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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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out section 174. Due to some GREAT legislation you can no longer write off engineers as an expense... it makes SWEs a tax liability instead of a write-off. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

Due to some GREAT legislation " In 2017, then-President, Donald Trump, signed the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs act, which overhauled tax codes and reduced tax – for example, it reduced the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 37%. To make the bill pass strict budgetary rules, the Senate used a process called reconciliation: adding in tax code changes that delayed tax increases. These delayed increases “balanced out” the tax reducti…

To be clear, that is sarcastic.

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

#282

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.

if you have the finances already to support a startup. The big issue in downturns is that VC money also dries up and hunkers down.

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

#283
post #63

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…

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

That's what I (and the rest of the community) was hoping for, but given that they gutted things like the art teams today... I don't think they're planning on improving anything. If anything, they're making it worse.

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

#284
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to a 9-5 in tech? Which is what they're suggesting instead. What is the point of moralizing?

What is the point of moralizing? Because the guy is framing his discouragement as "coming from a place of love" when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]. Which means it's really not that "fucking hard" at all to start small and begin the search for paying customers. I've been on this board for 17 years back when it was originally called "Startup News" and full o…

>when in reality it takes roughly 2-3 weeks to go from zero-to-[LLC accepting payments on Stripe]

okay, now tell my how long and how much it costs to g from new LLC to self-sustainable. Even some of the most popular startups aren't profitable for years.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion. As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in…

> I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.

Be careful what you wish for.

We barely respect other people.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess technically Larian and GGG are "smaller" than even Activision-Blizzard before the buyout, but they aren't "small" either any more. (And GGG has been mostly owned by Tencent for a few years now.) Path of Exile 1 is a glorious mess that anyone remotely interested in the genre should try (don't give up in the first act like most players, it gets way better), but currently at least with quite ridiculously bad per…

> but they aren't "small" either any more

OK, that's fair

> And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !)

Why not? It's the best marketplace for indie games... IMO it jump-started the PC indie gaming revolution! Before that, we only had shareware of limited reach, maybe distributed through PC Gamer floppies/CDs. And maybe Tucows. It was hard to find new indie games, much less buy them. Steam changed that whole paradigm.

> [PoE performance issues]

For what it's worth, it runs like shite on my M2 Max, but flawlessly on GeForce Now. Terrific performance with everything on max.

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

#287
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion. As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in…

> I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though. Be careful what you wish for. We barely respect other people.

Yeah, lol, it won't take much for a robot to have better ethics than us.

I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.

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

#288
post #227

I keep hearing of huge lay-offs. I wonder, is this the result of LLM’s making everything just so much quicker to code develop? I mean as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 came out, it was the first question on people’s minds so I am guessing that it’s all related and with each advancement in AI there will be more layoffs. Maybe the future consists of multibillion-pound companies which only have 1 staff member (the cleaner) to get…

Of course it's not because of LLMs. This happens after every acquisition. Anyway do you think LLMs are magic or something?

What a daft thing to say.

For my projects, I have decreased the dev time from things that would have taken me three months to build down to at max 1 month using LLM’s.

I have built around 50 plugins for Woocommerce which I would never in a million years had the time to build.

Magic? No, it’s like having a small team at my finger tips (and for no extra cost than the £75 I pay OpenAI each month).

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

#289
This is the new normal in 2024. Hearing about a layoff and reaching out to friends to check if they're safe from it. It's pretty messed up that world's richest companies are using layoffs as a mechanism to fix their balance sheet. My company never went for this lever. Also when you point out flaws in hiring processes at these large companies they swear up and down that it's absolutely necessary. So much waste, so many people chewed out in the process. Clearly there has to be a better way.

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

#290
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 :)

Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead. You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?". While D3 had it's fair criticism at launc…

You might remember the release of D3 with rose-tinted glasses ?

Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.

Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).

Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.

I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.

Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.

The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.

But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)

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