Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

theverge.com

261–270 of 322 posts

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

#261
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. Sorry what?

What I meant to say: a game studio dropping 2000 employees seem like A LOT until you consider it's Microsoft and it's "just" 8% of their workforce.

You're looking at it just like how Microsoft did, either way 2000 people lost their jobs. And I'm down voted for some reason.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just sad I guess this is an example of post consumerism. Maybe making games for the sake of profit and not fun it was just a matter of time. I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.

> to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company. Who are the people who invest in a public company for any reason other than to have their numbers go up? That's the entire point. They could be putting out absolute garbage, as long as it makes money (and more profit than your alternative of 'fun games'), that's all that matters.

Well, I think there are a few people who invested in GME to stick it to the man, or in Musk's companies for some other reason.

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

#263
This reminds me of when Microsoft bought Rare. One of greatest game creators of all time, who seemed to be the perfect fit as 2nd party Nintendo developers. Suddenly they couldn't produce anything noteworthy. I've no idea why. I just wish they'd been GameCube developers instead. That console needed them and to me was a better fit for their types of games. Oh well.

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

#264
post #18
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/

As a grown ass man who played Vikings/rnrr/superman/War1/War2 / War2BNE /SC1/ SC1X/{basically every released and unreleased blizzard title including alphas}, I really really wish I could see a successor game that doesn’t have pinups of women that look like they have yoga tights and crop tops for armor. It would be nice to have a game that’s a bit less thirsty.

They do mention in the description being inspired by Mass Effect so I guess they felt a visit to the $COLOUR-Skinned Space Babe spin wheel was part of the deal.

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

#265
post #263

This reminds me of when Microsoft bought Rare. One of greatest game creators of all time, who seemed to be the perfect fit as 2nd party Nintendo developers. Suddenly they couldn't produce anything noteworthy. I've no idea why. I just wish they'd been GameCube developers instead. That console needed them and to me was a better fit for their types of games. Oh well.

Microsoft bet all their chips on kinect, and Rare was spearheading game development for that device. When it didn't work as well, they gutted Rare.

They bet on the wrong horse then.

Activision blizzard recently released one of the worst rated call of duty games, diablo Immoral with obscenely predatory micro transactions, ruined overwatch forcing the original game into a sequel model no one asked for and is still reeling from a controversy involving years of employee abuse, including sexual offenses.

Gutting the management of ActiBlizz is a good bet. Too bad they got hit by the same wave of layoffs of many other studios and tech companies.

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

#266
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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..

This is true but I'm observing more and more casual players and just regular humans begin to catch up and become resistant. They understand they're being addicted and milked and started pulling back.

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

#267
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think this is necessarily the case for fiction, where creativity is more important than perfect accuracy (ie hallucinations could be a good thing). LLMs have access to more training material than a human writer could reasonably read in a lifetime, and have a large statistical model of "drama" that's way more nuanced than your typical side NPC. I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace t…

I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or will we look at it and get the uneasy feeling that it isn't human and decide we would rather deal with the unevenness of human creation because it is human?

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

#269
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The company is worth what it's worth, according to investors, no matter how many slices you piece it up in. If you issue more shares, people will be willing to pay less for each one. Yes, adding cash to the balance sheet increases the book value, but the only way to add that cash is to sell the new shares, and the only way to sell the new shares is to offer them for cheaper than the current asking price.

Put another way, if prospective investors wanted to buy more shares at the current asking price, they could, from an existing owner. The people who want shares but haven't bought, demand a lower price for them.

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

#270
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…

WTF is Stable Diffusion v6? SDXL is latest and before that 2.1 lol

Probably reffering to midjourney version 6
Post reply on HN