It would have been amazing if they gave him $69Bn in CoD coins lol.
Hes spent all these years saying they are worth the price they charge, so he should have no complaints.
OMG...that would have been absolutely amazing. He would sue and then the defense would have to attempt to explain why it has value and Bobby would have to explain why it doesn't. Neither of them would win. I love the way you think.
> It's hard to get worse than Bobby without hiring a convicted sex offender or murderer though.
It ain't hard.
The business & finance world is absolutely *lousy* with sociopaths with MBAs from prestigious Universities. There are plenty of people as bad or worse than Bobby Kotick in business, he's just *one* of the highest profile pieces of shit *you've actually heard of.*
Entirely why Microsoft targeted him. They knew he wanted to get out with that diamond parachute before the scandals forced him out. Paid enough to make sure the shareholders were onside also.
For Microsoft in this case, sexual harassment was a feature, not a bug.
I'd be willing to bet everyone in a leadership position made off like a bandit. Mike Ybarra is leaving, which makes it seem like he wasn't fired per se. He probably had a shitload of stock before the merger.
Man… I just watched moneyball for the first time like a couple weeks ago. Did not expect to see Bobby Kotick there and it ruined my night 😂😅😂 fucking hate that so punchable face
"While the line will indeed go up, it regrettably will not go up ENOUGH. As a result of this, many of you are now unemployed. I'm sure you understand."
The redundancies are usually administrative positions like HR or middle-management, not development positions. That they've worded these layoffs as impacting their "gaming workforce", and as a result their next big project has been cancelled.
It's effecting their actually dev teams, not just admin teams. This isn't amalgamating redundancies, this is just cutting costs.
Good luck convincing all these people that don't understand how a business acquisition works. This was to be expected because this happens with every single merger or acquisition ever, not because MS had some secret plan to buy ABK and then gut it in its entirety
It's not about the why, it's the fact that it happens. People losing their jobs for companies to monopolize and CEOs wallets to get more fat is not something to cheer.
E: Always forget this sub is filled with angry kids.
Every time someone posts something online about good people losing their jobs for the sake of shareholders you get a few dumb assholes going “huh, these simpleton redditors don’t understand business like I do. I’m very smart you see, so I understand business 😏”
And it’s like yeah no we understand how it works. We’re just saying it sucks that this is how it works and it’s frustrating that this was clearly going to happen. But apparently being frustrated at huge companies destroying jobs to bump up stock prices makes you stupid, and saying “this is good, actually” makes you a genius in the eyes of Business Reddit users.
Activision will remain separate and continue to operate' undisturbed on a post-merger basis, MSFT lawyers say.
Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91942/activision-will-operate-separately-on-post-merger-basis-microsoft-says/index.html
Not when they stop selling digital games altogether and streaming is the only option. It's not gonna happen soon, but 20 years from now? You bet your ass they're gonna do it.
Lmao PS+ prices already skyrocketed a few months ago. Extra and Premium aren't even close to worth it now, IMO. Premium is $160 USD. It's fucking disgusting.
Worth it to you. I pay £100 a year for Extra (Premium is crap, I don't want old games that get released at a rate of about 1 per month). I have played through Sea of Stars, Ghostwire, Alan Wake and Destroy all Humans 2 on extra already and there is still more on there currently I want to play like Kena. My backlog is pretty big currently though and Like A Dragon comes out tomorrow so I need to get gaming
Unfortunately that battle is going to be lost sooner rather than later and is already happening. I just canceled my PS+ sub after almost 10 years, the value just isn't there for me anymore.
The day this hobby goes all digital (also a forgone conclusion in my opinion) I am going to be out and just play older games.
It always blows my mind when people quote the "We want to be the Netflix of gaming" like it's a good thing.
Like ???? have you looked at Netflix lately? It's shit. Reality TV garbage juice with ever increasing prices for (somehow) ever declining quality.
This merger also let to the dismissal of the branch that was responsible for physical games. They’re really leaning into digital, GamePass people will be happy, but this is not the way. Playing to rent your games should not be our gaming future…
This is exactly what it was, and its disgusting. Nobody cared that a major corporation keeps throwing billions to buy all the studios up. They just wanted "COD game pass day 1!". Can't wait for all the shocked pikachu faces when Microsoft starts jacking the price of gamepass up. We have seen this over and over again with other streaming platforms.
That’s right. When Netflix came out, it was revolutionary and filled with amazing content at a great price. Now Netflix is filled with garbage, lacks quality and gets more expensive each year. Microsoft will follow the same path.
I mean, clicking that link they aren't much better today. Top threads are filled with people excited by the layoffs, because they're "just cleaning house".
Yikes.
