Microsoft Lays Off 1,900 Xbox, Bethesda And Activision Blizzard Employees

Honestly these CEO's can go straight to hell. These guys are making families jobless so they can earn an extra million to their own personal paycheck. I hope they eventually get what is coming to them, the damage they have caused for their greed is insane

"As we move forward in 2024, the leadership of Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard is committed to aligning on a strategy and an execution plan with a sustainable cost structure that will support the whole of our growing business."

Bro you ain't growing if you're shedding 2,000 employees.

I've said similar things before, but it is a strange feeling when something as unimportant as "I am far more interested in Nintendo compared to their competition" ends up feeling like I made the morally correct choice, by accident.

I think Microsoft actually did a good job rebuilding their reputation after the always online debacle, but at least for me they've really thrown a lot of that away because of this entire thing. Mergers are generally bad, this was always going to be bad, even taking into account the good that might come from Activision under new management. And I doubt a lot of that good would even have had a chance to happen if not for Microsoft trying to justify buying them and to a lesser extent if they weren't still behind the competition.

My question is why are these people losing their jobs. Is it because AI is replacing them, the CEOs wanted to keep their multi millions, or is it bag management, over hiring and creating jobs that weren't needed at the company like what happened at Twitter?

If you know anyone effected by this or Riot layoffs or any other game studio layoff, Requiem Cafe in Anahiem CA is holding a Video Game Industry Layoff meetup to gather and help one another and network. It is on the 28th this Sunday from 3PM-7PM.

I hope this doesn't get taken down for "advertising" because people who are effected by this will likely be reading this article

It’s very sad that people lose their jobs and it must very hard to deal with.

I think roughly the figures below are current and correct for the below totally employees is their respective gaming divisions and studios as of now.

Xbox 20,000 employees
Sony 10,000 employees
Nintendo 7,500 employees

Is it rough, sure. But let's face it. Microsoft has been buying all these studios and usually when this happens it means "restructuring". Whenever there are mergers, I've always seen this happen, so it's not something exclusive to the video game industry.

My fond hope is that people who will lose their jobs now will decide to fend for themselves, maybe start an indie studio and create something better than they would have at the studios they were working for. Most of them have been churning out garbage or sequel number 5132 anyway for the past years.

Well, People are playing Diablo 1 and 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft and they even spend Money for World of Warcraft Classic, but the new Stuff seems very bland and soulless.

Having so much People on a Company, you can't spread creative Ideas, People just do their Job and you can feel it in the Games.

Sounds like buying Bethesda really worked out for everyone.

Activision next.

It's pretty funny that even back when I was first looking at getting out on my own, and going to college, and what field I was really passionate about, I only considered making games for a few hours...cause it was miserable back in the early 2000s as well. Don't let anyone tell you to "support the devs," when it comes to purchasing anything from these big publishers. That isn't how any of it works if your company is publicly traded.

Buy them, gut them, take home the profits. Glad that Microsoft's share value has risen from 2.89 trillion to 3.01 trillion off the back of this news. Obviously the outcome we all wanted from this acquisition.

Nintendo often makes weird decisions, but when fans were saying during the lean Wii U days "why doesn't Nintendo just spend it's huge cash reserves on..." remember it's so it can continue to do it's own thing in gaming and not be taken over by some heartless Gordon Gekko corporation which would at best lead to a homogenised product and at worst see it stripped and destroyed.

So basically, thank you ***** you goodbye?

They just had a major merger we other Activision Blizzard, that means they have more workers doing similar jobs. This mass firing is them downsizing to ensure the company can run more efficiently. I have sympathy for those affected by this, but that’s the reality when you work for a massive corporation.

The Corporation Manual -

• Buy a compnay
• Make staff redundancies
• Steal the pension pot
• Continue to appear to make no money whilst paying shareholders and CEO's loads of money
• Make more redundancies
  .......................

I'm certain every single one of those 1900 people love this strategy of theirs while many of them could be struggling to find a new job to feed their families.

@GarlicGuzzler This is business? They are in it to make money just like Nintendo are. These layoffs will have been planned years ago, MS will have gone to its efficiency team and asked them to work out which jobs can go after the merger, worked out redundancy packages or even retirement ones it applicable.
Does it suck sure, but in general every time there is a merger especially between two big companies their are lay offs, they need to show value to the share holders, so reducing necessary staff is a part of that.

