The difficulty here is that this is a nuanced conversation about an emotionally charged topic. Hyperbolic takes like “the brand has lost its way” or “how are they going to make CoD now” are not particularly valuable.
There are universal truths about all of this that everyone can agree on:
Any loss of jobs, in any industry is a bummer. No one wants that for anyone.
This is the way corporate business is conducted, but that doesn’t diminish the real human toll these decisions have or the overall shitiness of these moves.
It is okay to be mad about what has taken place.
This isn’t a MS specific issue; it is an industry wide issue. This isn’t going to be the last one of these you hear about. More are coming from other companies.
People affected by these decisions aren’t interested in pragmatic discussions about it, nor should they be. If I got fired tomorrow and someone wanted to talk to me about the how/why of it all I’d punch them in the teeth.
The pandemic is still taking its toll. The explosion of gaming and the staffing up during that period is coming home to roost now that the tide has pulled back.
A large market cap doesn’t mean infinite resources to just keep every employee on the roll.
There is a reason why I’m always quick to point out that the only attachment to a brand you should ever have is that they provide you something worth your time and money. The moment that stops, cut it loose. They aren’t your friend. Nintendo isn’t your friend. Sony isn’t your friend. No company is your friend.
They started a mass hiring spree when the COVID boom was going on… just like every other publisher was unfortunately. The bubble burst is the direct cause for today’s layoffs, as it was for Embracer, Sony, Ubisoft, EA, Riot, and far more studios and publishers that I can easily name… this isn’t an “Xbox problem” and it literally says nothing about the state of Xbox (would love to see any empirical/quantitive evidence to suggest otherwise… there is none) but the moment something happens in the industry it’s only apparently doom when Xbox is the source.
At the end of the day I still want Team green to do well and they will. It sucks this happened but everyone will recover. PS xbox and nintendo arnt going anywhere. Dont show them brand loyalty. Just buy what makes you happy. Job losses happened everywhere last year and will continue this year everywhere. Dont let the FUD get you down because its xbox. This year is still going to be great. They still have the best linup IMO
Heard all kinds of news but this one cuts deep, makes me feel like giving up gaming. Is a crash about to happen cos i feel like gaming is about to have a drastic if not radical change.
Absolutely brutal news and my heart goes out to the employees being let go into an environment where job cuts are happening across the industry and where it’s going to be very hard to find a new position within gaming. There were always going to be some cuts due to redundancies but the number is staggering and a lot deeper then I think most were expecting.
The entire industry is doing this. Its nothing to do with consolidation. Plenty of independent studios, large and small, are cutting jobs, cancelling projects and getting shut down.
The second side is that this looks realpy bad on Microsoft. ABK was very profitable, and by itself could pay the wages of all its employees and make money for shareholders. That didnt change when MS bought them. MS just wanted to make more profit, as quickly as possible, when in reality they didnt need to. There was no dire financial issues facing MS. They are the richest company in the world. They could have done this far more gradually, with less cuts.
Microsoft really has shit people who are in charge of reading the room and knowing what are good decisions and what arnt.
For years people have lambasted Microsoft for their hands off approach with regards to running their studios. This ‘hands off’ attitude was blamed when Redfall crashed & burned last year, or when 343 failed to deliver the Halo game everyone wanted in 2021 after half a decade of dev time & hundreds of millions of dollars of budget. What happened to 343? Many were “let go”, i.e. layoffs. There were countless conversations over the years about how people wanted MS to be far more active, proactive & in charge of all their teams, i.e. micromanage release schedules & pipelines instead of sitting back & letting their studios do whatever.
As far as I can tell, MS have now taken charge. The numbers are pretty self-evident: 22000 employees on their team, 1900 layoffs. This is after 3 years featuring 2 of the biggest acquisitions of all time (certainly in gaming). No one batted an eyelid when Disney did mass layoffs after acquiring Fox (3000 or so), so what’s the difference here?
It’s just business. It can suck for the people involved but then again, many will have jumped from company to company before, also many have beaten others to job positions before as well. It’s how the market works. There’s competition at every level.
Context is everything. Post-merger layoffs are standard. If the layoffs happened a few years down the line after underperformance of the brand, then yes, there’s a problem.
But until then, wait & see. There will be people hired as well down the line, except those go pretty much unreported when the aim of the game is sensationalized clickbait articles & forum doom posting which drives traffic & ad revenue.
Very disappointing news about Toys For Bob. So its not only ‘redundancies’ in QA, HR, marketing or community management but also core parts of development. smh
Can we please not? This always rubs me the wrong way. People are humans, not fat to trim. Higher ups at Microsoft may see their employees only as numbers on a balance sheet but we can do better.
What has MS being too hands off have to do with cutting 1900 jobs from an already highly profitable company? Its the optics. They also cut alot deeper than just the double up areas normally gained in a meger.
They also got rid of people at Zenimax and XGS.
This, along with them now putting games on competing hardware, is a sign that we arnt in Kansas any more with Xbox.
Exactly! Microsoft reorganized their leadership structure to be more supportive of their devs and proactive in gaming development. Didn’t people want Xbox to be more hands on.
If someone is working for 5 or 6 years on a failed project (for example the Blizzard survival game) & the job done by the whole team isn’t up to scratch, what do think is going to happen? A promotion? Everyone dissed on Redfall, so did people want that Arkane team to get jobs for life as well?
I mean come on. This is the entertainment industry. People come & go, i.e. at all levels. There’s no job for life. Anyone working at these companies knows this as well. They’ve all beaten out competition from other CV’s for the roles. There’s a hiring process in which some people win, others lose. As long as there’s mobility across the industry, then talent will always find another job. I’m sure there are studios hiring right now & many of those who’ve been let go will apply elsewhere very quickly.
I fightback against the ‘optics’ of the sky falling & a number (1900 in this case) being used as a means to spread more doom & paint a very negative picture. In reality Xbox is about the enact their business plan which they put in motion years ago. Now we’ll see what they have planned for Activision-Blizzard (& we’ll see when they add the content to GP as well).
One of the things I was personally hoping for was a huge expansion of Toys for Bob, so we see more family games released in a regular cadence.
Now that seems very unlikely .
The first thing Spencer did as the head of Microsoft Game Studios back in 2009 was he shut down Aces (Flight Sim studio) and Ensemble. I warmed up to him over time but at the time I was furious.
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