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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

#61

It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

Activision Blizzard reported 13,000 employees as of Dec 31st, 2022

And barely 9,200 as of Dec 31st, 2019

The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the bad decisions there were driven from the top, then the acquisition could cause a large change in behavior. No guarantees, of course.

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

#65
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…

You're bringing back memories of Jaedong :-))

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

#67
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?

for attention of

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

#68

It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming? The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity . Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.

In times like this, it's important to remember that Skyrim was made by a team of around 100 people.

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

#69
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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Re: Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

#70
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?

For the Attention Of
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