I can see why you made it to 7k.
I haven’t even looked at Retail expansion tbh. Means nothing to me.
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That’s what happens during mergers. Did people actually believe there wouldn’t be some kind of restructuring?
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Some cool stuff on the horizon. But if you havent gotten anything out of the last few years its prob not for you.
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I wouldn’t of even got Dragonflight if it wasn’t a birthday gift and they gave us Shadowlands free.
Personally haven’t touched it seriously since Firelands. And I’m skipping the re-do.
A certain amount of redundancy was to be expected with the acquisition.
As for Adham and Ybarra leaving, eh, execs are the people I think about the least in these situations.
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Not surprised about the layoffs at all… comes with the territory. When a company is taken over the first thing they do is trim the excess fat… That said i am surprised about Mike Ybarra and Allen Adham especially Mike given he was from Microsoft originally 
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Thank you so much for sharing this, I’m in the gaming industry, you do not need a 4 year degree at all. Just a portfolio and connections! I did get a mentor who worked at AAA companies for many years, and very high level projects. He’s been in a senior positions with no college degree. Just has the experience and quality of work.
Once you get your foot in the door, which is the hardest part, for me the internet and game dev con sped up that process and excelled me to the right people.
If anyone is interested in game dev, it’s portfolio quality, how you are as a person, can you work on a team? that’s what they look at, they wanna make sure you can work well with the team, and able to communicate clearly and efficiently to everyone.
Once you get your foot in you’re good to go, and able to move around pretty quickly.
The upsets, projects cancels sucks, and lays off suck and feel awful, there’s a huge mourning process, especially even when a project finishes your team moves around within the company/different projects, you are family through the stress and pressure of it all.
I been involved in the industry for 4 years now, I haven’t met anyone that needed a college degree to get going, you can’t even really cut the line with a degree you need that experience for higher level roles.
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Common Ppl, you knew that was about to happen, but you/we kept thinking everything is alright and we’ll be able to continue to play wow… we had our butts handed to us… now with an uncertain future… where do we go from here? yeh keep complaining about those layers or those buff or nerfs… soon it may not even matter anymore.
True… one of them said “I’m taking some time off to travel the world”. I’m sure the working class slobs are going to go on some adventures with their 2 week severance packages.
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I originally thought that mostly ActiBlizz management roles were being removed. At least, that would make the most sense because Microsoft already has thousands of management-level employees. However, the memos make it sound like a lot of the people being laid off are ones doing “creative work” and work on the games themselves so I’m not sure what this means for us.
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Not happy for people losing their jobs but the with the amount of content we get at least in wow, this seems reasonable( 3 patches, less raid bosses & reused content, half of mounts released in expansions are recolors) and thats just to name a few. So the point of having this much people push out so little game content is funny, but i know this money they save will just end up going to higher up pockets and not the game lol
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The pro Mike Ybarra people as he’s leaving a sinking ship… 
Where are the usual shills, I want to see them spinning this as a good thing for WoW.
To any devs that actually read these forums and might have lost their job, well, there’s more work out there. It won’t exactly be easy, but you’ll be fine.
DF has probably had the most content out of any expansion as far as quests and updates goes. Besides, WoW seems like the winning team, they shouldn’t be punished because of other games doing poorly or what ever is going on over there.
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I don’t think it is the WoW team that is impacted by layoffs, or at least not significantly. It is always interesting to see people who don’t work there comment on staffing levels and production volume.
I don’t work there either - and I certainly would not assume that because I am not happy with something in a game, that I know the details of how a company runs their staffing and management of said staff.
They did lay off the whole unannounced survival game team though and cancelled that game.
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Nothing…
Speaking from personal experience, whenever a merger occurs between companies people always get let go sooner or later. With consolidating, restructuring and new divisions there are always people that do not make the cut or who’s skills are no longer needed (and there is no other place to assign them to work). Welcome to business practice 101.
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Probably because maturity dictates a wait-and-see approach instead of chimpscreaming on forums.
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So they laid off more employees than the game has active players?
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Lol agreed. And most likely these lay offs were redundant duplicate admin-desk positions.
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Hardly disagree on this take, Df has nowhere near the level of content Legion has or even Bfa, cinematics qualities of Df are worse than Wrathgate wotlk, Df has less raid bosses than Shadowlands even, 8 dungeons and 1 megadungeon compared to other xpac(excluding WoD). Ur main point is updates and quests, i hardly think Df has more quests than other expansions, it just better at splitting those quests in “storylines” that majorty of are not very good in my opinion, prime example is stretching Tyr questline whole expansion just to have him sit afk and think, and not tying him to any crucial events in game therafter. Updates in what way? If u mean qol updates yeah we have a lot of those but most of those are essential game systems that community asked for for a long time. I agree wow seems like winning but tbh if there was 10 people working on recoloring the mounts instead of making new ones, what would u do as their employer.
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Something that I don’t exactly understand is that Mike Ybarra worked for Microsoft for 20 years (right?), he then came into lead Blizzard, and now that the merger is through, he’s stepping away from his job? Or is he going back to work with Microsoft in some capacity?