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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

#311
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com

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/

No, I hadn't. This also looks great! Nice to see some action in this space - RTSs have been life support for the last little while.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I need Starcraft 3 badly :) I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1]. [1] https://playstormgate.com

Stormgate looks like it was developed a decade before SC2, not a decade after

In what sense? Graphically or gameplay wise?

Either way, that's arguably not a bad thing. Approximately a decade before SC2 was a golden age of RTS games. Homeworld and Red Alert 2 came out around that time. Give me more of that and I'm happy.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plenty of startups in NYC

plenty of other tech in NYC too. ISPs, all sorts of F500 orgs (not just finance), etc.

The rents are no joke, but if I had to be out of a job and in tech, NYC or SF would be top picks (maybe Denver, Austin, DC, or RDU after that).

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. because only AI, cloud, and startups are hiring? What a weird interpretation to make of someone based off of a comment history on the internet. We don't even know what domain they work in.

No, because even if you are at a pretty standard company, you will be expected to deal with these technologies

Nah. Cloud is a maybe, I (front-end focused) don't deal with cloud technology directly.

I should, but I find it draining.

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

#315
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The limiting factor on speed at large companies is not "time to write code".

I think you are the kind of person that can only see a few inches in front of you at any given moment.

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

#316
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limiting factor on speed at large companies is not "time to write code".

I think you are the kind of person that can only see a few inches in front of you at any given moment.

What a weird thing to say.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the company is worth MORE when people buy the new stock shares.

Let's say you have a company worth $2 and you have two shareholders, each with one share. So that's a dollar a share, right? Now you sell a third share for a dollar. The company that was worth $2 is now worth $3 because it has its old assets that were worth $2, and it has NOW has a dollar in cash that it didn't have before. Now it's a $3 company. This is not advanced analysis, this is simple counting. Trust me, I know how it works, I got a graduate degree in it, and you're simply wrong.

what you may be thinking of is when the company issues shares and gives them as incentives/rewards to officers/directors/employees. That does dilute ownership, but sale of shares does not.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your sentiment, but one's experience does not need to manifest like the ones you listed to be considered hard. You listed one career choice and agriculture is actually the easiest industry. #2 lowest failure rate in 1 year, #1 lowest after 5 and after 10 years [1]. What you thought was fucking hard is objectively not compared to every other industry from BLS data. Although I'd still say it's a startup an…

"You listed one career choice and agriculture is actually the easiest industry. #2 lowest failure rate in 1 year, #1 lowest after 5 and after 10 years [1]. What you thought was fucking hard is objectively not compared to every other industry from BLS data. " You are pretty clearly defining "hard" differently than the poster you're responding to, as somehow being related only to the chance of a venture failing. But ob…

That's exactly right and my point. The person I'm replying to is the one that used an irrelevant definition.

The context of the entire discussion was NOT for the parent to decide to apply for jobs or become a prisoner of war.

It was to work for the man or do a startup. And building a successful startup is fucking hard.

Furthermore, nobody in SV is using the definition that the parent is irate about when they say building a startup is hard. They're using the one I've outlined.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the company is worth MORE when people buy the new stock shares. Let's say you have a company worth $2 and you have two shareholders, each with one share. So that's a dollar a share, right? Now you sell a third share for a dollar. The company that was worth $2 is now worth $3 because it has its old assets that were worth $2, and it has NOW has a dollar in cash that it didn't have before. Now it's a $3 company. This is…

> the company is worth MORE when people buy the new stock shares

This is a huge "when" (it should be more of an "if"), and one upon which the entire theory rests. But we can't just assume infinite demand for shares at any price. So: will people buy the new shares, at the current, pre-new-issue price?

No, they won't. The current price is too much for those people to buy shares. If those people wanted shares at the current price, they could buy them from an existing holder. They didn't, indicating they don't want to.

Thus: no people buying the newly-issued shares; means no cash going into the company; means no increase in company value. The company would need to offer less than the current price (thus decreasing the price) in order to get anyone to buy the new shares.

>Let's say [I] have a company worth $2 and [I] have two shareholders, each with one share. So that's a dollar a share, right? Now [I] sell a third share for a dollar (pronouns edited to respond)

Who would you sell it to? Who would buy that share for a dollar? I could have bought it from one of the 2 existing shareholders for a dollar. Offering a third share says to me that you're on shaky financial ground, and that your company is probably worth closer to $0 than $2. In fact, I suspect you might apply my third dollar towards executive compensation, rather than towards increasing the value of the company, and that's why "the company" needs my cash in the first place.

This is basic demand theory: there is no marginal demand for a share of your company at a price of $1. Only 2 people were willing to pay that, and they already did. I bet the new-issue antics are giving them pause, too: they'll probably offload at a loss, if anyone will buy at that point, even for pennies on the dollar. But I'll tell you what: I'll offer you 30 cents. Take it (and lower the share price to 30 cents) or leave it. Trust me, I got two graduate degrees in this ;)

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

#320
post #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 reel…

Interesting, I didn't know that about kinect. Though I think rare were responsible for the mii like avatars which I think everyone liked. God knows how they managed to mess up perfect dark zero so much. Probably because free radical guys had left by that stage. I loved time splitters 1 and 2 too. Now I'm just rambling :)
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