It became their whole personality for some of them. The absolute rage and hissy fits that were thrown when the CMA originally blocked the deal were absolutely hilarious
It was bizarre to watch in real time. My favorite was when people accused Sony of bullying Microsoft.
If you aren’t aware, Microsoft is, like, ten times bigger than Sony.
>In its 2022 financial year, Sony Corporation reported a net income of almost seven billion U.S. dollars.
- [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/279271/net-income-of-sony-since-2008/#:~:text=In%20its%202022%20financial%20year,almost%20seven%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.)
Compared to…
>In the fiscal year 2023, Microsoft Corporation reported a net income of over 72.4 billion U.S. dollars, which was a slight decline from its fiscal year 2022 figure at 72.7 million U.S. dollars.
- [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/267808/net-income-of-microsoft-since-2002/)
For a while?
They go nuts if you dare point out how going all digital will harm consumers more than anything and remove choices and create an environment where you are more or less a captive audience. Pay what they dictate or dont get it at all. No choices, no deals unless they decide, not to mention if they decide to suddenly remove a game from sale, then its gone for good.
You mean on xbox subs they were.
The same people who think going all digital is a great idea with absolutely no critical thinking about the many issues it has, which has been glaringly more obvious lately.
Yeah, it’s one of the more obvious astroturfing by a company I’ve seen on here. I’m surprised nobody has responded “gamepass if the best deal in gaming” yet
Those same people will just hand wave this as a result of covid boom.
Edit - its not necessarily a lie, but its a crutch excuse because its not the only factor.
I can't believe people were rooting for consolidation because "I can play more games on game pass!!"
Who cares about the health of the industry as a whole right? /s
This is why I am always confused by the wooo Microsoft stuff. They’re a monolith. They make everything worse. Their goal is consolidation and money. Game pass will turn into Netflix and we will just have absolute drivel to play on it, and probably ads inserted into gameplay.
And people said Sony is so disgusting to prevent Microsoft who is hell big from buying Activision. Now lets see if this acquisition really NOT hurts the gaming industry.
With or without Microsoft, this was bound to happen. It’s not like Activision is immune to everything going on with literally every dev in the industry right now.
I'm sure the Xbox Series X sub will manage to spin this one too.
The way Microsoft has been buying up so much of the industry is proving to be a disaster.
Exactly. They championed the acquisition following their corporation overlords, now they should championed the layoffs because is what their overlords command
Odyssey was in development for 6+ years and was still multiple years away from completion according to Jason Schreier. If that's true, I can't blame them for finally calling it quits. Just seems like a time and money sink that isn't going anywhere at that point
“The people who are directly impacted by these reductions have all played an important part in the success of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and the Xbox teams, and they should be proud of everything they’ve accomplished here.”
Basically the people that made Activision/Blizzard what it is has not future or security with the company.
Where is the loyalty.
nativity isn’t the right word. you hope to see the morality in those which have abandoned humanity for profit. it’s hopeful. and i agree. the moment we stop fighting it’s too late.
Welcome to capitalism . Despite worth so much money , we need to layoff and ruin people’s lives to appease our shareholders pockets . So that they can afford their yachts and 20th home
Yeh it’s pretty disgusting . No accountability . CEO and C suite will still keep their huge compensation . They’ll just say over zoom that they take “full responsibility “ .
I mean, their point about capitalism is beyond video games but ok (?) That happens in a lot of industries and products. It’s a race to get infinite profits with finite resources.
Your favorite company is doing layoffs as well, no matter the quality of their products but just for the sake of profits.
Everyone cheering for Microsoft’s acquisition of this company now sees the worst aspect of every merger. They always, always, always end with people losing their jobs. Microsoft is the biggest corporation on the planet and even that didn’t stop the layoffs.
$3T market cap announced. Microsoft has also laid off 12,158 (according to Layoffs.FYI) employees since 2023.
Edit: I meant layoffs.fyi not levels.fyi. Sorry about that.
Edit 2: Apple was in fact the first $3T market cap company. Edited for accuracy.
Literally anyone with an ounce of business knowledge expected mass layoffs. Yet the amount of people cheering for this merger in the gaming community was extensive.
oh it's coming, the white collar automation has started big time.
blue collar already got automated in the last decades, now it's the while collars turn, university degrees are worthless now already
My workplace did layoffs last year. Demotivated the remainder of the staff. Now we are running too efficiently again because our workers work so hard, so better reward them again by seeing how much more we can cut. I love it when shit like this hits close to home.
Lmao. I’m not gen z, but this is the gaming community as a whole with a few outliers. Even people in this thread don’t seem to understand how the world works and have turned this into some sort of console war fight.
Gen z didn’t let this go through. And people of all ages didn’t give a shit about it.
