absolutely ridiculous state of affairs. Microsoft could find 69 billion to buy Activision, but couldn't even find a few million to keep an extra 1900 staff on.

The thing is: it's not even that long since the merger. Microsoft would have been looking into these layoffs while the ink on the contract was still wet
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Exactly. These layoffs were in the cards since day zero. The same is true for other layoffs following large mergers. I should know because I was made "redundant" less than six months after a large merger deal closed.
 
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Danny said:
Is Nintendo the only major video game company that never lays off any staff? Nintendo from the looks of it have a healthy business model that allows them to steadily grow their staff numbers without ever having to lay off staff. That makes them pretty much unique in the gaming market today.
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As far as I understand mass layoffs are rare (and technically illegal) in Japan. But Nintendo does on average have a much higher employee retention rate.

When you see companies shit the bed like Konami, that's how you hear the horror stories of them mistreating staff until they get fed up and quit.
 
Mekanos said:
As far as I understand mass layoffs are rare (and technically illegal) in Japan. But Nintendo does on average have a much higher employee retention rate.

When you see companies shit the bed like Konami, that's how you hear the horror stories of them mistreating staff until they get fed up and quit.
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Yeah it seems there are som different perks working in Japan compared to the west as a game dev, one negative is that the salary is worse but the positive is that you have fare greater job security compared to working in a western gaming company.
 
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More layoffs will probably happen before the end of March due to the end of the fiscal years. All in all terrible.
 
Hocot8 said:
That's just classic Wall Street though.
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Yep, and it's because investors are fucking morons. The extent of their "thinking" is:

Layoffs -> Lower expenses -> Higher profits

Doesn't matter how many times it's shown to not really work that way (indeed, mass layoffs typically will either have a neutral or negative impact on profits), they're going to keep believing it!
 
Not to be an alarmist, but does this feel at all to you guys like the triple a bubble is collapsing in on itself? Between layoffs at the embracer company and them literally struggling to fund games, to Sony’s massively slowed down output and the cancellation of the last of us factions, and now these massive Microsoft lay offs and game cancellations, coupled with them possibly going third party and barely having anything to support their first 3 years of the series consoles, to triple a releases taking almost a decade to make and costing upwards of 350 million dollars to make….this all just feels like too much. Something needs to change, I don’t know what but I don’t know how any of this is sustainable
 
Beanstar40 said:
Not to be an alarmist, but does this feel at all to you guys like the triple a bubble is collapsing in on itself? Between layoffs at the embracer company and them literally struggling to fund games, to Sony’s massively slowed down output and the cancellation of the last of us factions, and now these massive Microsoft lay offs and game cancellations, coupled with them possibly going third party and barely having anything to support their first 3 years of the series consoles, to triple a releases taking almost a decade to make and costing upwards of 350 million dollars to make….this all just feels like too much. Something needs to change, I don’t know what but I don’t know how any of this is sustainable
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This is an issue with dumb companies (like Sony and Microsoft). Not an industry issue.
Sony has been closing studios for years so of course they don't make games.
Microsoft spent billions for no reason just to shutter studios because they have no idea what they're doing.
 
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HockeyBird said:
About 8 to 9 percent.
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Goodness, even if most of the staff wasn’t fired this probably made everyone who works there paranoid, and for good reason. Xbox has tens of billions of dollars to buy companies yet can’t find it in them to keep hundreds of people with families to take care of. God I can’t wait for the industry to realize the way this are going isn’t sustainable, but knowing the people that run these companies that probably isn’t happening for a while
 
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Edit: Nevermind. Forgot they were banned here

But it looks like 25% of Sledgehammer Games, the makers of this years COD, were laid off.
 
Don't let people gaslight you into thinking acquisitions and mergers are good and companies won't do what they always do under capitalism.
 
I knew layoffs were going to happen when the merger was finalized but did not expect it to be this bad.

I don't know what the fuck Microsoft expects from Call of Duty cause that franchise is barely able to get a game out a year. They can't even do a full game a year anymore and THAT was after they had, what, 6 studios, working on the series. Sledgehammer just fumbled a Warzone update and they lost 10% of their employees.

This year needs to be the year of unionization for game developers.
 
Adulfzen said:
Don't let people gaslight you into thinking acquisitions and mergers are good and companies won't do what they always do under capitalism.
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Yeah though honestly I thought it would take a bit more time until the negative effects surface but I guess here we are. „Long life shortsighted profit maximising!“ - Higher ups at Microsoft, probably.
 
lexony said:
Yeah though honestly I thought it would take a bit more time until the negative effects surface but I guess here we are. „Long life shortsighted profit maximising!“ - Higher ups at Microsoft, probably.
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definitely thought it'd take longer as well but this just seems like the "covid bubble" so to speak made it also easier to justify and accelerate despite Microsoft becoming a trillion dollar company..
 
Adulfzen said:
definitely thought it'd take longer as well but this just seems like the "covid bubble" so to speak made it also easier to justify and accelerate despite Microsoft becoming a trillion dollar company..
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I don‘t know how much inflation plays a role here but that‘s the most infuriating part about it. All those companies are in the best place ever, the game industry is bigger than ever, but the only thing that counts is having success hype stories or "innovations" (mostly empty promises) which accelerate artificial growth, so bye bye employees.
 
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Vantell said:
More layoffs will probably happen before the end of March due to the end of the fiscal years. All in all terrible.
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To be entirely honest I don't think this will end till we are in 2025. Going to be a brutal year for the industry all around.
 
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We are already at ~60% of last year’s total & it isn’t even Feb; I absolutely expect this year to be even worse for employees than last.
 
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It's becoming more clear that this wasn't just because of redundancy. Artists, QA testers, managers, communications, are getting the axe. Just because you don't write code doesn't mean you aren't vital to the development process.
 
Danny said:
Is Nintendo the only major video game company that never lays off any staff? Nintendo from the looks of it have a healthy business model that allows them to steadily grow their staff numbers without ever having to lay off staff. That makes them pretty much unique in the gaming market today.
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This is kinda one of the reasons Nintendo isn't crazy about acquisitions. There's a lot of redundancies with an acquisition and a lot of staff your company may not be able to support with all the inefficiencies.
 
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Danny said:
Is Nintendo the only major video game company that never lays off any staff? Nintendo from the looks of it have a healthy business model that allows them to steadily grow their staff numbers without ever having to lay off staff. That makes them pretty much unique in the gaming market today.
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I read somewhere that in Japan it's much harder to fire someone than it is in the U.S., you're basically employed for life at a Japanese company unless there's a serious reason for removal. Also salaries in Japan for developers are really low. That's why several studios did huge pay bumps recently. NoA did shutter one of their West Coast offices a while back which is why Kit and Krysta left the company rather than relocate.
 
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This was always going to happen, and I'm frustrated at how many people insisted it wouldn't.

Hoping the best for the employees. This should not have happened.
 
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