@Joriss With healthy redundancy packages or retirement plans...

Just another day in consolidation hell.

Hopefully... and I know, it's pretty hopeful, all these guys can consolidate into something new. You know, become indy devs, studios where the passion is still felt.

But what they shouldn't do is then let anyone buy off their newfound studio, make millions themselves out of the acquisition, and let these soulless bags of excrement do the exact same thing all over again.

But, you know, greed is greed.

Are the layoffs the people that make the bad decisions?

This doesn't need to happen.

CEOs, investors, and other vulture capitalists can and SHOULD take a paycut, before laying off the working class en masse.

Nobody needs a 2nd mansion or a 3rd yacht. But workers do need to eat.

Greed is rotting this entire hobby from the inside out.

Remember when Iwata cut his pay in half when Nintendo was underperforming during the Wii U and 3DS doldrums in order to avoid firing employees?

Now the biggest company on Earth by market capitalization is laying off 8% of their entire gaming business after a record fiscal year.

This industry is in deep trouble.

@Cheez It's the CEOs that wanted to keep their multi millions. It is ALWAYS the CEOs, and I'm very serious about that.

another day, another mass layoff, another twinge of fear in my gut as a digital media art major reconsidering my life choices

@westman98 iwata really was such a admirable guy, usually people like him dont end up with such a powerful position in a company. Rare stuff in our world, i hope nintendo can manage to recapture that energy in the coming years, though im more realistically expecting a further decline. It really is a shame

@GarlicGuzzler,

It's a sad fact of life, people sometimes lose their jobs, this happens accross all sectors. sometimes companies have to make tough decisions.

@Cheez it’s a mix, but ultimately it’s because modern day, late-stage capitalism is setting in, which is the point at which it eats itself and everything in the process. Basically it’s not ok to be a successful company anymore, you have to be more successful year on year. Doesn’t matter if you made 1 billion profit each year you have to make 2 billion next year or you’re a failure. It’s not sustainable, but the entire system isn’t designed for sustainability anyway, it’s designed to make money now and not give a damn about later. By then it’s someone else’s problem.

So we’ve had record breaking profits across the industry, but they’re “not enough” for the shareholders and C-suite, so money has to be saved somewhere. So they cut jobs.

AI has made that easier for them to do, but it’s not the sole reason. Not yet. Also it’s coming to the end of the financial year so they all want to make it look like they are finishing on crazy good numbers, so they fire people now to save all those wages and artificially bump the numbers up again.

Then there’s also genuine overstretch in some studios. But that again comes back to the same “line must go up” level of thinking of the money folk at the top. Who look at things like Fortnite and say “we need to do that to make those numbers” and force the studio down a doomed direction.

You’ve got to remember, games devs love making games, they’re passionate and talented and just want to make something super cool and fun. But they’re employed by people who don’t care about games, they just want money. That’s why they own a business. Very few even come from a game dev background now.

I hate reading articles like this, it really sucks . My heart goes out for these people and I hope they find something else asap.

@Joriss To paraphrase The Simpsons, "I don't recall saying 'thank you'." That's what these awful business practices sound like to me anyway.

@LadyCharlie that isn’t how businesses work. These mass layoffs are due to efficiency reasons. After a massive merger like they just did with Activision Blizzard there are going to be job roles being filled by multiple employees, at that point you need to downsize because you’re going to have bloat that slows the company down. That is an unfortunate fact of how businesses operate.

I worked for a large company (SERCO) for 10 years. one day out of the blue they called us into the office and said here is your pink slip. there was 21 of us with family's to feed, They didnt care because they did not get the contract because of GREED. and this is what is happening here GREED.
all the employee's lost all the vacation days they had but we got paid for sick days on the books. the company had more then a 100 contract's in this area and said they could not find any place foe us to go. if MS looked around just a little they could have helped these people out before firing them.
it's just GREED nothing else. the bigger the corpuation the less they care about the little people they don't see everyday your just a number on the balance page.

Okay so now we just boycott Microsoft until their entire gaming division dies off, honestly they are not even needed in the industry, Nintendo and Sony are enough.

Microsoft gaming division should die a slow and painful death, a call to action is needed, boycott them, it'll hurt others working for them to begin with but long term, it will cut the cancer out of our industry. It will greatly benefit everyone, even those it hurts to begin with.