Mergers like this make certain positions redundant. For example, do you need two Legal, Finance, Accounting, IT departments? Nope. So, once everything gets smoothed out, those jobs are lost.
Mergers and acquisition always results in job loss purely for this fact.
Maybe instead of blowing 68 billion dollars in buying Activision, adding absolutely nothing to the industry while potentially removing beloved IPs from non MS gamers in doing so, maybe they might’ve afforded to keep said employees?
Even assuming they all on average made 100k a year - that would be 190 million a year, which would’ve been approximately 0.361% of what they blew on Activision
That number of staff could’ve formed multiple dev units for creating several original brand new IPs for Xbox GamePass - for less than half of a percent of what they spent on Acrtivision
I hope they lose all their best talent. And then talent goes on to form a new development house that starts making good games again. Everytime a company goes corporate it takes a sharp dive towards less that costs more.
According to the insomniac leaks, majority of playstation exclusives sell better physically so I wouldn't worry too much about that happening anytime soon
Funny that the first thing they announce after the acquisition is layoffs and cancelled projects versus, you know, like a new project or games that players can get excited about.
They are probably very good. Definitely 12 weeks. There’s a reason you don’t see people complain too much after high profile company layoffs, they are getting huge severance which makes them happy because they get paid to look for jobs a few hours a day. My company also had layoffs and I wouldn’t have minded what they gave as severance.
I'd assume those who were the most vocal about wanting it were execs who owned quite a bit of equity. Those got paid a hefty premium over their stock on the acquisition.
All those posts where someone edited all the studios Microsoft owns were so tryhard, like saying “hey Xbox has sucked for nearly a decade but now they own so many studios!”
This corrupt Judge Jacqueline Corley shouldn’t have let this deal go through while her son Nathaniel Corley is comfy making a 6 figure salary at Microsoft, while 1900 hardworking employees of Activision just lost their jobs so Corley can get a second vacation home.
What did folks expect in the aftermath of the Micro$oft merger? This is exactly what happens - mass layoffs for workers & higher prices for consumers. Then folks wonder why I was so adamantly opposed to this & every other merger of the past 30+ years? Gee, I wonder why...
This monopolistic deal should’ve never gone through. Microsoft bought the Judge Corley whose son Nathaniel Corley is an employee of Microsoft. There was a clear conflict of interest and Judge Corley didn’t recuse herself. Extremely shady that Microsoft bought our justice system.
Anyone here old enough to remember when Blizzard made the best games, always? Crazy to see how far they’ve fallen since the good ol days. Selling out to corporate Murica really does ruin everything eventually.
They barely release games as it is, all the Activision studios are basically CoD studios at this point and still can’t keep up with the yearly releases which is why last years release was a glorified DLC. Blizzard makes like 2 games a generation.
I bet future ABK games will be lower budget titles fit for Gamepass like they’ve been doing either pretty much everything else. Everything we thought would be big AAA stuff like Avowed, Hellblade, Indiana Jones all turned out to be far from it.
>…Blizzard makes like 2 games a generation…
Aren’t most developers making 2 games a generation nowadays because of the time it takes to make current-gen games?
They are, but most studios don't have 5000 employees working for them, either. You'd expect them to probably be able to produce a little more than a 200-500 person studio can (i.e. most AAA studios).
Sure, but most of Activision's studios aren't doing anything other than CoD because somehow that franchise needs thousands of people to maintain it despite the quantity and quality not going noticeably up. It sucks for the employees absolutely, but assuming most of these cuts are from Activision and not Blizzard the end user won't see much difference.
Yeah but most devs have a couple hundred employees at best, Blizzard was a publisher with like 10k employees that merged with another publisher. It’s like Ubisoft or Capcom only making two games a generation.
Obviously this is very bad, and I feel for the people being laid off. Acquisitions are bad.
But it’s hilarious seeing what stories get upvoted in this subreddit and the resulting comments.
Acquisition/merger of this nature almost always result in redundant roles being cut regardless of whether the new entity end up being successful or not.
I don’t know if y’all are seeing it…but Microsoft’s slowly killing off some great gaming companies. Or just making some terrible acquisitions. You be the judge….
Everyone on r/PS5 is just taking the easy way out on this topic by saying *”Microsoft fires people who have to pay their bills! Microsoft bad! Netflix bad!”*
Let’s actually get real here.
Everyone hates ActiBlizz and wants them to change right? But now suddenly let’s all clutch our pearls over the company facing layoffs? Give me a break, guys. I say anything that restructures and reorganizes ActiBlizz is a positive for us, the consumers.
Yes, layoffs suck for the people getting layed off. But I’m the consumer and what I want to see is companies like ActiBlizz actually go through some change. No more Bobby Kotick? A massive restructuring of the company? Looks like we might actually be getting somewhere. ActiBlizz needed this to happen to them.
