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submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 214 points 2 years ago

It is worth understanding that this is "different" than... all the other layoffs in tech at this point.

MS acquired ABK. Any acquisition almost always leads to "downsizing". At a high level: ABK would have had their own payroll department. Now they go through MS payroll. Why do you need an entire department whose job is now superfluous? Obviously this gets a LOT more complex with developers and the like (as well as local management) but that is the mindset.

But... holy fucking shit that is a lot of people getting laid off at one of the worst times to be unemployed in "tech" in the past decade.

[-] [email protected] 65 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It is indeed a lot of people. A quick search says ABK employed 17,000 people. Laying over over 10% of your workforce is... intense, to say the least. Though, how much of that 1,900 is just from ABK is hard to say, so the percentage could be lower.

You're right though; HR, payroll, legal, and social media/PR departments would definitely be among the first on the chopping block, depending on how much MS wants to integrate ABK into their existing departments.

[-] [email protected] 43 points 2 years ago

Finance too. They're almost always first from the multiple I've personally been through. The new owners want those hands out of the pot asap.

[-] [email protected] 40 points 2 years ago

Also considering the apparent toxicity of certain Blizzard employees it's probably a good opportunity to "purge" the Kotic gang and his following.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

So that's a dozen people. 1900 is more than a hundred times that. (#mathFTW)

These cuts will seriously hurt product.

Also, I sense my less-than-new windows version will be unsupported; and I only had it so the one game ran better.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Blizzard Products were polished turds.

They need a huge cultural shift and I'm all for it.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

Hence why acquisitions need more scrutiny. It literally kills jobs.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Yeah, it’s brutal out there right now. Reminds me of 2008 or 2000.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

Similar to 2008 but the 1% found out a way to keep their wealth intact while still fucking everyone else over.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

In 2008, those responsible got the rest of us to bail them out and give billions in bonuses.

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[-] [email protected] 119 points 2 years ago

I never want to hear "job creators" as a reason for tax breaks and special treatment again.

[-] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago

You're going to hear so much more of it now that we're cranking the unemployment rate back up again.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Plus being an election year, they gotta cycle through everything and see what sticks.

[-] [email protected] 117 points 2 years ago

68 billion to acquire IP, but can't afford to pay the people who make and maintain it.

[-] [email protected] 40 points 2 years ago

Layoffs after this size of merger are pretty typical. The number of people seems high, but it might be due to Activision's own acquisitions over the years.

First round of layoffs after a merger is consolidation of corporate administrative functions. ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn ActiBlizz had a lot of administrative bloat.

Most of the knowledge workers will be kept for now. Will be future cuts there as objectives are finalized and staff needed becomes clear.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

ActiBlizz finance, accounting, HR, etc is no longer needed. Microsoft already has all those needs covered.

That's not 1900 people, that's like 50.

I've been part of these before; they cut by pay. Junior artist? You stay. Senior artist? Bye. It goes all the way down to QA. A place I used to work at had massive layoffs, and were left with a QA team of 15 whose most senior member had 6 months in the industry.

This is phase 2. Phase one was last year when they laid of 10,000. those were the finance/accounting/etc people. This is specifically the games area which at this point, according to my friends caught in said layoff, says it’s mostly seniors across all (gaming) divisions.

EDIT: To be clear to the downvoters: 1. I worked at Microsoft (gaming) 5 years ago, and was caught in one of these layoffs. 2. It won't be areas like accounting/HR/finance because that was last year. I know people caught in these layoffs, and it's seniors in each department.

Microsoft uses, especially in Canada, a system to bypass hiring full-time employees, which they have to do here legally after 5 years of employment every X years (I forget how many). They hire from 3rd party contractors, and then refuse to rehire you after you've worked 4+ years, until a six month gap has occurred and you change 3rd party vendors. They do this with over half of their employees, so their gaming division has a TINY HR department because most of the staff don't technically work for Microsoft. I met 'our' HR at a meeting shortly before we were all laid off, and had never had any contact with any of them (nor anyone in payroll, etc, because that was all done by our 3rd party vendors.)

