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Didn’t Microsoft just report massive profits after reporting they played off tons of people? Maybe it was in reverse order, but they knew they had massive profits at the same time they were laying off tons of people.
Laying off a lot of people does wonders for the end of year report...
Yes, and also months after Bobby Kotick left, taking a $300M severance package with him.
The Microsoft layoffs were a bit different because it was cutting redundant positions after the Actiblizzard merger.
Stuff like middle/upper management mostly I would bet, the company I worked for did a similar lay off after an acquisition not long ago.
Didn't they cancel a game that's been in development for over 5 years and lay off the whole team? That's not exactly redundant positions.
From what I know of recent video game company layoffs, it's mostly been the cancellation of an in-development game in order to get rid of all the employees working on it.
I tried to search, only thing I found was an unnamed "survival game" blizzard announced in 2022.
It was 1900 people, Microsoft has over 200,000 employees for reference.
They already made those "redundancy" cuts last year. This last round of layoffs was a bunch of software devs and artists of all experience levels, and basically the entire esports divisions for both Overwatch and CoD.
Also keep in mind, this was a record year for Blizzard, profits wise.
Do you have a source for that first part? The deal only went through in October of last year and i can only find info on the most recent slate of firings.
That does suck though for those laid off of course, I hope they can find work they enjoy.
Unfortunately I can't find any good articles anymore, but I do remember seeing a lot of people posting about it on Twitter. I believe the earlier layoffs happened right around October of last year though.