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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

#201

Post by bhdlr »

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.

WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo

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

#202

Post by bostonsre »

rsanek wrote: post #195
fsckboy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

issuing stock and selling it into the market doesn't make the stock price go down. Raising money for this activity on a large scale is why the stock market exists. The value of the existing company "before" remains the same, and the sale of the new shares brings cash into the company at the selling price, so those new cash assets exactly balance out the dilution of ownership. If anything it might increase the value o…

this doesn't require any advanced analysis, it's simple supply and demand. offer up more shares to a market without changing demand and the price per share must go down. think about it the other way -- why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price? there's a reason buybacks are considered essentially the same as dividends.

> why would a company ever do a stock buyback if changing the amount of issued stock didn't change the price?

Buy low/sell high maybe? They buy their stock when the price is low and they think it is undervalued so that they can sell it later when the price more accurately reflects the value or even better when the price is overvaluing their stock.

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

#203

Post by JohnFen »

saos wrote: post #12

> It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft Always on the table after an acquisition. Especially close to earnings I hope severance is nice for all impacted

Having been through a few acquisitions, I have learned the truth of this. Eventually, I learned that if a company I work for announces they're being acquired, the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities.

Even if I'm not laid off (which I haven't been yet in these situations), I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted. It's the perfect opportunity to reassess to determine if I fit into the new company and to scout around for something I may fit better in.

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

#204

Post by rsanek »

fermentation wrote: post #28
mikeortman wrote: post #19

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

This same comment gets posted on nearly every layoffs thread. A lot of people work at tech companies. Despite that, it sucks for someone to lose their job.

As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.

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

#205

Post by JohnFen »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #191
eek2121 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Downturns is the best time to build a startup. When things turn around, you hopefully have found product market fit and can ride the up wave.

This is so true that when I'm planning on starting a new business, I intentionally wait for a downturn before I pull the trigger.

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

#206

Post by nolok »

hbn wrote: post #188
nolok wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And barely 9,200 as of Dec 31st, 2019 The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places

40% increase isn't even that bad compared to some I've seen. I saw that before the recent layoffs at Discord their employee headcount had grown 5x since 2020, and after the layoffs they're merely at 4x their size of 2020

It doesn't actually have any real impact and there are plenty of counter example, but the fact that Activision is a 40+ years old company who slowly grew to that number before jumping 40% in two years for no reason (no major shift, new product or anything like that, no "we own the world" like microsoft, ...) somehow makes it feel way worse to me that yet another not even a decade tech company that grew crazy for the numbers.

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

#207

Post by true_religion »

hipadev23 wrote: post #193
eek2121 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups. It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.

Maybe they should try applying in the east coast. There is no AI, cloud or startups here.

You will have to stomach finance or the military industrial complex though.

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

#208

Post by mort96 »

jacknews wrote: post #39
mort96 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of weird criticism of MS there but this is the first time I've seen them criticised for not doing EEE?

Eh? I'm saying they are exactly doing EEE, at a corporate level This extinguishing of a bunch of taken-over staff might be a natural consequence of the 'merger' (duplicate roles and all that), but the embrace itself was totally invalid if you ask me.

The part which comes after the embrace is extend..

..and it's a very specific strategy, about "embracing" an existing standard (integrating it into their products and pushing it), then adding a bunch of non-standard "extensions" to the standard, which "extinguishes" the standard and the other implementations because now everyone's writing against Microsoft's proprietary version instead of the actual standard. Think "Works best in Internet Explorer" web pages which used ActiveX controls (Microsoft's "extension" to the web), or Microsoft's Java implementation which omitted the standard JNI and introduced Microsoft's own proprietary FFI solution to make sure Java programs written for Windows wouldn't work on other systems.

I struggle to see the connection to this ActiBlizz/Xbox case. EEE doesn't stand for "embrace then extinguish".

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

#209

Post by ep103 »

graphe wrote: post #122
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So did the homeworld series. Story isn't enough. AoE2 had online and so did StarCraft so they stayed. Homeworld never got that, without the story, multiplayer and mods it's not quite up there. I remember CoH2 was popular, but you're right it's hard for me to want to try something other than AoE2 or SC, when they're pretty perfect.

FWIW, Homeworld 3 is coming out in 2 months, and I, for one, and psyched up about it

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

#210

Post by ipaddr »

hipadev23 wrote: post #193
eek2121 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now ente…

Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups. It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.

What skill would you suggest he learn?
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