It’s gotta be so disheartening to not just the laid off employees but even the ones still there, this is not a good start to building trust and healthy integration… it’s so shit.
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I can not describe how much this pisses me off especially after all this “all in on gaming” and “our acquisitions are good for everyone” talk.
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Microsoft are a bunch of clowns for this. They’re the richest company in the world but to just discard employees like that after an acquisition is just gross
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Must be redundancy positions that are mostly getting hit. I foresaw this even with acquisition. This is why January tends to be really rough on jobs. Pandemic didn’t help with inflation, so this kind of stuff was always going to be nasty to see. I knew time was coming for this one, so I always prepared for the worst.
I really expected them to tank it, they could have afforded it but the combination of every other company doing layoffs and the fact that MS already did a non gaming layoff made it easy for them to just add to the pile like we’re numb to it. It was either going to be 3 announcements or 1 with no real way to determine if consolidation made this worse or not (need some real numbers not hunches). I also don’t get people feeling bad about Ybarra leaving, the guy’s policies sucked he mandated a return to the office at Blizzard just to exert control.
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This usually happens when a massive company buys another smaller company but I didn’t think it would be this soon nor this cold blooded.
A sobering reminder that yeah, Xbox is a cool ecosystem to be in but Microsoft is just as soulless and ruthless as any other company behind the public facade.
Feel bad for everyone that got laid off, and the future upcoming thousands within the gaming industry in the following months.
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Few days before Microsoft announced their earnings. Sadly it’s expected.
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Terrible news and a terrible look for the company, you finally acquire your big company and get rid of 1900 of them, absolutely wack
Ybarra gone and the survival game cancelled is pretty shocking news too
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It would explain the absent from Blizzcon if anything.
I wonder if Odyssey was a Bobby mandated “We need a survival game” type deal and talking with the devs the Xbox team just got the vibe that they weren’t that confident in it. A blizzard survival game is easy money so it seems like they would have just saw it through.
https://x.com/zhugeex/status/1750530203468849230?s=46&t=O_AGT9SEnlptKOF_2SxtqQ
Expect more. No one is safe.
wtf is happening
January means layoff time. That’s the sad part of economy, especially here in USA.
Jeez, this industry is in a very bad place
It was only rumors of course but there seemed like a lot of excitement and confidence in it, clearly that wasn’t the case
Basically a big acquisition or merger result to layoffs because a lot of redundant positions + few days before Microsoft announced their earnings (January is layoff month).
It’s better to lie than spreading bad news at the first show after the merger.
Or something happened idk.
Perhaps he chose to leave because of the layoffs? It’s a very disappointing day.
I would be surprised if he didn’t expect any layoffs. But all we can do is speculate.
What a gross move. Acquiring a 70 billion dollar company and their first move (Literraly first move, Activision games are not even in gamepass yet) is to fire more than 1000 people.
What a good way to make future acquisitions harder too.
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