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None of this affects me I play hots, sorry I don't even pay for fan and I must have watched 10k hours of content 🤑🤑🤑 I understand you probably don't know but hots patches ? Why
I remember being stuck in Stratholme back in TBC, trying to solo it with my Rogue for the mount from Baron Rivendare. I went through the door in stealth and it closed. I wrote a ticket and after a while a Gamemaster replied. He appeared next to me and ran against the closed door with 500% movement speed not able to open it. He teleported me at the beginning of the big place before the door and the mobs that were outside suddenly ran at me. I used all my cooldowns and health potion to survive while he was standing next to me and cheering me up, knowing that it would be unfair to help. I managed to win the fight and he wished me a happy day. One of the best interactions ever, only followed by Markus from Customer Support who replaced my Elite Furious Gladiator Sword with the Axe, because the Sword texture got lost during the Cataclysm Patch. True Chad!
dude during wotr days, i got stuck in the lavas by black rock spires, could not move or tele out, the blizzard staff responded to my message half away through their lunch break and 'flew' me out of the place and took me 'swimming' across the sky.......those were the good old days
i wonder if they didn't have such safety nets if they wouldn't be so carefree when it comes to running companies in the ground, What do they have to lose? They are always smiling n talking all positive too. Nothing can be done, if workers attempt to give themselves more power they'll just outsource to a 3rd world nation that is more than happy to suffer for pennies. gotta love globalists.
@@ReturnOfHeresy If your understanding of economics is bigger number better, maybe. Every dollar is worth less. The numbers get bigger because the dollar is weaker. You understand that's why a loaf of bread is $7 instead of $5, right? They have to charge the $7 to get the same monetary leverage that the $5 bought before the economy went in the trash because of inflation.
Iwata made such a good point. I worked in the game industry from 2006-2016 and I was laid off due to company restructuring 3 times. The layoffs were cold and didn't make much sense, other than just short-term budgeting. I was a top-performer and my managers couldn't even make a case to keep me because the decisions came from corporate executives who don't even know me. It makes you feel like you're just part of a machine and not valued at all. Because of that, I have no company loyalty anymore for anywhere I work and I don't buy-in to any company culture that they encourage because the corporate business doesn't really care about you even when they say they do. It's kind of sick honestly and American companies should practice what Nintendo is doing, manage their businesses more responsibly, and value their employees more. It will be better for everyone in the long-run.
Yes. American publicly traded IPOs for game companies is their fault. It’s not possibly to be creative AND have a guaranteed upward curve on shares. Greed killed gaming
I don't mean to be negative with this in Nintendo's case but the problem is that Iwata was the main corporate executive at Nintendo who actually "led from the front" so to speak. He prioritized the video game experience and players first while trying to maintain high profits (which turns out that's the ultimate winning strategy if you're willing to pay the "pound of flesh" in the short term for that long term quality and success. My main bit of proof is compared Gen 6 Pokemon to Pokemon post Iwata's passing). Nintendo doesn't have a guy like Iwata running the company anymore unfortunately. Nintendo's still doing a little better than the rest of the AAA gaming industry at the moment but you can see the "decay" in quality with Pokemon after Sword and Shield. Scarlet and Violet is still an absolute mess with how much lag it has even in singleplayer at 30fps and how many bugs it still has. And when people called out GameFreak and The Pokemon Company out on Scarlet and Violet's (still) awful technical performance, GameFreak and TPC just kind of ignored it. You can see this pretty easily with the recent DLC for Scarlet and Violent having pretty bad optimization and performance. The actual care is gone because "Too Big to Fail Syndrome" has taken over. Edit: I know there's still people who "lead from the front" like Miyamoto (if he's still there) and a few others but my point was there's no "higher-ups" who have that same mentality that people like Iwata and Miyamoto had/have.
@@Doomweapon66 Good insight. Yeah, and the higher-up types tend to be ambitious business people who start to get blinded by bonuses and promotions. I've ran consumer analytics for them and sometimes they completely disregard the results and just do what they want. They have that kind of mentality. It's illogical. Then the company suffers because they didn't do what their fans/customers wanted. For any creative-based industry, and gaming is one of them, there should be a creative person who can also do business at the top. Not just a business person. Disney is having this problem now as well. And yeah, Scarlet and Violet looks like a Game Cube game or a bad mobile game. Lot's of disappointment there and obvious lack of quality. They shouldn't push Pokemon games out like how Activision pushes out Call of Duty games. The quality starts to suffer. Spend a bit more time and make them good games.
Company loyalty stopped being a legitimate thing you should bother with in like 2012. 2 years. If by 1.5 years you are not approached for promotion or a raise; prepare your resume. Most companies have already been on a 2-year-tenure-trajectory for most employees, since 2015-ish. At your next job interview, tell them you work on an "up or out in 2 years or less" policy. "As someone with a specialized skillset and advanced expertise in this field, I have no intention of remaining in the same role or at the same rate for longer than 2 years on average. If there are opportunities here for me that match my pace of progression, I fully intend to commit long-term, and be as loyal to the company as is reflected in my compensation growth and in the elevation of my responsibility tier" Something to that effect will scare away everyone who wants to wring you dry on minimum wage. You will get LOTS of rejections. The MOST important thing is to say it with confidence. Almost with nonchalance; A passing, necessary pleasantry. Coming off as if you don't think it's an issue but you're "required to say it for policy reasons." If you get called back, you already have the job.... it's just a matter of not disqualifying yourself. Avoid multi-rounds, office tours, and ANY conversation with HR (as best you can; ESPECIALLY smalltalk), etc. If it's not an immediate "no" but they haven't offered the job, then they're hoping you will keep your life on hold while they use your pending application/offer as leverage to offer under-pay to the guy who's 80% as good as you but will take 50% of the pay if we tell him "we have other candidates and we need a response soon". Which is a tactic you can spit right back at them at your FIRST interview. Your objective is to get THEM to say yes RIGHT NOW, on YOUR terms.
I worked for Vivendi, who published Blizzard back before Activision. When they announced the merger with Activision, our team promised us that there wouldn't be layoffs. It was just to ensure that we would keep working and they would get their product finished. The moment the merger went through, and they had enough staff, they laid everyone on our team off, except for the leads.
@@johnh8292 the best part of it was when we went to work, people removed all the letters from Vivdendi Games to spell End Me. It was the first thing anyone saw when coming up the elevators.
I worked at a private airfield that AT&T leased for their corprate Lear jets. In the mid 90s AT&T announced one of the largest layoff in US Corp history. One day we got a new custom order and my supervisor said "Oh wow we are going to see their new Lear jet!!" And I answered, "wait, didn't they just announced the largest layoff in US history?" He gave me a funny look and said with a straight face, "How do you think they paid for the jet?" I get the feeling we just found out how they were going to pay to acquire Activision/Blizzard and Bethesda........
Maths wise it would be easier to not get paid double digits of Millions per year just to be part owner of some Corp but hey that would not be fair, everyone deserves the chance to become a CEO :))
@@CBRN-115 Shills will never quit as they live rose colored goggles on their face but you can lose whales if your product is absolute shit which blizzards games have been for many many years.
I think it’s funny that these industries started crumbling when prices increased. $70 games and $25 skins, and sky high revenue expectations… people aren’t buying the BS anymore. What did people think was going to happen? Higher costs means less people buy meaning less people working for those companies.