Cutting cancer out is never easy, its always painful and you always lose a piece of yourself in the process (trust me i would know), but it's very necessary for continued survival.

We gamers need to cut the cancer that is Microsoft, out of our industry for good. This is a call to action, if you are unhappy, then speak with your wallet because its the only language Microsoft understands.

People getting worked up thinking all these jobs are blue-collar coders getting fired. It's mostly gonna be white collar, redundant paper-shifters. Still sucks, sure, but this was known to be necessary as soon as they started saying "merger".

Ok 1,900 people fired does look bad… but let’s not forget there was just a merger. So combining both companies means many redundant positions!

These people who are being layed off are most likely Human Resources, Finance, and in house Legal.

@Reztobi bad idea. More competition is necessary for an industry to stay healthy. Killing off Microsoft is not “cutting a cancer” out of an industry, it does nothing to benefit the industry at all.

Get the F outta here, first they buy alot of companies, second they throw alot on the streets.

I smell depression!

@Cheez yes

I hate to say it but likely redundant (or even due to performance) positions. That being said I hope impacted employees land on their feet.

This was written on the wall from day one. This is the first version of this story I've seen that mentions Zenimax being effected, but notice who never actually is; King.

King was the real reason Microsoft wanted Activision. Getting CoD and WoW was just a nice bonus at worst, but a convienient misdirect for what they really wanted; someone who understood how App store marketting worked. They didn't want the HR nightmare that is Blizzard, or the bloated Call of Duty Assembly line Bobby Kotick had reduced the TWELVE Activision studios too. All that just to releasing ONE game. It's the single most unstable buisness model in all the world!

King is just as bloated with an equal number of studios of 2000 employees total also all working on essentially one series, but they have a much high ROI than CoD could ever have, BUT they are also still the same size as ALL of Xbox. To ONE game.

This is only the begininning for Activision.

@Jireland92 I will never agree with the corporate "efficiency" excuse.

That PR statement doesn’t mean anything.

This is almost 2000 people.

I am from a small town with 3000 people.
This is 60% of the town I grew up in. This type of practice is violence, I don’t think you can fairly call it anything else

Gamers simultaneously trash the games being made, then act as if every one of those 2,000 jobs is a precious and innocent family loving individual being treated unjustly? Those big evil corporations… that fill your entire life with toys.

It’s an entertainment industry. It’s especially volatile. These people aren’t dependent on their companies to survive. They are not going to starve and their children won’t be wearing rags. An employee is not a dependent. It’s your job to protect yourself and your family.

To simultaneously be so vile and reprehensible towards people you think deserve it, and get on high horses and after bashing the games being, act like your heart goes out to those poor unjustly treated developers is hypocrisy. This is genuinely becoming disturbing levels of ignorance; bias; and vitriol.

@ScalenePowers
An anecdote about how that’s 60% of your population is meaningless. How many employees in MS game division still? 20 thousand?

You guys are just being mean, and think you’re being just. It’s scary.

@BlueMonk Microsoft bots working overtime i see.

@BlueMonk looks like Sony and Nintendo could hire some of these people.

Seriously, when did firing people become a premium activity with 9+ digit prices?🤔🙄

@BlueMonk I want to put in perspective what 1900 people is. What do you imagine when you think of 1900 people?

Is it “mean” to say companies who routinely lay off staff to pay out shareholders are doing a bad thing?

These people aren’t helpless, living off their meager MS wages. They’re adults with skills and they work in an entertainment industry. I don’t want to anger everyone, but the malice we show one human being, while pretending to be defending another, is awful.

News for you people: All living beings suffer and we as individuals have no idea what personal battles someone fights. Be they a CEO or a janitor. With the little information we have, the rhetoric here is just pitch forks.

@LadyCharlie it’s not an “excuse”, it’s the reason why they’re doing this. It happens in business all the time when big mergers like this happen. The only other option they have is too keep everyone on, which isn’t ideal for the business. Or the workers for that matter as you have too many people to manage, which means you need more middle management, which leads to mismanagement, which leads to a poor, potentially even hostile work environment.

Look, I get it. You’re upset that lots of people lost their jobs. I feel the same way, the economy is in tatters right now and the last thing these people needed was to be out of work. I feel sympathy for these people m, but I can feel sympathy for them while also acknowledging the sad reality of why this is happening. You can do both.

