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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

#101

Post by HideousKojima »

solardev wrote: post #90
jrockway wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Larian, FromSoftware, Gunfire, Grinding Gear... the smaller studios are putting out great games still, with much of that 90s magic. There's that new game Palworld too apparently making a stir (haven't tried it yet), from another small studio. It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist. I mostly just ignore them and haven't felt like I've missed much. So many good indie titles coming out…

Palworld is basically Ark: Survival Evolved with Pokemon plus some elements from Breath of the Wild. That said, it's less buggy (and better performing) at launch than Ark is 9 years after release, and unlike Ark it isn't designed to require you to quit your job and have a full guild with set work schedules just to get some cool pets.

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

#102

Post by oblio »

solardev wrote: post #98
oblio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. I have bad news for you :-) The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.

I dunno, I've personally seen ChatGPT produce better writing and more interesting game mechanics compared to D4. But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...

It's novel. Give it 5-10 years for the "sameness"-y to kick in.

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

#103

Post by picadores »

doktrin wrote: post #56
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 de…

Behavioural hacking people is certainly cheaper then making them happy, and the ultimate hack - is heroine. The final form of all unchecked buisnesses is virtual drug dealing. Invest now into the ultimate society meltdown..

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

#104

Post by blibble »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #99
blibble wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also they literally never even mentioned Fenix, Raynor's best Protoss buddy, in SC2 Wings of Liberty despite Kerrigan betraying and murdering him. spoiler warning! like most characters killed in SC1 he does pop up, specifically in LOTV (not a good one though)

>spoiler warning! I think when an IP is over 10 years old, you don't need to warn for spoilers anymore, Dumbledore dies in the end.

> I think when an IP is over 10 years old, you don't need to warn for spoilers

Legacy of the Void was released in November 2015

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

#105

Post by gruez »

oldpersonintx wrote: post #5

1900 salaried workers with good benefits laid off from Activision 19000 to be hired by Chipotle to make burritos for minimum wage By the labor stats, this is a net gain of 17100 jobs

Do you have any data that shows this is actually what's happening? For the economy as a whole, inflation adjusted wages have been slowly creeping up since the end of the pandemic, which seems contradictory to what you think is happening.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

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

#108

Post by LegitShady »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #37
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/

Unfortunately, I'm not impressed at all. It looks and feels like a cartoonish bootleg of SC with AI generated Fortnite-looking artwork. What made SC interesting, like most Blizzard IP of the time, was also the well written story lines with amazing character arcs, that kept people invested, and not that it was a strategy game of space marines versus organic aliens versus energy aliens. They even made sure to give stor…

both games are being developed with the help/input of sc2 pros looking for the next thing. IMHO zerospace seems to play closer more similarly to sc2.

I agree about the visuals - they need to invest more into the art/visuals.

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

#109

Post by jasonlotito »

pimlottc wrote: post #60
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?

Apparently, something that can be replaced with the word "For". It's odd, because FAO takes a LOT more text to get it's point across compared to "For" even though technically they are both the same number of letters.

Consider also that "For" sounds natural, but in this case, FAO does not.

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

#110

Post by rhplus »

mikeortman wrote: post #19

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

Crazier still is the cost of employing 22,000 people in one division. Even at a low ball of $100K/year/employee, that’s $2.2 billion in people costs per year. Microsoft needs to be recouping at least $50/year from every single Xbox owner (estimating 50 million out there) to cover that cost alone.
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