Microsoft will lay off approximately 650 people from its gaming team, the company’s head of gaming, Phil Spencer, told employees in an email to team members this morning.
Spencer framed them in the context of Microsoft’s October 2023 $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.
“As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we have made the decision to eliminate approximately 650 roles across Microsoft Gaming—mostly corporate and supporting functions—to organize our business for long term success,” Spencer wrote.
The majority of the cuts will impact people in those corporate and support roles at Activision Blizzard, according to a source familiar with the matter.
I mean layoffs are always bad purely because of the people whose income and lives are negatively impacted, however this doesn’t sound like it will negatively impact OW much at all tbh. None of the “important” Devs (artists, game devs, balance team, systems designers, etc.) are getting laid off, just corporate positions because Microsoft already has a ton of their own people to do those things.
Wishing those laid off a speedy search for a new job though
First thought was “isn’t this old news” before seeing it is a second wave. That’s rough. Really feeling bad for people losing their jobs under any situation.
Probably should have read the article, because the announcement says that no games teams will be affected, just corporate and support roles.
Which obviously is not ideal, but we also don’t know where those support and corporate roles are being cut from. Could be from one of the many studios that was under the Activision Publishing umbrella, rather than Blizzard Entertainment. We don’t know. Either way, Overwatch will likely not be affected.
Corporate managers (and HR, etc.) are almost always let go after acquisitions because they are easily replaceable - they have no specialized knowledge beyond their connections at that point. These would have likely been scheduled ages ago and they get a lot of bonuses, severance etc. to stick around until merging is complete (because it is a miserable time and they can’t really hire on new people to let them go 2 months later).
I don’t know much about support so idk about that.
There is still a chance that we may get marketing practices that doesn’t try to scam us behind each corner, though I don’t have a lot of experience with Microsoft’s marketing in games.