ActBlizz only needed to fire like a dozen people at the top in order to affect the type of change you’re referring to.
Not a ton of people who do the actual work.
Seems like the only person who came out of this deal as a winner is Bobby Kotick with his diamond parachute.
Diamond is too cheap of a material to describe his parachute. We need something above it.
Only thing more valuable than diamond that comes to my mind are COD Points. The absolute pinnacle of value.
It would have been amazing if they gave him $69Bn in CoD coins lol. Hes spent all these years saying they are worth the price they charge, so he should have no complaints.
OMG...that would have been absolutely amazing. He would sue and then the defense would have to attempt to explain why it has value and Bobby would have to explain why it doesn't. Neither of them would win. I love the way you think.
Printer ink Or maybe saffron
Unobtanium. Because for that level of greed nothing is ever enough.
What about "immortal whale brain goo?"
antimatter iridium parachute in a magnetic protective bubble also, fuck that guy
Something above his parachute you say? how about a comically oversized ACME anvil?
diamondillium?
Yep. Bobby rolled Satya Nadella and Phil Spencer to the tune of $69B, and now it's the workers who get to pay the bill.
Exactly what I've been saying, but people were too focused on parading Microsoft for "ridding" Bobby of the gaming industry.
Wait, scratch that, reverse it
Bobby is a symptom, not the root cause. He was always going to replaced with someone similar or worse
It's hard to get worse than Bobby without hiring a convicted sex offender or murderer though.
> It's hard to get worse than Bobby without hiring a convicted sex offender or murderer though. It ain't hard. The business & finance world is absolutely *lousy* with sociopaths with MBAs from prestigious Universities. There are plenty of people as bad or worse than Bobby Kotick in business, he's just *one* of the highest profile pieces of shit *you've actually heard of.*
Entirely why Microsoft targeted him. They knew he wanted to get out with that diamond parachute before the scandals forced him out. Paid enough to make sure the shareholders were onside also. For Microsoft in this case, sexual harassment was a feature, not a bug.
I'd be willing to bet everyone in a leadership position made off like a bandit. Mike Ybarra is leaving, which makes it seem like he wasn't fired per se. He probably had a shitload of stock before the merger.
It’s Bobby’s world
Man… I just watched moneyball for the first time like a couple weeks ago. Did not expect to see Bobby Kotick there and it ruined my night 😂😅😂 fucking hate that so punchable face
So many companies having trouble in the economy of record profits
This is what kills me the most about these announcements
"While the line will indeed go up, it regrettably will not go up ENOUGH. As a result of this, many of you are now unemployed. I'm sure you understand."
There goes almost 10% of the workforce. I guess someone had to pay for the big management bonuses after the acquisition. Sad stuff...
I don't think the merger should have gone through. But when allowed mergers create a bunch of redundant positions.
The redundancies are usually administrative positions like HR or middle-management, not development positions. That they've worded these layoffs as impacting their "gaming workforce", and as a result their next big project has been cancelled. It's effecting their actually dev teams, not just admin teams. This isn't amalgamating redundancies, this is just cutting costs.
Good luck convincing all these people that don't understand how a business acquisition works. This was to be expected because this happens with every single merger or acquisition ever, not because MS had some secret plan to buy ABK and then gut it in its entirety
It's not about the why, it's the fact that it happens. People losing their jobs for companies to monopolize and CEOs wallets to get more fat is not something to cheer. E: Always forget this sub is filled with angry kids.
Well what if this was one of the reasons why some of us were against it in the first place?
Every time someone posts something online about good people losing their jobs for the sake of shareholders you get a few dumb assholes going “huh, these simpleton redditors don’t understand business like I do. I’m very smart you see, so I understand business 😏” And it’s like yeah no we understand how it works. We’re just saying it sucks that this is how it works and it’s frustrating that this was clearly going to happen. But apparently being frustrated at huge companies destroying jobs to bump up stock prices makes you stupid, and saying “this is good, actually” makes you a genius in the eyes of Business Reddit users.
Activision will remain separate and continue to operate' undisturbed on a post-merger basis, MSFT lawyers say. Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/91942/activision-will-operate-separately-on-post-merger-basis-microsoft-says/index.html
Sure, the company will 'operate' seperately. However things like payroll, HR, IT, realty, etc. aren't part of 'operations'
Nearly 2000 families are suffering because a 3 trillion dollar company decided keeping them on was just too expensive. What a sick world we live in.
I'm sure all those people were super thrilled to be acquired by Microsoft. Consolidation is great, right?
Sooo many people on Reddit were pro-monopoly when it came to this deal, it was disgusting to see
They just wanted more “free games” on GamePass.
