25th January 2024, 6:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 25th January 2024, 6:22 PM by A Black Falcon.)
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.
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.
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