1900 people laid off is an extremely violent situation. I didn’t expect so many layoffs.
5 Likes
??? Dev direct was the best non summer showcase anyone has ever had
6 Likes
I personally thought the games at D_D were wholly unimpressive outside of Indy and Xbox has another half a year gap in their first party release cadence.
Almost 2 thousand people have lost their jobs and its only January, how is that not a rough year regardless of the games to be released?
Its so tiring when anything that isnt full on optimism is labelled as “concern trolling”
1 Like
When you posted that I assumed it was a joke but just seen IGN post it too.
Not a great decision by MS right now while they are trying to repair their image.
Your feelings about a show are yours alone. Saying it is a rough year so far because of your own personal feelings about the DD is nonsense. You are allowed to not be excited about what was shown, but your feelings are not an indictment of the state of Xbox.
The layoffs are a bummer, and I hope for the best for everyone affected, but they are also day-to-day corporate reality.
14 Likes
People losing their jobs is always a terrible thing. It’s also been happening widespread across the tech industry recently and was always inevitable after a big merger.
“I personally didn’t like the games at the Dev Direct showcase”, a showcase that was universally rather well received, and pretending that half a year is a staggering amount of time between first party releases for a platform holder? I mean yes it sounds rather hyperbolic to declare “2024 is shaping up to be rough for Xbox”.
5 Likes
With all due respect, your concerns with the Developer Direct are yours alone and aren’t shared by anyone else. I was thoroughly impressed by what was on offer, especially since it’s all coming to Game Pass Day 1 (whereas we would have to pay $70 each for them if they were on Playstation). This does not constitute Xbox being in for a “rough year”. Xbox has a cadence of 1st Party releases and 3rd Party Game Pass deals lined up to cover us throughout the year (just look at Palworld and the success its having and try and tell me you’d rather have Helldivers).
Secondly, while it is definitely a shame to see so many people be let go, I expect Microsoft to be hiring throughout the year and to have nearly made up for those numbers in the next 12 Months. All this to say your original comment seemed needlessly dramatic. I actually think we as consumers and Xbox as a whole are in for a very good year.
8 Likes
The scope was always going to vary, but knowing ABK size as well as being a recent acquisition, this was probably foreseen; at least in this range. I wouldn’t know but it’s always about how big it will be. As for timing, well timing was always going to be against them. Like if ABK was acquired back in April, we will have enough time to digest before layoff happens. Because the acquisition occurred merely two months before the judgment day, it came off looking bad.
Trust me, despite explaining this, it still upsets me that this is happening. It’s how I adapted for a while now.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone is trying to diminish the seriousness of what has taken place.
However, this is a news cycle this comes up every year every time a company makes staffing moves. This is an unfortunate byproduct of the world we live in, but until you convince society at large to give up capitalism, it is just the way things work. Microsoft’s, or any other corporations, impetus as a business isn’t to carry staff just because. It is to make shareholders happy. And if you check MS’s stock right now, it did exactly that.
There is a reason I have decided to keep working in Higher Ed instead of taking a corporate role where I could make a fair bit more money. The stability of it is far more appealing to me.
3 Likes
In Phil Spencer’s email to employees, I did find one sentence odd…
It seems odd that you would have to point out to the remaining employees to be respectful to departing colleagues. It does make me wonder if some of these layoffs is part of the ‘house cleaning’ that many wanted for ABK. I wouldn’t be shocked if Mike Ybarra is one example of this, given his strong push to end remote work.
7 Likes
That definitely is an odd statement, not the usual thing you’d see in one of these emails
Yeah some of this is house cleaning but… Man alot of people who probably don’t deserve this suffering are being hit.
Layoffs suck.
2 Likes
I could maybe see some of it being cleaning house but 1900? yeah, a lot of this is just redundancies and the usual big company saving money shtick
Yep. Plus a game cancelation shows to me it wasn’t just redundancies… This was to make the next financial results look even better… And that is disgusting
3 Likes
It is house cleaning. It happens every year in January because they don’t fire anyone before Christmas and give the 2023 bonuses in mid-february. Employees working in these companies should know that if by december they’re not meeting their goals, (even as a team), they’ll be on the market before the end of January. It happened to me too.
2 Likes
I’ll downplay it quite easily. I think rage culture is in full swing & there’s a hell of a lot of faux outrage, virtue signalling & yes, console warring going on with this news. Also a load of clickbaiting as well.
Companies restructure, acquisitions lead to redundant doubled positions etc. & people are let go all the time. It sucks for those people involved but then again, some probably expected it & have in fact most likely jumped from job to job before in this industry. It’s just the nature of the beast. But when I see the raging on places like other era right now… it’s too much.
They rage at layoffs, they claim they’re for the devs, they rage at microtransactions, they rage at bad performance in games, they rage at games like COD, Diablo IV & Starfield because they didn’t hit their expectations… & many also never truly hide their desire to see one team “win” the console wars & Xbox pull out. What do they think would happen to all the devs then?
So this is hardly newsworthy as far as I’m concerned. especially considering how these companies grew during Covid years.
1 Like
Their stock price just soared, that’s the reason things like this happen.
5 Likes
The Internet: If MS closes on Activision, they need to clean house!
Also the internet: NO, NOT LIKE THAT
9 Likes
Layoffs AND a game cancelled…
Why cancel Odyssey ? Why ?
The project felt like something special.
You’re a f***ing trillion dollar company.
Edit : we’ll forget about this in month or so but it’s still bad. You can’t mesure the consequences of these layoffs directly.
2 Likes