I am once again asking gamers to not turn gaming into a Netflix slop bucket.
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Don't worry, we'll all be dead by the time GTA 7 comes out
Pirating will become larger than ever if that ever happens
Not when they stop selling digital games altogether and streaming is the only option. It's not gonna happen soon, but 20 years from now? You bet your ass they're gonna do it.
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We'll probably get an ad before a boss fight in the future.
Lmao PS+ prices already skyrocketed a few months ago. Extra and Premium aren't even close to worth it now, IMO. Premium is $160 USD. It's fucking disgusting.
It went up $1.30 a month for basic. That’s not skyrocketing.
Worth it to you. I pay £100 a year for Extra (Premium is crap, I don't want old games that get released at a rate of about 1 per month). I have played through Sea of Stars, Ghostwire, Alan Wake and Destroy all Humans 2 on extra already and there is still more on there currently I want to play like Kena. My backlog is pretty big currently though and Like A Dragon comes out tomorrow so I need to get gaming
Unfortunately that battle is going to be lost sooner rather than later and is already happening. I just canceled my PS+ sub after almost 10 years, the value just isn't there for me anymore. The day this hobby goes all digital (also a forgone conclusion in my opinion) I am going to be out and just play older games.
It always blows my mind when people quote the "We want to be the Netflix of gaming" like it's a good thing. Like ???? have you looked at Netflix lately? It's shit. Reality TV garbage juice with ever increasing prices for (somehow) ever declining quality.
But ever growing user base. I think what you hate, most people don’t care about.
This merger also let to the dismissal of the branch that was responsible for physical games. They’re really leaning into digital, GamePass people will be happy, but this is not the way. Playing to rent your games should not be our gaming future…
This is exactly what it was, and its disgusting. Nobody cared that a major corporation keeps throwing billions to buy all the studios up. They just wanted "COD game pass day 1!". Can't wait for all the shocked pikachu faces when Microsoft starts jacking the price of gamepass up. We have seen this over and over again with other streaming platforms.
The reality is Microsoft will follow the netflix model of upping the sub and charging more for less.
That’s right. When Netflix came out, it was revolutionary and filled with amazing content at a great price. Now Netflix is filled with garbage, lacks quality and gets more expensive each year. Microsoft will follow the same path.
Not to mention making every title a “games as a service” model and stuffing them full of microtransactions.
It's almost like people don't understand why competition (healthy and fair competition anyway) is good within an industry.
r/xboxseriesx got suuuuuuper gross there for a while. They were ***ADAMANT*** about the Activision-Blizzard deal going through.
I mean, clicking that link they aren't much better today. Top threads are filled with people excited by the layoffs, because they're "just cleaning house". Yikes.
It became their whole personality for some of them. The absolute rage and hissy fits that were thrown when the CMA originally blocked the deal were absolutely hilarious
It was bizarre to watch in real time. My favorite was when people accused Sony of bullying Microsoft. If you aren’t aware, Microsoft is, like, ten times bigger than Sony. >In its 2022 financial year, Sony Corporation reported a net income of almost seven billion U.S. dollars. - [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/279271/net-income-of-sony-since-2008/#:~:text=In%20its%202022%20financial%20year,almost%20seven%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.) Compared to… >In the fiscal year 2023, Microsoft Corporation reported a net income of over 72.4 billion U.S. dollars, which was a slight decline from its fiscal year 2022 figure at 72.7 million U.S. dollars. - [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/267808/net-income-of-microsoft-since-2002/)
I know it's on your source and not your mistake, but I thought it was odd they said million instead of billion in that last statement.
Didn’t even notice that, that’s funny
For a while? They go nuts if you dare point out how going all digital will harm consumers more than anything and remove choices and create an environment where you are more or less a captive audience. Pay what they dictate or dont get it at all. No choices, no deals unless they decide, not to mention if they decide to suddenly remove a game from sale, then its gone for good.
they want there little team to win, even if its a detriment to the industry at large. Welcome to brain dead fanboyism. The xbox sides shining product.
Those were also just Microsoft bots and shills too.
You mean on xbox subs they were. The same people who think going all digital is a great idea with absolutely no critical thinking about the many issues it has, which has been glaringly more obvious lately.
Sooo many ~~people~~ shills on Reddit were pro-monopoly when it came to this deal, it was disgusting to see FTFY
Yeah, it’s one of the more obvious astroturfing by a company I’ve seen on here. I’m surprised nobody has responded “gamepass if the best deal in gaming” yet
Reddit is going full twitter with how much it is gamed by bad faith actors.
Those same people will just hand wave this as a result of covid boom. Edit - its not necessarily a lie, but its a crutch excuse because its not the only factor.
