8% of Microsoft’s total gaming workforce. Which includes a lot of non Blizzard staff. The article meanwhile states the layoffs primarily affected Blizzard.
“While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted by the cuts.”
As we have no idea how this is going to affect the games currently out, it for sure feels like they aren’t keeping the required people for creating new games inside the IPs they currently have let alone for creating new IP’s. It is worrying that they also just flat cancelled the survival game before it got really to the alpha stage. Could be because of the fact that Palworld just released and its doing fantastic as its starting in early access.
these changes will take awhile to feel/see so its to be determined on what happens
All game companies today are the same the sooner people realize it’s all such the sooner people can accept it the status quo, or actually vote with their wallet and stop supporting companies that do bad practices.
Like early access purchase with more cash.
After acquiring Activision-Blizzard, there would be a lot of corporate level positions that were already being handled by the much larger Microsoft, or at least the Microsoft gaming division. Laying off duplicate or redundant positions makes sense, and is pretty common in the aftermath of acquisitions.
I feel bad for those laid off, but it makes sense from a redundancy standpoint.
Many people in this thread don’t seem to understand what actually happened here, and are instead using this as an opportunity to kvetch about unrelated issues.
This sucks, I just really hope that the layoffs aren’t impacting many actual developers like engineers, designers and artists and such on the WoW team. Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 have already dug their graves but WoW is just getting better and better and has huge potential, it would absolutely suck if the team was cut down and we had to go back to WoD and Shadowlands level disasters again.
Welcome to new boss, same as old boss.
Seriously I don’t know why anyone is surprised by this.
If a big company merger was an undersea earthquake, then layoffs would be the tsunami. The two go hand in hand.
I hope people land on their feet again very shortly.
That is so cute.
…This isn’t even the first time this happened to Activision-Blizzard. I wouldn’t worry personally.
I wouldn’t listen to Zumakind, he’s always just trolling people. Or “DOOM Trolling” as i’m going to coin it now.
That game could have been dead in the water. We’ve been hearing about it for years without even a name attached to it. They might have just cut the dead weight loose.
Disturbed dirt 
New game they were making being cut hmmm?
Unfinished products are always the first to go when there are cuts. There is no customer backlash when you trash an unreleased game. Plus a new game is a risk when it comes to return on investment so it is easier to cut losses early.
Plus Blizzard seems to cut as many games as they release. They should just stop announcing new games until they are at the Alpha stage and being play tested.
I do this now working for a low-volume health insurance company… I take maybe 12-14 calls per day.
It’s wonderful.
I think this might impact Overwatch more than WoW though.
That game is hard struggling when last I heard.
One teensie question before I buy the xpac… does WOW hold the most promise for Blizzard’s future growth?
Who are you expecting to answer that question here?
highly possible… but we will never know how much they had finished or if it was a waste or if microsoft just didn’t want it now.
Beginning of the end. Well it had to end sometime
It was dead for about a year. Posted earlier about this. It wasn’t going anywhere and internally it wasn’t a surprise.
Gee, who didn’t this coming a mile away.