https://www.polygon.com/24050311/microso...ard-layoff
Yep... I knew it was coming. I literally predicted that a giant acquisition was going to lead to massive layoffs, and so it has happened. These mergers are steadily monopolizing the whole industry, and this is the result, inexorably, inevitably.
And now Embracer Group just gut 3D Realms...
Damn it all... It keeps happening. Those corporate bastards are going to pay for firing my ride.
Yeah, while the rest of the economy is on the upswing, the tech industry, gaming in particular, is definitely slumping and a bunch of companies are firing people. This 1900 person layoff is a pretty large one, and it sounds like some major projects were impacted -- an unannounced but known about Blizzard survival game that had been in development for 6 years (and was still two or three years from release) was cancelled.
It's really sad that so many people are losing their jobs, but some of it as inevitable -- a lot of tech and gaming companies hired LOTS of people during the depths of the pandemic, when many people were playing way more stuff because of being at home a lot, but now that things have returned to something closer to normal those numbers have gone down, so companies are firing people. A lot of companies are sadly reactive, always just changing the number of employees based on the needs of the moment and not thinking well enough about longer-term planning.
Of course, the big counterpoint to this problem is Nintendo. Nintendo doesn't hire way up, and doesn't fire large numbers of people, ever. With that, with their insanely high employee retention, with their refusal to ever buy debt, they are such a strange company by normal corporate standards, but it really does seem like a clearly better model... that makes you less money so who'd do THAT, right?
Oh, and on the subject of Microsoft, MS also fired a lot of people involved with physical Xbox game releases, apparently. Between this and their leaked plan for the next models of Xbox to not have disc drives in them at all, MS is clearly on the forefront of "we want physical media to die". As an XSX owner who likes the system quite a lot and loves physical Xbox games -- that green color is beautiful! -- this is really sad. I know that physical mediia in general is rapidly declining, but between the loss of ownership of anything, the loss of access to things that companies delist, and so much more, while digital is convenient it is absolutely horrible that the option to actually own copies of things is going away and shame on Microsoft for being the number one hardware manufacturer pushing for that.
Nope, not even that. MS and AB are both in profit.
There is no excuse for this. This is blind greed.
Even considering the fact that some of these companies absolutely overextended by doing silly things like buying up gigantic corporations for billions upon billions of dollars, employees absolutely should have the right to have been told this was the plan from the start, because it absolutely WAS the plan from the start. Would this have caused early exodus of employees? Yes! It's MORE important to treat employees like human beings with their own lives than whether or not this will be briefly inconvenient for the company.
"We are excited to bring you this cancellation" has got to be the most ridiculous statement a corporation can possibly make. Welcome to actual hell.
EA just announced over 600 layoffs as well. The industry is clearly having major problems thanks to how long and expensive development of AAA games has gotten. The total number of consoles sold has not increased much over the past few generations, but game budgets have increased dramatically. Games take many years to complete and cost crazy amounts of money, and can developers make their money back? And in a market so clogged with games, how many games are going to be unnoticed or forgotten because of how many releases there are? I don't know what the solution is, but clearly things are not going well. Microsoft is trying to get games to more screens as a way to deal with the stalled market size while prices balloon issue, but I don't know if it is going to work for them or not. I guess we'll see.
Seriously though, considering that games cost multiple times more than they did in the past and take five or eight or ten years to develop, is it any surprise that things would start to break down on the development end? Honestly, it isn't.
It's not just that. Layoffs are happening in many industries right now. Layoffs of people that the executives could easily afford to pay through the hard times, as is legally required in Japan, where layoffs must be a last resort. Thing is, Sony's layoffs are only occurring in overseas development houses, not locally, due to that.
They really are spending way too much on developing these games, but the other part is their "live service" models are being rejected by gaming at large. I won't speculate on specific gaming industry causes though, not when every industry is being hit with this stuff.