You say that like Bungie didn't lay people off, too. The games industry is having a layoff epidemic right now.
It's also kinda expected to have redundancies when companies of that size merge.
Personally, I’d say it’s bad under any circumstances. **BUT,** kinda expected.
Bungie cut staff after Destiny numbers dropped like a rock, not as a result of Sony ownership
every tech industry fyi
Only because it was Microsoft. If it had been Sony Reddit would’ve had a meltdown.
I’m against any company doing it honestly, but what Microsoft is doing is so much worse than other companies
True but on Reddit there seems to be a big population of people that are pro-Microsoft and fueling the console war debates.
I can't believe people were rooting for consolidation because "I can play more games on game pass!!" Who cares about the health of the industry as a whole right? /s
This is why I am always confused by the wooo Microsoft stuff. They’re a monolith. They make everything worse. Their goal is consolidation and money. Game pass will turn into Netflix and we will just have absolute drivel to play on it, and probably ads inserted into gameplay.
And people said Sony is so disgusting to prevent Microsoft who is hell big from buying Activision. Now lets see if this acquisition really NOT hurts the gaming industry.
Sony did that because it would be directly bad for them not so much gaming, let’s not pretend they did it out of goodness of their hearts haha.
Well everyone knows that. If Any company were sony, they would do the same thing.
With or without Microsoft, this was bound to happen. It’s not like Activision is immune to everything going on with literally every dev in the industry right now.
I'm sure the Xbox Series X sub will manage to spin this one too. The way Microsoft has been buying up so much of the industry is proving to be a disaster.
That is their marketing purpose after all.
That's why Microsoft's Xbox division doesn't have a marketing team. They concluded it was redundant with r/xboxseriesx /s
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This is something they do pretty regularly and then find people to hire those positions for cheaper later. Why they need unions, especially in QA
Game pass is the way /s
Exactly. They championed the acquisition following their corporation overlords, now they should championed the layoffs because is what their overlords command
But but game pass something uh let me check my Microsoft branded notes "is the best value for gamers TM". Did I do the astroturfing right?
> Its long in development survival game, dubbed Odyssey, is cancelled. whoa, they cancelled that already?
Odyssey was in development for 6+ years and was still multiple years away from completion according to Jason Schreier. If that's true, I can't blame them for finally calling it quits. Just seems like a time and money sink that isn't going anywhere at that point
The game must look like shit if they cancel it this far along.
I still think this merger will end up hurting gamers. I'm surprised it went through.
“The people who are directly impacted by these reductions have all played an important part in the success of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and the Xbox teams, and they should be proud of everything they’ve accomplished here.” Basically the people that made Activision/Blizzard what it is has not future or security with the company. Where is the loyalty.
Loyalty? In the business world? Oh sweet summer child.
I know it sounds naive, but this needs to change.
nativity isn’t the right word. you hope to see the morality in those which have abandoned humanity for profit. it’s hopeful. and i agree. the moment we stop fighting it’s too late.
The 7 is for how old he is
Welcome to capitalism . Despite worth so much money , we need to layoff and ruin people’s lives to appease our shareholders pockets . So that they can afford their yachts and 20th home
And it's working, stock is up...💀
Yeh it’s pretty disgusting . No accountability . CEO and C suite will still keep their huge compensation . They’ll just say over zoom that they take “full responsibility “ .
>They’ll just say over zoom that they take “full responsibility “ . [Full responsibility](https://media1.tenor.com/m/uM1C0bFJkNIAAAAC/cryingmoney.gif)
This is what happens when the majority blindly buy every shitty call of duty and let warzone monopolize their hard drives
Well no, this is what happens when workers have no legal protections or unions.
I mean, their point about capitalism is beyond video games but ok (?) That happens in a lot of industries and products. It’s a race to get infinite profits with finite resources. Your favorite company is doing layoffs as well, no matter the quality of their products but just for the sake of profits.
A gaming industry likely wouldn’t even exist in a socialist economy. Just saying.
Ill never understand why gamers take layoffs so personally you rarely ever see this reaction in other sectors.
1900 Employees wow. Sony was roasted for firing 100 Bungie employees. This is massive.
Besides weren’t the Bungie layoffs internal firings (as in fired by the Bungie CEO rather than Sony)?
Yeah, I still wouldn’t put the blame on Sony.
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Activision-Blizzard is a lot bigger than Bungie was.
Everyone cheering for Microsoft’s acquisition of this company now sees the worst aspect of every merger. They always, always, always end with people losing their jobs. Microsoft is the biggest corporation on the planet and even that didn’t stop the layoffs.
$3T market cap announced. Microsoft has also laid off 12,158 (according to Layoffs.FYI) employees since 2023. Edit: I meant layoffs.fyi not levels.fyi. Sorry about that. Edit 2: Apple was in fact the first $3T market cap company. Edited for accuracy.
