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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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68 billion to acquire IP, but can't afford to pay the people who make and maintain it.
Can*
Doesn’t
Cansn't
Well, yeah.
The shareholders demanded a sacrifice. You really think any of the top brass would be affected?
They literally do 1000 times the work the devs do to justify the millions in pay and compensation, and the whole place would grind to a halt if they were affected (/s if you believe that)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
What you posted was at Microsoft itself. That story is from January 2023.
The ActiBlizz deal didn't close until October 2023.
Agreed, and my Coder/QA/Artist/Designer friends who were laid off aren't in Finance, HR, etc. They were all seniors in Engineering/QA/Art/Design departments.
Dude you're so confused right now.
You're suggesting layoffs announced today, within ActiBlizz teams, were preemptively carried out by Microsoft a year ago, 10 months before the merger closed and the ActiBlizz team was even part of Microsoft?
Not if you read carefully. Slow down. Pay attention.
Nope. They're conflating Microsoft layoffs a year ago as being part of a different round announced today. The 10k people let go in January of 2023 are long gone. They can't fire them again now. Especially so since the 1900 just announced today have only been Microsoft employees since October.
not a chance thats 50 people. it could be 50 HR business partners alone. that 1900 could easily be entirely backoffice positions
When such acquisitions are happening all what happens is that the stock/shares of one company (Activision/Blizzard in this example) is replaced by the stock/shares of another company (MS in this example) and the purchasing price is simply another way of discussing the stock exchange ratio. Company can have zero money to do that.
They hardly maintain them anymore....
Probably because they will cut people from,small games and invest in the big Activision franchise
They acquired another company, that always means there will be a lot of redundancies between the two and they need to cut them
a lot of these jobs are among the first where humans are being replaced by AI.. it's not likely to slow down soon..
We're in open-season mode for AI at my day job. No one's being replaced by AI.
It's a great tool for code/copy generation, but it gets so much wrong that now we're both coders and qa for bots feeding us scaffolding code.
A coworker screenshotted an AI hallucination yesterday that vomited pages of garbage into their IDE. At least today AI isn't gonna replace programmers entirely.