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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#51

Post by thinkingtoilet »

iammjm wrote: post #3

"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)

If you love Starcraft just a quick reminder that the Korean Brood War scene is still going strong, and is now getting bigger. BW is a near perfect game and it's clear with how they handled SC2 "Blizzard" is not going to make anything close to BW ever again. I would highly recommend checking it out if you love Starcraft. For starters, Artosis casts a pro-level ladder game every day on this channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos

If you like that, the main BW tournament is called ASL and happens a couple times a year. The next one should be starting relatively soon.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#52

Post by safog »

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs.

It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work.

Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be amazed but then you start noticing the minor flaws and how much effort it takes to make it good enough.

It's still possible that some jobs will get replaced, not every NPC detail needs to be hand drawn perfectly, but let's see.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#53

Post by jrockway »

xnorswap wrote: post #30
iammjm wrote: post #3

"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)

Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?". While D3 had it's fair criticism at launc…

Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on.

My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.

At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#54

Post by oblio »

aaomidi wrote: post #17
AlexandrB wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com

With the advances in AI, I really hope coop vs AI gameplay will be made better.

I don't think there are any advances in real time AI. We're still stuck with the same bad AI from the late 90s.

Oh, or if there is better tech, nobody really uses it, everyone focuses on multiplayer because $$$.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#56

Post by doktrin »

iammjm wrote: post #3

"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)

> I need Starcarft 3 badly

This feels at least tangentially relevant :

https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/

I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#57

Post by yreg »

asylteltine wrote: post #35
iammjm wrote: post #3

"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total." 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)

The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.

Where has it gone south?

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.

It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#58

Post by solardev »

whoswho wrote: post #18
iammjm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/

As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.

As another grown ass man (well, more or less) who also played those games, what really bothers me is that dude's haircut. It's like a grease tsunami had sex with a chia pet.

I miss the 90s, can you tell?

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#59

Post by gary_0 »

whoswho wrote: post #18
iammjm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you already seen Zerospace?[1] I think it also looks great and there are some SC/SC2 pros involved in making it [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/

As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.

It's kind of weird how much of the gaming industry still caters to the teenage boy demographic.

Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#60

Post by pimlottc »

safog wrote: post #52

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs. It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work. Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be ama…

FAO?
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