[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

lol no. 50 might just cover ActiBlizz accounts payable department.

I work for a similar sized company now. We have around 300 just in Finance. Another nearly that many in accounting. When companies get this big they have a lot of spending and assets to track.

Then you get into Marketing, Sales, HR, etc. I'd confidently bet 90% of the 1900 roles were corporate administration. I've personally gone through this process multiple times. I've even been part of making consolidation decisions for a few of them.

Edit: What you experienced will happen. But as phase 2.

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

not a chance thats 50 people. it could be 50 HR business partners alone. that 1900 could easily be entirely backoffice positions

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[-] [email protected] 93 points 2 years ago

The industry is at its most wealthy and yet it feels like its on fire.

[-] [email protected] 45 points 2 years ago

Yup thats capitalism. Always need to make more money than previous year, or we have a depression.. Lol.

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[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago

It’s all about instilling Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt to gain from it.

Right now what they are gaining are lower overhead and when they re-hire they will be paying less for the same roles.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

You don't get rich paying a ton of people 200k. You get rich not paying them. So what you are saying is actually not a contradiction!

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k.

You literally do, though. Because wealth isn't a function of the volume of currency you've amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you've got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.

Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.

And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.

At some point, you've got to put forward an investment. You can't run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don't have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?

Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

Software engineer (luckily not in games) here. Definitely feeling it in terms of looking for a new job. Everyone's only looking for senior engineers and they're SUPER picky because there are so many unemployed engineers applying, even in my country where there are a lot fewer layoffs.

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[-] [email protected] 68 points 2 years ago

I remember people on the Internet talking about the Microsoft Bethesda deal. I saw people saying that it's "actually a good thing" and how Microsoft can contribute more to Bethesda and they'll churn out better games for Xbox. Then I see shit like this and games like Starfield and understand why 99% of the people on the Internet have no fucking clue what they're talking about.

[-] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago

Starfield was basically done with their release development when Microsoft aquired Bethesda

[-] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago

You think Microsoft is at fault for Starfield being mediocre? Okay

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[-] [email protected] 56 points 2 years ago

January hasn't ended yet and we are at 60% of the total layoffs of last year.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

Curious for a source on that

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[-] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago

1900 employees, that's something like 10 big games that won't be released, or we can look forward to more outages and bugs in the new releases, and slower fixing of those bugs.

Thanks Microsoft for your contribution to enshittification 🏅💩

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago

I mean, given the quality of product they'd been churning out, I don't know if I'm going to loose sleep knowing we won't get another Diablo Immortal or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III or Candy Crush Saga any time soon.

Like, if Larian or Nintendo was hemorrhaging talent, I'd be a bit more upset. But between these guys, EA, and Riot turning out flops... Idk, man. Maybe a shakeup that pulls people out of the Micro-transaction Factory isn't the worst thing for the industry as a whole.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago

you seem to be blaming the workers for turning out flops but in general it's the managements lack of planning and micromanagement that's the general cause.

no one who's a developer, artist, designer wants to add micro transactions, that comes from top down because it's a revenue generator. they want to polish the games so they can be proud of the work, but are not given time.

executives are not the ones generally being let go and the ones that are will be cashing out from the acquisition. expect those IPs to get worse and have more enshittification because that's what makes money and that's all corpos care about.

you don't get a larian studios from laying off talent, you get it from good management and giving your talent time to deliver.

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[-] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

Not what that word means

[-] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago

My initial reaction was to laugh my ass off at the extra drop of crap in the collective cup. Upon a second take however... considering what a horrifying den of depravity ActiBlizz became during the past years, this may turn out to be for the best in the long run...

[-] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

Yeah those coders and artists had it coming!

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[-] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago

Just as long as one of the 1,900 is the CEO...

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

It's a good thing we didn't raise their Taxes or Wages! Otherwise they may have fired their workers!

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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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