Heh, I don't buy full price games. I just wait until they're 70%+ off, even if it takes years. I have a great backlog of games as a result; all the quality of life patches are implemented to fix the terrible stability issues they normally have on launch, and I save a good bit of money and it goes farther enjoying the games I have!
@@bok4822 Exactly, that's how stock companies operate. If your target is a 20% margin, the top management will be rewarded more for killing all the products/services not getting at least 2/3 of the expected profits than keeping it and trying to make things work. It's crazy in the long term, but works wonders for the actual owners aka shareholders and their interest in the short term. So whenever two large market players merge? Expect heads to roll, and most of those will be the frontline staff. And should income drop as a consequence? Increase the prices or implement a more agressive monetization strategy. At this point, with the internet being a thing and knowledge for the taking as long as people want it? This should not be a surprise to anyone, and the people at the helm at Microsoft know damn well what will happen and they're ready for the worst scenarios. Gotta keep them investors happy during the next margin call, will worry about the rest in 6 to 12 months from that 😉
@@jakeholmannf I don’t pay full price either. I did buy D4, and have been getting my money’s worth, but prior to that the last full price game I bought was Fallout 4.
Especially Ubisoft and Bethesda's Pete Hines. Yes, all gaming executives are liars, but the sheer degree to which Pete Hines and any Ubisoft mouthpiece is going to spew easily-disprovable tripe is just... staggeringly more blatant than most other game companies.
CEOs are selected by the board of directors. Directors are elected by stock holders. Have you ever met a stock holder who cared about anything other than their stock price increasing? If you have a 401K do you care about whether the employees of your company are being treated well or do you just want your investment to gain value?
These companies need to be very careful. They're driving thousands and thousands of people to disregard game development as a possible career choice. Nobody wants to apply or work in a field that provides zero job security. I think we'll begin to see the results of this in the upcoming years.
I think it's becoming more cumulative as time goes on. There are still plenty of people who love games, and would love to make games, and would love to make games for a big developer... but they are being given more and more reasons to consider: is this studio worth moving to X Y or Z for, can I actually live decently there, is this salary right for me, should I risk taking this low position with hope I'll move up within the company or will they lay me off before that happens? And, there's one question where the answer is clear: will this company care about me as a person, and the answer is NO.
There's no job security for people who draw paintings, make music, and so on and so forth. Creative jobs have always been inherently unstable. This will change nothing, and the video games industry is always gonna remain big as long as it remains profitable.
@@josephteller9715working for a triple A studio, one of the contracts that you tend to need to sign is that any game you make is owned by the company. With all of the industry professionals that are cut loose it’s the hope that some of these people will start indie and double A studios and start to build better games in the future.
Translation: 'Bad things are happening to the companies I don't like.' Nintendo is doing fine. Sony is fine. Remedy's Alan Wake 2 is the most expensive game from Finland to date with an estimated 70 mil euro budget, great game. CDPR shaped up their entry into AAA. EA is certainly still trucking along, and the list goes on. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good narrative I guess.
I mourned the death of Blizzard a long time ago ... The employees will hopefully find new jobs ... but Blizzard did this to themselves. Then the pencil pushers are making the decisions and noth the creatives ... your doomed
And here's the kicker, even if they hire new devs that are fresh graduates. They won't have the same caliber as the staff of old and it's not like replacing someone at an office.
To be fair to Ybarra, he didn't actually mean any of what he said in his post. It's just a cover-up to make it seem like it was willingly and he wasn't kicked out the door when most likely he was shown the door and given two options for how to go through it. I'd wager 99% chance it was not voluntary nor a desired career path choice by him.
You have a good point but something we need to remember is that people on Ybarra’s position are accountable to shareholders not to their workers. This sort of message is what shareholders of other companies he might apply to in the future are going to be looking for
But then EVEN MORE SO, he’s already fired, what’s up with the ass licking from all sides all the time. You got fired - say it out loud IF you disagree with it. Nothing they can do to you
Same here. I will not play any of their games ever again. And I read who is behind the companies I buy my games from, and if I find any of these vultures being part of the dev team, it is an automatic no.
Agree - many of examples of many of my US friends tell me going wrong in US economy; Nasa, Boe ing, Am azon etc and UK just as bad; BT, Post Office and its scandalous IT Horizon project; firms now run by bean counters and little knowledge / care of their product or their customers
I think a good rule of thumb to abide by is if you're a dev in a AAA game development studio (moreso in the west, but still), don't expect to stay employed there for very long
@@UltimatePhantasm well the dying on the Job thing ain’t great either. But on the topic of lay-offs, Japan’s “labour protection” policy sounds good on paper and in isolation, but all it leads to is companies barely hiring employees and instead hiring “independent” contractors, who are definitely not protected by that policy.
I was at Blizzard from 2010-2017. I worked at several other studios before and after Blizzard. Got burned-out from all the politics, overtime and stress. I switched to Healthcare and I'm not turning back. 40 hours a week, decent pay. I get to enjoy my life. Working in healthcare I realized how intelligent people in the games industry are vs healthcare. I was able to get promotions quickly even though I had no prior healthcare experience. This isn’t by any means a slight to healthcare workers. Streamlining processes and technical skills (troubleshooting problems) are the main area I’m referring to. Just different skill sets. GIVE IT SHOT!
@@NoSlow78administrative is a lot better than being in the trenches. For the regular worker it's crap pay, crap hours, and physically and psychologically taxing. Fifteen years of it until I was asked to lie to a state regulator to protect the company. I quit. Went to manufacturing and make triple what I did then.
The best jobs you can hope to get are ones you're paid according to your actual worth, but also massively overqualified for the job. The only thing is that you will always have to have "maximum effort" in your back pocket because eventually they will hire someone who can fire you, who actually knows the RoI on you is unbalanced. But that generally takes quite a while. If you're hired in the first place, their ability to get someone like that outside of dumb luck is slim.
"The results produced by an institution are its intentions." Same goes for corporate policy. Hiring freezes and ending work from home to force people back in the office result in lower employee satisfaction and increased turnover. Most importantly, turnover they aren't legally obligated to report, which would affect their stock prices and broadcast a position of financial insecurity.
just another thing blizzard with their billions of dollars apparently couldn't accomplish which a literal indie studio did with a staff of like 6 UNPAID guys in a basement (Valheim) could pull off really successfully.
Yeah. Same with OW2 story. And Titan the mmo replacement for wow. And D4's new season. Reality is Blizzard scraps tens of millions of dollars in labor hours. On OW2 alone they scrapped almost 300k labor and development hours. Imagine the amazing games they could have made if their teams were capable. It's an asinine amount of time wasted.
It's amazing, all the areas of cuts is the same areas everyone has been complaining about. Activision/Blizzard & Zenimax/Bethesda DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE! They were sold, their IP catalogs were claimed, their current 'moneymakers' which got them bought are now being re-examined and the Executives are now only Microsoft employees and most of the senior staff cashed out their options and left before they were fired. This is what everyone wanted, right? Personally, I hope Todd Howard is on the chopping block as well.
Same. Todd and Emil both can be canned it would only breathe creative life into the company. Instead of a tacky ass jacket wearing ego with a God complex - they could possibly create games actual gamers want to play F Emil. F Todd.
Do you think the fact that the people being laid off work in the areas that the customers are complaining the most is purely coincidence?? No boss lays off an employee that is delivering...