This is a little crazy considering they were just going on about how great of a quarter they had

@LadyCharlie @Jireland92 Not pursuing sustainable business practices ends you up as the Embracer Group. An easy example of overlap after an acquisition would be HR. Every studio doesn’t need its own HR department, but Embracer didn’t do any downsizing after acquisitions and kept many of the studios’ departments (like HR) intact. You can find insider comments from people in those studios saying they thought the lack of streamlining was weird and inefficient and then Embracer’s desperate Saudi Arabia money falls through and you get two rounds of layoffs in the last three months.

I agree with you that generally speaking CEOs and companies are greedier than the average person (who is also greedy). I do not agree with the implication of your statement that a company can never do layoffs in pursuit of sustainable business practices.

EDIT: To be clear, I don’t believe that every person laid off here was in HR or PR or any other department that gets bloated upon a merger. I would wager some of these layoffs are for pure pursuit of profit and not just common sense business practices.

They paid 70 billion for the privilege of firing that many people. ^^

It is interesting how many people hate companies, want to boycott their products, send death threats to their employees but when people get fired/laid off they are upset. Many people weren’t this compassionate yesterday before the news broke.

@Cheez Probably jobs that were made redundant after COVID and different jobs overlapping between Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard after the merger.

I don’t usually comment on these types of articles but the way he talked about that many people losing their job so nonchalantly makes me sick.

Uhhhh yeah I'm sure even Stevie Wonder saw this coming.

This was going to happen, sooner than later, so that Microsoft can show some profit to their shareholders, after spending more than 69 billion dollars on ABK. They removed people from all their game divisions. They have fired the majority of the team in charge of the logistics for physical game distribution, basically giving a big "f#$k you" to physical games. And, believe it or not, there's people that are trying to justify all of this BS.

@GarlicGuzzler I'm curious to know what kind of jobs people were being laid off from. Were they jobs the company deemed "unnecessary"? Or just cutting back on the amount of employees hired for the same positions?

Curious to know how much this would affect everyone's workload at these companies

Inevitable, Activision Blizz is a diseased lumbering company. Can't expect MS to not want to polish up their big shiny new purchase. Hopefully those axed included the ones who have created the terrible work environments over the years, but looks like it's easy to forget all that happened now to performatively dunk on the c level.

Factor of growing too fast and the market not holding up to the amount of staff what would one expect to happen?

@Alpha008 The article implies it was management that desired the new, less supported engine in order to handle 100 simultaneous players

@Dinglehopper I’m sure that will all come out in due time

I work for a corporation that is currently laying off people to outsource those roles to India. Fortunately my team isn’t being affected however I hate it for those being laid off and my heart breaks for them. I hate corporations and the fact I have to work for one. I hate corporate greed, corporate structure and corporate lingo that BS’s the real reason they are laying people off. I jokingly call it “black speech” like in Lord of the Rings but really corporate leadership are despicable in most cases and evidently so with Microsoft.

Yes. Let's say Company "A" has 100 accountants. And company "B" has 100 accountants. They merge. Management calculates that the new company can be handled by 120 accountants. 80 are fired. Now do that with all the other positions and it's straight profits for shareholders, and management, as everyone is pointing out.

It's kind of like that bit in the movie "Office Space", where each worker is interviewed about "exactly what is it you do here?"

On the entrepreneur game show "Shark Tank" tonight, there was a company who makes customized songs to be loaded into teddy bears to sing to kids. The company employs about a dozen singer artists who compose and sing and play each song for the individual child's toy, using questionnaires from the parents to tailor each song specifically.

One of the investor "sharks" immediately said: "You can have A.I. do that right now for free!"

Not surprised and its not necessarily a bad thing.

They just acquired a 69 billion dollar company, bound to be a lot of redundancy they needed to streamline.

Short term itll stink ofcourse for those impacted and hopefully MS offers a generous severance package and job hunt support for those impacted. However, the good side is tat whenever these companies shed staff, experienced people are able to join new teams and drive industry growth. It keeps the indy scene flowing.

Lamentable but predictable.

The really bad thingg about all of this is that Microsoft isn't just laying off inexperienced college graduates or secretaries or HR, they are firing high level employees, many of whom have been at their respective studios for many many years. Even the Call of Duty studios are seeing big layoffs which is the last thing that should be happening to studios working on a massive GaaS annualized game franchise.