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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

#171

Post by moondev »

gmerc wrote: post #116
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…

there’s a lot more to game development - environment textures, normal maps, foliage, gui textures, background sounds, concept art, etc and AI has been making a lot inroads to these areas People over index on the hard cases but those are not the majority of work.

Curious if there are models trained to output 3d stl (or similar) files instead of 2d png

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

#172

Post by blasphemers »

trzeci wrote: post #141
jmyeet wrote: post #47

When this was announced my question was "is Microsoft buying Call of Duty or are they buying Activision-Blizzard?" CoD is a reliable cash cow and driver for consoles with an annual game release. It makes a lot of money. Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Bl…

You might be surprised what is the real money printer in ABK.

Yea, if the acquisition was only about one thing, it was definitely mobile

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

#173

Post by quonn »

cj wrote: post #167
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…

My sister owns an etsy shop that sells customized items. They have a graphic designer who's in photoshop all day doing the same repetitive task for each item that's ordered. This is the first category of jobs to be killed off. It can't already be killed off because it requires some human judgement (at least right now) to make sure photographs on a custom ornament are centered and cropped in a visually appealing way.…

Couldn't conventional software have done this? And it didn't. So why would AI do it now?

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

#174

Post by jmyeet »

trzeci wrote: post #141
jmyeet wrote: post #47

When this was announced my question was "is Microsoft buying Call of Duty or are they buying Activision-Blizzard?" CoD is a reliable cash cow and driver for consoles with an annual game release. It makes a lot of money. Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Bl…

You might be surprised what is the real money printer in ABK.

I'm aware of Candy Crush being a money printer but we're talking about Activision-Blizzard. CoD is important not only because it sells a lot of copies (and, more importantly, cosmetics in-game) but it's one of those titles that's key to selling more consoles. There's a synergy between CoD and Xbox.

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

#175

Post by eek2121 »

e40 wrote: post #143
seydor wrote: post #87

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

Interest rates and fear of recession. Big tech fuels R&D via very low-interest loans. This is what everyone in the financial community has been saying for a long time.

It blows my mind that people aren't hiring like mad with high interest rates. It seems like just parking a bunch of money somewhere and letting it accumulate interest would pay for salaries. Shoot, for 10 million dollars you could pay the entire salary of 2 developers without touching a dime of the actual money.

Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.

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

#176

Post by lrae »

fxtentacle wrote: post #10
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 recently saw that ZeroSpace is raising money. Looks like StarCraft 2 and the investor brochure confirmed that there's lots of ex-Blizzard on the team.

Are you mixing it up with Stormgate? ZeroSpace doesn't have much if any ex-Blizzard on the team, do they?

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

#177

Post by dpflan »

cchance wrote: post #150
seydor wrote: post #87

Last time the stock market was surging, everyone was hiring. This time it's different

Ya this time they realized instead they can just pocket even more profits, theres a reason inflation is 50+% due to corporate profits when normally inflation surges are ~11% from corporate profits.

Right, reduce headcount, adjust balance sheets, extract profits with fewer people.

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

#178

Post by ryandrake »

ohhnoodont wrote: post #77
mikeortman wrote: post #19

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

It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineer…

Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.

Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.

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

#179

Post by hbn »

ramesh31 wrote: post #23
mikeortman wrote: post #19

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.

And we just had Starfield come out to demonstrate how little all that matters.

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

#180

Post by eugenekolo »

rhplus wrote: post #110
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.

Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.
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