The whole Mike Ybarra situation is baffling to me. When I saw the news yesterday I had assumed he may have gotten some promises from Phil when they visited Blizzard months ago that were broken with these mass firings, and Mike was leaving out of frustration. If he’s eager to jump into another “hyper growth” situation again so soon, I really don’t know.
I work with a lot of executives in gaming, primarily marketers and CROs. The phrasing is purely ego stroking for the shareholders and partners (not employees) of Blizz. Mike needs to make nice and seem like this is peak capitalism (it is), as in, he led to a huge milestone in the gaming world and wants to replicate that success. Don't let the buzzwords spook you. This is to make nice and not get blackballed.
Mikes from California. He doesn't have a work ethic. He certainly didn't when wod hit. He didn't when devs worked from home and produced one patch. He didn't when they made overwatch 1.5 to monetize it
Either Ybarra got forced out overtly or giving him a sh*tpile of unpalatable things to do (like layoffs) or he was the enemy within all the time. See what happened with Nokia.
Blizzard had QA And Customer Support? Color me shocked. Those 3-week waits before getting a canned automatic response to a ticket made me thick they'd canned their CS department years ago. And as for QA? Given the massive number of stupid bugs in every patch, I can see why housecleaning the department was a good idea.
Do you work on any Blizzard games right now? How do you know that QA is to blame for bugs? Most of the time bugs are found by QA and marked as not a high enough priority to fix. Every Blizz dev I knew was overworked and underpaid even relative to other game dev studios. If you want less stupid bugs then you should advocate for less features, longer patch cycles or more staff across all development roles including, but not limited to, QA.
@@DaRealPielover1987 they have 22k employees.... what games have they really brought out recently? sorry but 22k employees for a 15 year old games dlc?? just nutty
I was mass reported for "stealing" that stupid quest in the courtyard in SW and had 3 weeks of my game time stolen after being suspended. I will NEVER give blizzard another penny. Automated bans for crap like that is theft imho.
The only Blizzard game I play is Overwatch, but they've never done proper playtesting on that game. I still remember when they decided to add recoil to Soldier's gun (think it was 2019 or 2020) and it was completely broken. If you held down the trigger for more than a second his gun would fly up in the air from the recoil and your screen would shake like crazy, it was genuinely impossible to aim. And it took them three or four days to fix the problem.
I'm an IT industry veteran of 2 decades. Listen to me: Do NOT ever believe management when they say that there will be no layoffs or that your job is safe. I have heard that said on Fridays SO MANY times over my career, then next Monday the employees were stopped at the office entrance and their laptops and badges taken and treated like criminals. ALWAYS know your worth and options on the marketplace. Always keep your CV up to date. Have a rainy day fund enough for half a year or more.
Corporations ALWAYS lie. When that tweet came about "Oh we won't do layoffs" I told all my people to start updating their CVs. Corporations always do the LEAST humane decisions, with 0 regard to people's lives. When they say "we support that game long term" don't buy it. That means they will abandon it. "We won't do layoffs" = Definitely there will be heavy layoffs.. ALWAYS, ALWAYS LIE, ALWAYS DO THE LEAST HUMANE DECISIONS.. ALL the companies.
A client I worked for got bought by a corporation and no one was laid off. I actually got a higher paying job to work for the company that bought the client because I was so valuable to the client. It goes both ways and your attitude. You may think you have a good attitude but if you go post on reddit/youtube comments about how you hate your job or it was awful. You probably subconsciously showing that without even realizing it.
@@tonic316 I speak from past experience. My experience is that what you describe either doesn't happen or extremely rare. Besides your hearsay, I haven't actually heard of any of such interaction. When overwhelming majority of cases are like that, corporate lies, mistreat employees, trample through lives without a thought.. Just because you saw 1 example of that not happening (yet) does that make it any better? From where I'm standing it just sounds a bit desperation to prove me wrong. Not sure how you pulled the line between my personal job satisfaction, that you know nothing about and provable facts you can see in the news every day. I do programming, automation, and business continuity. It's better than what 85% of the jobs out there and I do it fully from home. I couldn't be happier with it. That doesn't change the fact that I have to fight with the company for every penny of increase, I have to threaten them with quitting just to they follow the inflation so I don't have to sleep on the street next month.. Every single time I had to achieve something at a corporation it was a struggle. My ex worked at corporate HR. They had mandates to rate people lower regardless of performance, just so the management can say next quarter that they "improved" people. It never mattered to them that by ranking people lower loose benefits, cannot get bonus, cannot be advanced for years etc. And that's just how things work. I haven't even mentioned that my direct manager gets 2x my salary. And there are 6 other levels of management above him. A few levels above him people get such an obscene amount of money, they literally get more than the people actually working got in a year. extreme inequality. And every time you raise these up all you get is that "this is corporate culture. 🤷♂" I stand by any day to that statement that corporate culture is the bane of humanity. People knowing perpetuate it, since above a certain paygrade, you get enough money to not care for others. If you want to see sad statistics just check how many people have been fired from the game industry just this year. And it's not even the end of January yet. It would be informative to see how many of those were managers and how many were ground floor people. It would provide a great inside to the nature of what I wrote earlier. Anyway. What I wrote, I did so because of my personal experience with corporations. I'm happy that your experience might be somewhat different. Doesn't change the big picture. I won't even say that it's a trend and things get better. They won't get better ever. Life sucks, and at the end you die, as they say.
You have a chip on your shoulder big time. Your experience doesn't represent everyone, you can't even claim it represents the majority. But a simple situation is this: you hate corporations so much? Don't work for one ever again.
@@eternalsun13 Wow what a deep life advice. What if, instead of abandoning the problem I try to raise awareness of it and try to make it better? I can't even put into words how stupid this is, really. nearly every work opportunity is for a corporation in one for or another. There's no work out there that is not tied to a corporation and pays enough for a decent living. Yes I do hate corporations, but you and everybody else is a bit behind in showing me any alternative to that. So instead of not working for a corporations I advocate for ethical work and highlight problems with it wherever I can. Sometimes you don't have the option to work on things you love doing. Sometimes you need to maintain yourself alone with no help from anyone. It's easy to say don't work for corporations if you have something better lined up, or you don't need money or you have a family to support you etc. Working for a corporation and criticizing corporate lifestyle are hand in hand. I'd argue, since I lived it all my life I have more right to do so, and better knowledge to do so than anyone not lived a similar life. When I say corporations are shit, that's coming from decades of experience working for them.
9% of Total Microsoft Staff not just ABK Staff. ABK felt it the most, but when they're using the 9% stat it's 9% of total Employees of Microsoft & Microsoft is Massive.
Heroes of the storm, the 1 janitor in charge of it appears to have been let go or is hiding in hopes of being overlooked. It worked as apparently not even you folks either remember it or didn’t see them lost.
From the beginning, it was considered that all Microsoft really wanted from the merger, was Call of Duty. With that being the case, basically everything else is fat to be cut. As for all the other job losses from the rest of the gaming industry, that seems due to companies aggressively expanding beyond what they should have when things were booming, as it was expected things would continue to grow, but they didn't, so what we are seeing now are the adjustments.
and ironically not what happened. Management was upset with the devs for having nothing to show for the past six years and told them to stop jumping from engine to engine and forced them to use one because they were incapable of producing anything over 6 years.