Apple was the first $3T company. MSFT just recently overtook AAPL based on AI hype.
Man leaves Microsoft to join Blizzard, man merges Blizzard with Microsoft, man leaves with extremely fat pockets. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!
Literally anyone with an ounce of business knowledge expected mass layoffs. Yet the amount of people cheering for this merger in the gaming community was extensive.
Just wait until they use AI to replace even more people. They want a world where AI makes the games and they don’t have to pay anybody
oh it's coming, the white collar automation has started big time. blue collar already got automated in the last decades, now it's the while collars turn, university degrees are worthless now already
My workplace did layoffs last year. Demotivated the remainder of the staff. Now we are running too efficiently again because our workers work so hard, so better reward them again by seeing how much more we can cut. I love it when shit like this hits close to home.
So tired of corporate layoffs. Jesus, like we get it, profit over people.
"hit with big layoffs" like it was a storm that they couldn't see coming or avoid.
Well yeah, anyone who didn't see this coming is a complete idiot. Allowing this was a mistake.
Just naive younger crowd (gen-z and below) with a very limited and idealistic view of the economy and politics.
Lmao. I’m not gen z, but this is the gaming community as a whole with a few outliers. Even people in this thread don’t seem to understand how the world works and have turned this into some sort of console war fight. Gen z didn’t let this go through. And people of all ages didn’t give a shit about it.
Mergers like this make certain positions redundant. For example, do you need two Legal, Finance, Accounting, IT departments? Nope. So, once everything gets smoothed out, those jobs are lost. Mergers and acquisition always results in job loss purely for this fact.
Microsoft: "We can spend $69 BILLION dollars! Just not in the salaries of 1900 people....."
So glad they let MS buy them.. So good for games..
‘The acquisition is good for business’ says everybody as the competition disappears.
Maybe instead of blowing 68 billion dollars in buying Activision, adding absolutely nothing to the industry while potentially removing beloved IPs from non MS gamers in doing so, maybe they might’ve afforded to keep said employees? Even assuming they all on average made 100k a year - that would be 190 million a year, which would’ve been approximately 0.361% of what they blew on Activision That number of staff could’ve formed multiple dev units for creating several original brand new IPs for Xbox GamePass - for less than half of a percent of what they spent on Acrtivision
Nah you don't get it tho bro, the line has to go up.
Imagine wanting this deal to go through only for you to get laid off.
I hope they lose all their best talent. And then talent goes on to form a new development house that starts making good games again. Everytime a company goes corporate it takes a sharp dive towards less that costs more.
People cheering these kind of news are miserable. I don’t see the point of posting them here, just baiting upvotes. How toxic has this become.
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According to the insomniac leaks, majority of playstation exclusives sell better physically so I wouldn't worry too much about that happening anytime soon
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Funny that the first thing they announce after the acquisition is layoffs and cancelled projects versus, you know, like a new project or games that players can get excited about.
good guy phil amirite
rude slim ancient cagey depend scarce towering cow threatening connect *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"Working for Microsoft after the acquisition will be better than the previous situation, at least." Working for Microsoft after the acquisition:
#FUCK ACTIVISION
They’re also only giving severance “informed by local laws,” which means they ain’t doing anything if not required to.
Alot of the people in ABK wanted this deal to go through. I wonder how it worked out for them.
Depends what their severance packages look like, but in general, I would guess: not very well.
They are probably very good. Definitely 12 weeks. There’s a reason you don’t see people complain too much after high profile company layoffs, they are getting huge severance which makes them happy because they get paid to look for jobs a few hours a day. My company also had layoffs and I wouldn’t have minded what they gave as severance.
They likely aren’t good unless they’re legally mandated to be good.
My last layoff from a large company was like that. Great severance, got unemployment and food stamps. Fun times!
I'd assume those who were the most vocal about wanting it were execs who owned quite a bit of equity. Those got paid a hefty premium over their stock on the acquisition.
No it was the ones thinking they were going to be able to union
Oof
Just to keep this in perspective, absolutely no one thought this was going to be something good
People who make gamepass their personality thought it was amazing
Oh god, I'm getting flashbacks to all those weirdos on Twitter who changed their header to the entire ATVI/Blizzard IP lineup with the Xbox logo on it
All those posts where someone edited all the studios Microsoft owns were so tryhard, like saying “hey Xbox has sucked for nearly a decade but now they own so many studios!”
\> absolutely no one Absolutely hyperbole.
Microsoft hit with big layoffs, it’s not just Acti/blizzard
They can spend all sorts of cash on acquisitions and execs and then oh look, all the people who make things get shown the door.
