This is absolutely zero cause for celebration yet; Blizzard employees haven’t even been able to start their shifts for the day so they don’t even know if they’re laid off or not. There are a lot of talented folks at this company and it would be a damn shame if some of the company’s brightest devs got laid off.
“The people who are directly impacted by these reductions have all played an important part in the success of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and the Xbox teams”
But ook them, our CEO and the shareholders want more money
“We will provide our full support to those who are impacted during the transition, including severance benefits informed by local employment laws.”
After years of not giving Diablo fans what they wanted.
You know the ones that left D3. Not ones that would follow willy nilly no matter what blizz does. They were giving faith once again. And they chewed it up and spit it out.
D4 forums is looking oddly familiar with all the faces. Same filth still around so I know it won’t do good.
When acquiring a new company, you have dual roles. Mostly in Administration. It’s better to work for the acquiring company than it is the company getting acquired.
If you were in billing with 15 other people, and a company is buying your company and they have 20 people working in billing, it’s safe to assume that you or your coworkers are getting the axe. Your boss is definitely getting the axe, don’t need too many chefs in the kitchen. I’m willing to bet most of these layoffs are coming from Admin, Management, or marketing, but that the core of the development teams will remain.
The gaming landscape has changed so much the last few years with the rise of AI. Streamlining a lot of processes. A game started 6 years ago will undoubtedly have some design changes with this in mind.
Maybe it was silly to continue work on a 6 year old game instead of starting fresh.
Also with palworld doing so well perhaps survival games coming out now will fall to “palworld did it better” critiques.
As for the layoffs would it be possible they are cutting redundant jobs? Microsoft has its own legal, hr, etc departments.
The game dev industry (software dev as a whole really) was pretty much bloated with hires over the last two decades and it’s been a steady stream of layoffs for a few years now. It’s nothing unique to MS.
Meh. Palworld is a survival-light game with very little focus on building or survival. No actual survival game should worry about being compared to it.