@fandyllic1975 ummmm not in recent years, no. MS Gaming has allowed their studios to make what they want over a decade now. And they only are more hands on when they need to, while still facilitating a "make what you want" approach
I'm most surprised that people are surprised that Microsoft axed 1900 people from a company like blizzard that hasn't put a quality product out in a decade if not more
Does Blizzard's upcoming wow xpac "The War Within" come from the real-life struggles of the staff against years of abuse and bullying from Blizzard's executives and Bobby Kokface?
We've been in a race to the bottom since the 1980s and now there is nothing left to cut and no more jobs to outsource, so all that's left is laying off employees to squeeze out a few more quarters of "growth." We're looking a very dark decade.
As someone in the customer experience profession - it's hilarious when we're the first to go but 6 months later the company is desperate for help from those jobs. They're always seen as fluffy/luxuries when they're actually just as essential as the devs to create a successful product.
Difference is Blizzard hasn't been customer focused in over a decade, and the 'blues of old' are just a nice memory. Customer service in Blizzard has been dead for years, they just never held a funeral.
Ybarra is clearly just trying to save face when he would have been kindly forced out. He's happy though because he gets to spend the livelihoods of all the people ge got fired on vacation.
if you are assured something isn't going to happen in a merger/acquisition situation, you should assume that exact thing is going to happen. that has been the case in just about every single situation witnessed or been a part of.
Ybarra being gone is the one piece of good new in all of this. Too bad they didn't get rid of that lawyer that's been pretending to be a dev for a decade or so.
5:12 I occasionally watch showbiz talkshows on TH-cam where industry people come onto the show and comment on things that are going on. One of the topics I remember them talking about was when the Discovery Warner merger happened, and the Discovery CEO went on a tour of Warner studios. The Discovery CEO was of course described as very cordial and friendly, but the industry people on the talk show heavily emphasised that the whole “office tour after a merger” exercise is always seen as a harbinger of layoffs. The acquiring company’s CEO is always, without exception, looking for what needs to be cut in their newly acquired holdings. When Phil Spencer of Microsoft went on that tour of the Blizzard campus, anyone with corporate experience would already know to take it as a sign that they should have their resumes up to date. There was always going to be massive job cuts at Blizzard, and anyone who took Phil Spencer’s niceties at face value was simply naive.
1800 employees making a video game... let tat sink in. Most of the big hits recently were made by solo developers and or small teams. The problem with triple a studios is the bloat. middle management and game dev university graduates who have no real interest in actually playing games. It is just like the lifeless animators who come out of universities or the people that can't seem to give any life to their art due to school. Universities and bloat is killing entertainment. Remember the people who got laid off will be disgruntled ex employees and what they say about what happened will be painted with an awfully stinky brush.
bloat is decidedly not the issue. upper management is the issue. And those ppl always end up keeping their jobs. Look at Bethesda, blaming customers for Starfield's problems. "you don't play the game properly." Their head writer doesn't want to write a story. He also directs game design and doesn't believe in meetings and planning things to keep ppl on track. They have to run everything past Todd Howard who's never around toward the end of development. That's how they're being managed. No one is going to succeed in making the game when management isn't effectively managing. I'm tired of ppl always blaming the coders, programmers, art ppl, qa, etc. when the ones in power who are leading the ship are opting to simply do nothing and just wait around for it to somehow all come together. "It just works" indeed.
To me it sounds that ActiBlizz was way overbloated, without producing anything in the quantities or of the quality that would excuse such size, and MS is cleaning house. A game already 6 years in development, that would reach at least 9 years and not be ready yet? With nothing to show of it, not even a trailer or a name? That doesn't sound like there was any actual work being done.
Minor thing, but I'm so glad you got "decimate" coreect. A friend of mine is an author and he went on a soabox rant about how it's incorrectly used, and I started noticing how many people use it incorrectly! Thank you!
Like with Bungie, it blows my mind when people are surprised Pikachu face when layoffs happen after the company/devs have been underperforming for years on their main titles. Many of these game communities complain and cry nonstop about how bad their games are run, how bad the devs are doing, etc. then suddenly have a heart and care when the layoffs hit. It's just such an odd dynamic in gaming communities. Content creators do the same thing, nothing but shock clickbait titles all year about how the devs/company sucks and then it's all shock and surprise when people get fired. While the execs f'd up quite a bit, the Overwatch dev team has screwed up the game's development for years. Every new thing they implement is a balance disaster, they can't get balance changes into the game fast enough, can't prevent stale metas and op/broken heroes from dominating the meta constantly, and made a terrible choice to go to 5v5 while also cutting out a ton of content. They also made the decision to waste time on PVE in the first place, which literally no one outside of a tiny vocal minority on reddit wanted, and let PVP/Comp twist and die on the vine for it. OW/OW2 has always been a PVP centric shooter that offered a great objective based alternative to COD/Battlefield, etc. and they screwed with that and paid the price trying to shoehorn in PVE that no one wanted. I hope Microsoft jettisons PVE altogether and makes the team focus on rebuilding and fixing the PVP experience.
I'm with you. I don't understand how anyone could be surprised. They've killed every IP they have. Have wasted hundreds of thousands of hours of labor time in scrapped projects. They could have made half a dozen good games and fresh IP's with that wasted time. Imagine if a construction company was working on a bridge. After 7 years of development they were barely started and tore it down and gave up. That's essentially what we see time and time again with blizz. It's sad.
Blizzard has always suffered from disastrous team and project management. They put far too much power and decision making ability in front line workers and it makes it impossible to change directions in an agile way. It's why all of their newer projects have suffered from one level or another of development hell. (IE: Pansey and incompetent middle management) The situation over the years is so bad that all the press on upper management folks leaving is because those are the people that failed when they were middle managers. So Blizzard like every company in America rewarded that incompetence to the point of failure. And it only resulted in lots of general labor folks being burned. How we consume games hasn't changed. How they expect us to and the current toxic business models being pushed has. It won't get better until game companies get back to making games, and stop trying to stick a vacuum hose into everyone's wallets. Again, this is a failure of upper management. All who were middle managers 15 years ago.
You are a wonderful example of the integrality and honor reporters and journalists should have, you're a great example of genuine journalist, so happy to see you are as dignified with your integrity, gives me hope for people looking at you as a role model. (: Thanks for making this video and covering it.
I am honestly absolutely tired of this world and the economic rules .. Its like the whole effing world lost the ability to just do some common sense or act with a tiny sense of decency. People creating value are being treated as trash left and right .. while useless bigots are made rich. Society develops in an absolutly 'me first and only' kind of approach. And your whole life you are being taught that this is the way it should be. And really, none of this BS is serving any real purpose to begin with. Nowadays we teach the younger ones that they have to invest in companies because there is no other way to really prep and save up for life. These invests again fuel the whole economic nonsense we are seeing everywhere. Its an utterly prepdatory cycle that prevents evolution and good products to actually be made, because everything is just effing focussed on profits. Again, none of this nonsense is really required. Am i so out of touch to just be unable to see anything useful in the rules we play by? This whole story in the vid is just one tiny piece of the entire shiatshow happening in the world :( Hope that with your information being out there and your popularity .. you do create enough awareness that at some point, a critical mass of people actually grows a brain again ..
