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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

#231

Post by diogocp »

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.

> offer up more shares to a market without changing demand

But demand does change, because the company is expanding its balance sheet. You end up with more slices of a bigger pie.

Compare to a stock split, which keeps the pie size constant.

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

#232

Post by jug »

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...

Yeah, tangentially with this, I once asked GPT-4 to identify Star Wars sequel trilogy shortcomings and write a better story outline. It came up with a reimagining of what Jedi truly were and addressed the power vacuum in a much more exciting way than a rehash with a New New Empire.

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

#233

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

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.

No, the company becomes more valuable after the raise. It's more slices of a bigger pie == each slice is the same size as before.

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

The company used its cash to buy its own stock. Fewer slices of the same pie == each slice is bigger than before.

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

#234

Post by maerF0x0 »

indymike wrote: post #213
maerF0x0 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the cost of borrowing that $10M has gone from 0.25 to 5.5 a 2100% increase. If inflation is above 4-5% then sitting on the money will lose purchasing power. Fear of depr/rec-ession means the products you build might see 0 traction as the economy contracts and the funding to survive dries up.

The's another factor: you now have to deal with getting 20% of the tax benefit from an engineering salary since R&D expenses are now amortized over five years.

Agreed, this has a really interesting effect on smaller businesses which may not exist in 5 years. Sure the S&P500 it's unlikely many or any of them go bankrupt in the next 5 years, so they at least know they can _eventually_ write it off. Meanwhile a company may hit bankruptcy in yr 3 despite lingering credits. This can happen when they have profit on paper, but negative cashflow.

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

#235

Post by riversflow »

solardev wrote: post #93
pfdietz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft hasn't made any remarkable games in a long time, either. They just play it safe and release filler msterial, like most of Gamepass.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of hope for Microsoft acquired companies tbh. Just look at what happened to Rare after they were acquired. All the games in their pipeline were published on Xbox, but then the Studio's production nose dived. Rare as an independent studio was producing banger after banger for 20 years. Under ~15 years of Microsoft they have only produced Viva Pinata, B&K:N&B, then nothing for a decade but some Kinect sports trash nobody wanted(sorry). then Sea of Thieves.

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

#236

Post by mannycalavera42 »

lmeyerov wrote: post #157

Ouch, first Disney/Pixar, now Microsoft / Activision Blizzard For #webgl folks ready to beyond entertainment & ads, we may be able to help turn lemons into lemonade: - Opening: Senior webgl infoviz engineer to help us build the next gen of our infoviz & genAI platform for data-intensive analytics missions. Also involves our GPU cloud backend for server acceleration, and broader data viz tasks. - Background: Graphistr…

the video on louie site is too small and I cannot click on the fullscreen button in the bottom right corner

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

#237

Post by antisthenes »

dehrmann wrote: post #185
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> BW is a near perfect game It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.

The pacing is what makes it an amazing watchable esport with crucial timings.

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

#238

Post by asylteltine »

solardev wrote: post #50
asylteltine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness. Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE). With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thi…

I really liked the universe and characters which is why heroes of the storm was so cool. But of course they killed that off. Their classic games aren’t just about the gameplay it’s the universe too.

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

#239

Post by yterdy »

bostonsre wrote: post #112
seydor wrote: post #87

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

Is it all due to inflation and the interest rates? Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Or anyone know why this is happening?

Stock issue dilutes ownership and lowers share price. Why would people paid in stock do that when they can just offload labor? Also, they'd be competing with market makers, winkwinknudgenudge.
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