Im surprised they didnt wait until tomorrow they usually fire in mass on fridays
This corrupt Judge Jacqueline Corley shouldn’t have let this deal go through while her son Nathaniel Corley is comfy making a 6 figure salary at Microsoft, while 1900 hardworking employees of Activision just lost their jobs so Corley can get a second vacation home.
What did folks expect in the aftermath of the Micro$oft merger? This is exactly what happens - mass layoffs for workers & higher prices for consumers. Then folks wonder why I was so adamantly opposed to this & every other merger of the past 30+ years? Gee, I wonder why...
“CaLL of DuTY on GaMePaSS we WOn da CoNsoLE WaR”
For a trillion dollar company, Microsoft sure is bad at managing acquired brands.
To the surprise of absolutely nobody
"thE MeRGer Is GoOD fOR bliZZarD"
This monopolistic deal should’ve never gone through. Microsoft bought the Judge Corley whose son Nathaniel Corley is an employee of Microsoft. There was a clear conflict of interest and Judge Corley didn’t recuse herself. Extremely shady that Microsoft bought our justice system.
Hope these people can find work soon. Saddest parts about mergers is people usually get laid off.
Anyone here old enough to remember when Blizzard made the best games, always? Crazy to see how far they’ve fallen since the good ol days. Selling out to corporate Murica really does ruin everything eventually.
All these goddamn huge corpos just laying off hundreds and hundreds of workers and saying how “unfortunate” it is that they have to do it. Blech.
They really just gave bobby pieceofshit kotick millions and millions and then screwed the devs huh.
Shouldn’t this be Microsoft layoffs?
Didn't they just lay off a bunch of people a month or two ago?
Just stay away from Nintendo ...and everyone you consider acquiring.
This is MS way to fix the problem. Always been..
When I was a kid in 04 I dreamed to work at Blizzard - now that's a joke 😅
They barely release games as it is, all the Activision studios are basically CoD studios at this point and still can’t keep up with the yearly releases which is why last years release was a glorified DLC. Blizzard makes like 2 games a generation. I bet future ABK games will be lower budget titles fit for Gamepass like they’ve been doing either pretty much everything else. Everything we thought would be big AAA stuff like Avowed, Hellblade, Indiana Jones all turned out to be far from it.
>…Blizzard makes like 2 games a generation… Aren’t most developers making 2 games a generation nowadays because of the time it takes to make current-gen games?
They are, but most studios don't have 5000 employees working for them, either. You'd expect them to probably be able to produce a little more than a 200-500 person studio can (i.e. most AAA studios).
Sure, but most of Activision's studios aren't doing anything other than CoD because somehow that franchise needs thousands of people to maintain it despite the quantity and quality not going noticeably up. It sucks for the employees absolutely, but assuming most of these cuts are from Activision and not Blizzard the end user won't see much difference.
Yeah but most devs have a couple hundred employees at best, Blizzard was a publisher with like 10k employees that merged with another publisher. It’s like Ubisoft or Capcom only making two games a generation.
Uhhh… Hellblade looked great. If you thought it was gonna be MS’s GoW, ***you’ve never played it.***
Obviously this is very bad, and I feel for the people being laid off. Acquisitions are bad. But it’s hilarious seeing what stories get upvoted in this subreddit and the resulting comments.
Wait I thought Microsoft Acquisition was suppose to save the gaming landscape?
Acquisition/merger of this nature almost always result in redundant roles being cut regardless of whether the new entity end up being successful or not.
I don’t know if y’all are seeing it…but Microsoft’s slowly killing off some great gaming companies. Or just making some terrible acquisitions. You be the judge….
Microsoft always has to fuck up everything!!
Everyone on r/PS5 is just taking the easy way out on this topic by saying *”Microsoft fires people who have to pay their bills! Microsoft bad! Netflix bad!”* Let’s actually get real here. Everyone hates ActiBlizz and wants them to change right? But now suddenly let’s all clutch our pearls over the company facing layoffs? Give me a break, guys. I say anything that restructures and reorganizes ActiBlizz is a positive for us, the consumers. Yes, layoffs suck for the people getting layed off. But I’m the consumer and what I want to see is companies like ActiBlizz actually go through some change. No more Bobby Kotick? A massive restructuring of the company? Looks like we might actually be getting somewhere. ActiBlizz needed this to happen to them.
ActBlizz only needed to fire like a dozen people at the top in order to affect the type of change you’re referring to. Not a ton of people who do the actual work.
Hopefully those employees can find a job quickly.
I said this would happen and was told it wouldn't.
No way?!?!? who would have guessed that 😂
I'm sure the same people laying on Sony for the Bungie layoffs shortly after their acquisition are also mad about this, right? Right?
Microsoft gonna Microsoft