You're quite correct. The problem (one amongst many) is that the real-world economy died a while ago and the consequences are just now setting in as governments are correcting. Basically, people were allowed to borrow and accept vast sums of money, which were used by large and inefficient companies to put their smaller competitors out of business. And these large companies got addicted to the idea that they could spend more and more money without returning a profit. Theranos Medical Tech, Credit Suisse, WeWork, Nikola Motors (which literally initially got valued more than freaking Fiat-Chrysler without even delivering a feasible product, something it will never do), and Elon Musk's various ventures all come to mind here. AAA gaming and other entertainment media are all too often the same. It's basically like if you owned one store that generated 100,000 dollars a year selling goods at a decent price, but were immediately undercut by a company setting up dozens of stores around you that sold at massive losses that put them at say -10 million $, but who eventually out-competed you because they kept getting money funneled into them to undercut you. And then, when you've been outcompeted, they buy up your business for cheap and start to run it into the ground with their method. That's the venture capitalist economy and it's currently in its death throes. And you're also very very correct about the need to incentive people who actually do work, not people who tell others to do work. I've considered the feasibility of stuff like a 5X cap on wages (i.e. the top jobs earn up to 5 times the wages of the lowest tier jobs), enough to incentivize people to go into fields that are difficult, dangerous, undesirable, etc. but not enough to create the sort of anti-democratic money-based oligarchies that we have running around. Hard to get that sort of thing through governments though. Also, something needs to be done to dramatically deal with the scam/fraud/theft economy. And that's also a difficult thing to do.
I feel bad for those that were the common workers/programmers that had nothing to do with the terrible direction the leadership took Blizzard in, but there is only so long Xbox is going to let them ruin the IPs they paid millions for. Overwatch 2 pretty much dead, Diablo 4 is dead once POE 2 comes out this summer, who even remembers Starcraft? WoW is super mid. I'm pretty sure the last straw was them having nothing to show for with the 6 year development of the survival game.
So true. People loves using the word "Veteran" or "Senior X" as if that makes the people complete saints and absolute professionals without any issues or removes all type of responsibilities. If these said "Veterans" works on a project for 6 years, and it turns out to be complete dogshit, or hasn't even come anywhere near the original plan, then they're just wasting time and space, space that young and excited people could use instead.@@solarydays
In the IT industry it's also horrible with layoffs right now. I'm physically disabled and even with Schedule A Hiring authority I haven't been employed since I was separated from the military.
Software development has this funny thing that when you get enough people working on a project, the more you add the less shit done. Plus they lost all the talent. Nobody talented is working there anymore.
I honestly think that we're gonna be seeing more stuff like this over the course of the year. I think most of Blizzard's current games are gonna go into "maintenance mode" like what happened with Heroes of the Storm, and Microsoft will give Diablo a couple seasons to work its stuff out and giving WoW till the end of the Worldsoul Saga, and if neither have improved their numbers by then, then it's maintenance mode for those 2 as well.
@@Patrick_0n Its not really a dead investment though, even if the games go into "maintenance mode" they'll still generate a lot of revenue even with skeleton teams, just look at classic.
With all the layoffs and what's to come, is it just me or are video games entering a dark age in a metaphorical sense? Right now, creativity is being silenced for profit and the passion of gaming seems to be dying. It is grim how the industry is looking right now and wonder if there is going to be any resurgence at this point as it's all about money now a days.
AAA games have been a plague on the industry. Almost all of the New ideas have come from the Indie sector. Its not really a dark ages, its a culling of rhe herd.
I'd say more of a transition point. I think it has been obvious for a while that AAA hasn't been sustainable, given that each generation has doubled or tripled production cost, but the gamer population hasn't been increasing at anywhere near the same rate. Now, AAA games cost as much as, or even more than, Hollywood blockbusters. Creative bankruptcy and abusive monetization is almost guaranteed with that amount of money on the line. When you are spending $250M developing a game, and at least that much marketing it, everything is *has* to be about the money. You'll very quickly run out of money otherwise. On the other hand, there are signs of alternatives popping up. Nintendo has generally lagged the industry in doing the stuff that drives cost, and really has been showing the industry an alternate path with medium cost and distinct IPs. And more broadly, we are observing that the old gatekeepers are getting bypassed. Getting into Steam and the console stores are now easier than ever before for a tiny team without a publisher. Commercial game engines are highly affordable to indies and can do pretty much anything a proprietary engine would. The rise of game streaming allows for random games to become the flavor of the month without much advertising nor PR (think Among Us, Fall Guys, Lethal Company, and, most likely, Palworld). The big issue really is discovery. There are almost certainly tons of fun and innovative indies, but they are buried under the dozens of other, lower quality, indies that released that same week. If there was a way for the best indies to be found by their target audience, the indies crack the industry wide open. The AAA model has been broken for at least a decade. I'm hopeful though that a solid AA and indie scene can spring up in its place.
Yes and no. The gaming industry keeps growing every year. It's the big companies that are entering a dark age, and deservedly so. I think we are now seeing the consequences of growing too much at the expense of passion. These companies are out of touch and treat games as a means to profit and nothing else. On the other hand, we are seeing small studios and even solo developers cater to what consumers actually want and bringing back creative levels we haven't seen since the 90s and early 2000s. We are simply in a turning point, perhaps we may see games that are not as impressive in terms of quality (graphics, cinematography, mocap animation, etc.) but are instead impressive in terms of creativity, innovation and overall fun. But don't fret, technology keeps advancing at a staggering rate, and now with AI knocking on the door we may see small studios do crazy stuff that only AAA companies were now able to do.
gaming is moving away from the big mega corps. I have had more fun from games created by relatively small dev teams in the last 5 years than I have from mega corp games
Microsoft is doing their best to save the gaming industry. They aren't about to squander their investment, and their analysts know better than any of us arm chair commenters. These studios are so obviously bloated and full of fake jobs that do nothing but slow things down. Blizzard hasn't made a good game in years. Do I even need to comment about what Bethesda has been up to? I mean seriously. One week we have a video laughing about those terrible "Dev" responses to Starfield's Steam reviews, the next week we have a video bemoaning the deconstruction of marketing offices at Zenimax. Which one is it, eh?
I mean, Microsoft isn't that trustworthy, but very few can say they'd trust Blizzard and Activision over Microsoft. I think most of us are all for Activision Blizzard getting slammed, and then hoping Microsoft doesn't do something stupid afterwards but prepared for them to do so anyway. Edit: As for saving the gaming industry? Highly doubt, Activision Blizzard wasn't the only one ruining gaming. If anything, Larian and other indies are. Doesn't mean Microsoft ain't doing nothing for it, though, this certainly is an improvement.
@@thefiresworddragon927 The industry is infested with do-nothing positions and fake jobs. I hope this is the start of an industry-wide chain reaction cleansing of unnecessary departments, with a re-allocation of resources into actual developers. That sort of thing might indeed result in better products for the consumer. "Saving the industry" is ofc a little bit dramatic, but the sentiment is there
My working theory is that Bobby Kotick is a void elemental. cause wherever he goes he leaves this huge empty cavity and then everything implodes on itself.
@@majdavlk649 most of the US is "at will" so anybody can be fired or quit on the spot without notice. The "we must give notice" is often just a company policy or gaslighting
@@majdavlk649 afaik if they can fire you without notice then it's "at will" employment, in the states where it's not "at will" there are also notice times for firing.
The market is in fear of a big recession, so the banks made the price of loans higher because of risk, the companies need to cut cost so they can still show "growth" since there is a lot of other mass layoffs the market of people looking for a job is bigger, the people without jobs will accept less money for the same role as before, depressing the cost per employee, they are just cutting costs so they can still show "growth", they don't care for you or your family, unionize and fight together, they are robbing your family just to see "imaginary number go up" like a person with the worst case of OCD in history.
And all of these layoffs are only going to exacerbate things. More people with less money, more people afraid of losing their job, means more people spending less and saving what they can. Which is bad for the economy
Nah... You need help with a bugged quest? You probably tried doing something funny, dind't ya? Pre-emptive ban from the "ai" that's just a bunch of scripts to save on employees. So don't worry, things will get more efficient than ever before! 😆
As someone who works in the gaming industry I am so sick of it by now. Years of trainig, sacrifices, sleepless nights because you love your craft, only to endup in an industry that doesn't provide you the absolute bare minimum. Job stability...
Fear produces stress. Stress produces burnout. Burnout produces bad results. Executive and stock holder muddling to manipulate design for cash over their consumer interest drives consumer interest into the ground. Creativity and interest isn't something you can force. It can't be squeezed out of a rock. It has to be grown and supported by passion.
I am sorry but when everybody was praising the Microsoft takeover I was not (forever the skeptic). I felt their praise was misplaced due to lack of knowledge of mergers/takeovers. Having worked for a division of one of the worlds biggest companies that got taken over by the mother company, I watched the same thing happen with my fellow employees and as I said to them 'you will see that your praise is misplaced and you will be sorry it happened come {this date}, that being the date when the mother company takes full control. Come that date sure enough the "bad news" started and never ended until that division was resold to another buyer for higher profit and that is the key word...profit. Big companies don't buy/merge with smaller companies to spend a big amount of money on that company and if anything they cut cost, cut spending and reduce staff. It is a the same process every time.
Honestly I think it's a good thing if they fire off many of them, sorry if it should shitty. While the leadership is a big problem yes, so little of the games content is decent let alone good. Blizzard has been infested with bad devs and writers for a very long time now on top of their leadership. The only people I respected where the art teams as they tend to do great most of the time.
This is not all bad. Usually when these things happen, the best and/or most driven people will team up and make new companies. And we may see a new studio and IP crop up in five to seven years. Lay-offs suck, but stirring up the pot is good in the end.
Why is anyone surprised that there are layoffs when companies merge? This is normal business practice. Organizations always review the overlap of functionality/job roles/skills and purge those that are not required. Welcome to reality.
@@atelierbagur3831 We've never seen so many layoffs like this before, it's not even about what the consumers confidence is in the companies, theyre hemmoraging staff and expected to keep making more money each year and assuming the customer will accept greatly increased prices, which i dont think is the case people are hurting economically rn. The bubble is bursting as we speak dude, itll be a huge shakeup and a couple giants might go as a result. There's no way there wont be downsizing efforts made.
I am going to disagree with your assessment of Ybarra's note on LinkedIn. It was the usual corporate speak for "I'm gone, gonna have to look for a job." He can't go out with the "I hate these people" speech, especially on LinkedIn, that's job suicide. He was probably told "you're out" and he had to put a face on it. He's not being callous toward the others who got pink-slipped, he got the same RIF they did. He's got to find a new job and stabbing your old bosses in public isn't going to help that. My husband has been through 14 of these over the years from the 1980s to today. One of them he had been there for 10 years, was the only IT guy in that branch. The company got sold to someone in Oklahoma who wanted to shut down the branch here. He didn't even get a possible move to Oklahoma, it was just "see ya, here's 5 months severance." He was out for 8 months. The last one was when he was almost 60 and we had no income for 11 months as he searched for a job. Thankfully I play World of Warcraft and a guildie had a job opening in his company. They talked, and then the guy said "Hang on a sec, let me check something." Then he came back and he had my husband's resume in his hand. They thought he would be perfect for it but he would be bored so they didn't contact him. He got hired and is still there. Thanks for WoW friends. Hopefully these folks will get a new job soon, it sucks to be laid off. I expected it would happen, a buy out always results in RIFs until they get a handle on the new product and group. It will eventually come back up.
If I evaluate how it affects my gaming: Activision: I never bought one of their games since the old Modern Warfare 3. So I don't care. Warcraft : Never played WoW. I used to be a big fan the Warcraft IP, but only the RTS. Still got my old Wracraft III and Frozen Throne DVDs somewhere, but after I finished the campaigns, the only thing I liked was trying the mods (mmh, Wanderers of Sorceria). I was weary of the Reforged game, so I waited, and when I saw what a terrible product it was, I didn't buy it. For me, WoW, with its ongoing continuous story, killed any hope for future RTS under that IP. Diablo: never was a big fan. Played a bit of 2 with my cousin, but never touched 3 or 4. I was more of a Torchlight guy, but since Runic went down and this IP has been bought, it has turned bad (I played Torchlight Infinite, a few good ideas and cartoon graphic, but a big cashgrab otherwise). Starcraft: big fan, completed I and II (the whole trilogy), but there will be no more games under that IP from what Blizzard said. Overwatch: really liked it at first, I was a bit unconfortable with the seasons thing, I became rehyped with the announcement for Overwatch 2 and its PvE content. The rollback on that part, plus the paywall for the meager PvE that was left was the last straw for me. I uninstalled the game and unless there's a huge change for good, I won't reinstall. The new survival game: it was the only thing I was really hyped about in Blizzard, but with its cancellation, and reading how it was handled internally (I prefer a average/above average looking fun game that runs well over a game that looks good but is buggy and flawed, so if the best content could only be put in working order in Unreal Engine, just do it), well I am disappointed yet again. So in the end, unless Blizzard can put Overwatch back on the right tracks or come up with a fine game using a new IP (maybe by salvaging the good in the aborted survival game), they won't have me as a customer anymore. I prefer to spend my money on games from smaller companies who make good games with passion.
I’ve been saying for the past two years, the gaming industry will be sinking and shrinking over the next five years, so three years to go. Many people will be losing their jobs. AI will be taking over a small amount of people in each studio will carry the rest. Big companies like Microsoft will take over pretty much the gaming sector…. gaming, as you know, it is slowly coming to an end… with new developments and new ways of playing games are coming… i’ve worked in the game industry at Ubisoft I’ve seen what’s coming
What? You mean the corpo's promised they wouldn't fuck over their employee's, then merged, then the big shots got paid and walked, and everyone left behind got fucked over? I'm shocked. Really. It's heartwarming to know that Yberra will be "travelling the world" though while all the employee's that got knifed in the back are looking for work in a tough industry to find it.
Meanwhile microsoft will have record profits as a 3 trillion dollar company, at least sony tried transferring people to other gaming companies and having a smooth transition, Microsoft just kicked them to the curb
That's what companies do. It's literally their purpose. Maximize profits for shareholders. Not to take care of their employees, do charity or be nice. Not saying that it's right, but it's the entire system that is at fault. It's literally capitalism. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Also, with their AI team, they probably will cut permanently position like customer service and shit. People chanted that MS would save Blizzard when they forgot that MS is almost as bad as EA in terms of killing/neutering the companies they buy.
@@ryue5626 They're thieves. They ban & suspend players for what they do on non-Sony platforms. How do they have the time or resources to do that? Why do they think that's a smart business move?
Blizzard has ALWAYS been greedy. They NEVER discount their games. I've always seen them at full price, and always going up. 😑 Yes, joining with Activision made things worse, but Blizzard management has been a greedy shitshow for a LONG time. I'm not surprised about all the abuse, neither.
The question is why wouldn't Microsoft do this. And the answer is - there's no reason not to. Even more so, taking out the most rotten part(s) of blizz prbably wont help
@@alexanderdimitrov6916 my wow tickets usually are 12-14 hours ..I put in a ticket a month ago about not getting a mythic plus achievement and it was fixed in 12 hours
To be fair, AB couldn't keep that promise of no-layoffs, because as soon as the merger occurred, they'd cease to exist in any decision-making capacity. They never should have made that promise in the first place.
So 250 people got laid off because the game they worked on does not exist anymore? Sounds good to me, they are not needed anymore. Why are they crying they knew that would happen when the game finished, its common practice. It happens in many more branches than game dev and they dont cry as much.
Also remember how much Microsoft just invested into OpenAI in recent years. Environmental artists for example. Will only need one artist. they will just need to create concept art and maybe a room or two, drop the encounters, and then tell a deep learning ai tool to build everything else in-between, in the same style as the focus pieces. You're going to see this a lot in game development going forward. It's going to be super tough to get experience doing "the in-between encounters" stuff going forward.
Can only hope further/deeper cuts and restructuring are coming to the D4 team. And not from the artists who are probably the only ones who did a great job on that team.
Blizz art team is on a whole other level. I get that WoW is still this "cartoon style" game, but what they manage to push out of a nearly 25+ year old graphics engine with each new expansion boggles my mind.
We're at a point where the Blizzard brass are about as believable as the average Russian propagandist. If they say one thing, you can expect the opposite to be true.
This is extremely sad to see. They definitely cut projects and people they said they weren't going to. Now, the QA and customer service is not a shock at all having lived through that internally in the late 2000s.
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Your insane if you think anyone who worked at blizzard had any faith in that company what so ever since it first sold itself to activision.
None of this affects me I play hots, sorry I don't even pay for fan and I must have watched 10k hours of content 🤑🤑🤑 I understand you probably don't know but hots patches ? Why
Ybarra probably had a golden parachute of some sort; he'll be okay.
Soft layoffs are voluntary buyouts. Axing remote workers that refuse to return to the office aren't soft layoffs.
This is not a down sizing. This is removing the toxic culture out of the company, just like a doctor doing surgery. That Bill Gates 💊
I miss the days when WoW support would message you in-game as if they were a part of the world.
My ticket for hacked account is already ignored for 2 days now. No answer, no nothing.
I remember being stuck in Stratholme back in TBC, trying to solo it with my Rogue for the mount from Baron Rivendare. I went through the door in stealth and it closed. I wrote a ticket and after a while a Gamemaster replied. He appeared next to me and ran against the closed door with 500% movement speed not able to open it. He teleported me at the beginning of the big place before the door and the mobs that were outside suddenly ran at me. I used all my cooldowns and health potion to survive while he was standing next to me and cheering me up, knowing that it would be unfair to help. I managed to win the fight and he wished me a happy day. One of the best interactions ever, only followed by Markus from Customer Support who replaced my Elite Furious Gladiator Sword with the Axe, because the Sword texture got lost during the Cataclysm Patch. True Chad!
i remember when they would even sometimes teleport to you visibly to see the issue if it was like a mob bug or something.
dude during wotr days, i got stuck in the lavas by black rock spires, could not move or tele out, the blizzard staff responded to my message half away through their lunch break and 'flew' me out of the place and took me 'swimming' across the sky.......those were the good old days
@@nikolajpopovs3844 there is no support anymore, so good luck with that
Record profits for those golden parachutes every CEO is getting, but record losses in regular worker stability. CEO's are disusting.
i wonder if they didn't have such safety nets if they wouldn't be so carefree when it comes to running companies in the ground, What do they have to lose? They are always smiling n talking all positive too. Nothing can be done, if workers attempt to give themselves more power they'll just outsource to a 3rd world nation that is more than happy to suffer for pennies. gotta love globalists.
And would you look at that? My Microsoft stock is up.
Record profits is easier during high inflation, more money going around.
@@ReturnOfHeresy If your understanding of economics is bigger number better, maybe. Every dollar is worth less. The numbers get bigger because the dollar is weaker. You understand that's why a loaf of bread is $7 instead of $5, right? They have to charge the $7 to get the same monetary leverage that the $5 bought before the economy went in the trash because of inflation.
I thought cheaters/botters were bottom of the barrel filth.
We found another layer at the very very bottom.
Iwata made such a good point. I worked in the game industry from 2006-2016 and I was laid off due to company restructuring 3 times. The layoffs were cold and didn't make much sense, other than just short-term budgeting. I was a top-performer and my managers couldn't even make a case to keep me because the decisions came from corporate executives who don't even know me. It makes you feel like you're just part of a machine and not valued at all. Because of that, I have no company loyalty anymore for anywhere I work and I don't buy-in to any company culture that they encourage because the corporate business doesn't really care about you even when they say they do. It's kind of sick honestly and American companies should practice what Nintendo is doing, manage their businesses more responsibly, and value their employees more. It will be better for everyone in the long-run.
Yes. American publicly traded IPOs for game companies is their fault. It’s not possibly to be creative AND have a guaranteed upward curve on shares.
Greed killed gaming
@@iRemainNameless So True.
I don't mean to be negative with this in Nintendo's case but the problem is that Iwata was the main corporate executive at Nintendo who actually "led from the front" so to speak. He prioritized the video game experience and players first while trying to maintain high profits (which turns out that's the ultimate winning strategy if you're willing to pay the "pound of flesh" in the short term for that long term quality and success. My main bit of proof is compared Gen 6 Pokemon to Pokemon post Iwata's passing).
Nintendo doesn't have a guy like Iwata running the company anymore unfortunately. Nintendo's still doing a little better than the rest of the AAA gaming industry at the moment but you can see the "decay" in quality with Pokemon after Sword and Shield.
Scarlet and Violet is still an absolute mess with how much lag it has even in singleplayer at 30fps and how many bugs it still has. And when people called out GameFreak and The Pokemon Company out on Scarlet and Violet's (still) awful technical performance, GameFreak and TPC just kind of ignored it. You can see this pretty easily with the recent DLC for Scarlet and Violent having pretty bad optimization and performance. The actual care is gone because "Too Big to Fail Syndrome" has taken over.
Edit: I know there's still people who "lead from the front" like Miyamoto (if he's still there) and a few others but my point was there's no "higher-ups" who have that same mentality that people like Iwata and Miyamoto had/have.
@@Doomweapon66 Good insight. Yeah, and the higher-up types tend to be ambitious business people who start to get blinded by bonuses and promotions. I've ran consumer analytics for them and sometimes they completely disregard the results and just do what they want. They have that kind of mentality. It's illogical. Then the company suffers because they didn't do what their fans/customers wanted. For any creative-based industry, and gaming is one of them, there should be a creative person who can also do business at the top. Not just a business person. Disney is having this problem now as well. And yeah, Scarlet and Violet looks like a Game Cube game or a bad mobile game. Lot's of disappointment there and obvious lack of quality. They shouldn't push Pokemon games out like how Activision pushes out Call of Duty games. The quality starts to suffer. Spend a bit more time and make them good games.
Company loyalty stopped being a legitimate thing you should bother with in like 2012.
2 years. If by 1.5 years you are not approached for promotion or a raise; prepare your resume. Most companies have already been on a 2-year-tenure-trajectory for most employees, since 2015-ish. At your next job interview, tell them you work on an "up or out in 2 years or less" policy.
"As someone with a specialized skillset and advanced expertise in this field, I have no intention of remaining in the same role or at the same rate for longer than 2 years on average. If there are opportunities here for me that match my pace of progression, I fully intend to commit long-term, and be as loyal to the company as is reflected in my compensation growth and in the elevation of my responsibility tier"
Something to that effect will scare away everyone who wants to wring you dry on minimum wage. You will get LOTS of rejections. The MOST important thing is to say it with confidence. Almost with nonchalance; A passing, necessary pleasantry. Coming off as if you don't think it's an issue but you're "required to say it for policy reasons." If you get called back, you already have the job.... it's just a matter of not disqualifying yourself. Avoid multi-rounds, office tours, and ANY conversation with HR (as best you can; ESPECIALLY smalltalk), etc. If it's not an immediate "no" but they haven't offered the job, then they're hoping you will keep your life on hold while they use your pending application/offer as leverage to offer under-pay to the guy who's 80% as good as you but will take 50% of the pay if we tell him "we have other candidates and we need a response soon". Which is a tactic you can spit right back at them at your FIRST interview. Your objective is to get THEM to say yes RIGHT NOW, on YOUR terms.
I worked for Vivendi, who published Blizzard back before Activision. When they announced the merger with Activision, our team promised us that there wouldn't be layoffs. It was just to ensure that we would keep working and they would get their product finished. The moment the merger went through, and they had enough staff, they laid everyone on our team off, except for the leads.
This is exactly how it goes. your employer will lie right to your face to get what they want, then throw you out in the street.
@@snoogans3849 exactly what happened
I was there as well. It was a confusing and precarious time.
I was at Blizzard during the merger and I don’t think the leads even survived. As I recall Activision kept only about 10 former Vivendi employees.
@@johnh8292 the best part of it was when we went to work, people removed all the letters from Vivdendi Games to spell End Me. It was the first thing anyone saw when coming up the elevators.
I worked at a private airfield that AT&T leased for their corprate Lear jets. In the mid 90s AT&T announced one of the largest layoff in US Corp history.
One day we got a new custom order and my supervisor said "Oh wow we are going to see their new Lear jet!!"
And I answered, "wait, didn't they just announced the largest layoff in US history?"
He gave me a funny look and said with a straight face,
"How do you think they paid for the jet?"
I get the feeling we just found out how they were going to pay to acquire Activision/Blizzard and Bethesda........
Maths wise it would be easier to not get paid double digits of Millions per year just to be part owner of some Corp but hey that would not be fair, everyone deserves the chance to become a CEO :))
"How do you think they paid for the jet?" 🤣
So true now seeing the recent studio closures.
who knew cashing in your player's trust has ever lasting consequances.
Wow, even die-hard whales and shills have limits? This is genuinely surprising
@@CBRN-115 Even they prefer to be fleeced without feeling they are being fleeced - once that illusion is shattered enough, they do leave.
@@CBRN-115 Shills will never quit as they live rose colored goggles on their face but you can lose whales if your product is absolute shit which blizzards games have been for many many years.
They withheld fun from the games and kept them hidden behinds paywalls and RNG
@@CBRN-115 thing is they want normal players to play. when they feel like rate of whales is too high they stop feeling special and quit.
I think it’s funny that these industries started crumbling when prices increased. $70 games and $25 skins, and sky high revenue expectations… people aren’t buying the BS anymore. What did people think was going to happen? Higher costs means less people buy meaning less people working for those companies.
Less people buying? Means they just have to turn the prices even more up!
@@bok4822 Yeah, I kept telling people that capitalist trends... just repeat themselves.
Heh, I don't buy full price games. I just wait until they're 70%+ off, even if it takes years. I have a great backlog of games as a result; all the quality of life patches are implemented to fix the terrible stability issues they normally have on launch, and I save a good bit of money and it goes farther enjoying the games I have!
@@bok4822 Exactly, that's how stock companies operate. If your target is a 20% margin, the top management will be rewarded more for killing all the products/services not getting at least 2/3 of the expected profits than keeping it and trying to make things work. It's crazy in the long term, but works wonders for the actual owners aka shareholders and their interest in the short term. So whenever two large market players merge? Expect heads to roll, and most of those will be the frontline staff.
And should income drop as a consequence? Increase the prices or implement a more agressive monetization strategy. At this point, with the internet being a thing and knowledge for the taking as long as people want it? This should not be a surprise to anyone, and the people at the helm at Microsoft know damn well what will happen and they're ready for the worst scenarios. Gotta keep them investors happy during the next margin call, will worry about the rest in 6 to 12 months from that 😉
@@jakeholmannf I don’t pay full price either. I did buy D4, and have been getting my money’s worth, but prior to that the last full price game I bought was Fallout 4.
Blizzard died a long time ago
Sad but true.
I wish the corpse of blizzard would stop floating back up.
Yup, the moment they all sold out.
Tell that to the CEO & investors swimming in money.
Unfortunately, yes.
I used to blind buy their games.
Assume gaming executives are lying at all times, you'll hardly ever be wrong...
Welcome to corporate capitalism. They genuinely do not give a shit about any employee who doesn't have a seat in the boardroom.
Especially Ubisoft and Bethesda's Pete Hines. Yes, all gaming executives are liars, but the sheer degree to which Pete Hines and any Ubisoft mouthpiece is going to spew easily-disprovable tripe is just... staggeringly more blatant than most other game companies.
CEOs are selected by the board of directors. Directors are elected by stock holders. Have you ever met a stock holder who cared about anything other than their stock price increasing? If you have a 401K do you care about whether the employees of your company are being treated well or do you just want your investment to gain value?
Executives, period.
They are corporate politicians, they care about the shareholder. Only way to get their attention is to be more than a gamer.
These companies need to be very careful. They're driving thousands and thousands of people to disregard game development as a possible career choice. Nobody wants to apply or work in a field that provides zero job security. I think we'll begin to see the results of this in the upcoming years.
I think it's becoming more cumulative as time goes on. There are still plenty of people who love games, and would love to make games, and would love to make games for a big developer... but they are being given more and more reasons to consider: is this studio worth moving to X Y or Z for, can I actually live decently there, is this salary right for me, should I risk taking this low position with hope I'll move up within the company or will they lay me off before that happens? And, there's one question where the answer is clear: will this company care about me as a person, and the answer is NO.
Indeed, look at what happened in the Aerospace and Defence industries, with Boeing being a case in point.
IDK people keeping becoming teachers for some rason
People will always develop games as a career they are just quickly learning which companies to stay far away from if they want job security,
There's no job security for people who draw paintings, make music, and so on and so forth. Creative jobs have always been inherently unstable. This will change nothing, and the video games industry is always gonna remain big as long as it remains profitable.
Triple A is dying and gaming as a hobby is healing.
Indie games have been more enjoyable over these so called AAA games.
Healing? How?
@@josephteller9715indie games and other gaming industry that LISTEN to players
@@josephteller9715working for a triple A studio, one of the contracts that you tend to need to sign is that any game you make is owned by the company. With all of the industry professionals that are cut loose it’s the hope that some of these people will start indie and double A studios and start to build better games in the future.
Translation: 'Bad things are happening to the companies I don't like.'
Nintendo is doing fine. Sony is fine. Remedy's Alan Wake 2 is the most expensive game from Finland to date with an estimated 70 mil euro budget, great game. CDPR shaped up their entry into AAA. EA is certainly still trucking along, and the list goes on. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good narrative I guess.
I mourned the death of Blizzard a long time ago ...
The employees will hopefully find new jobs ... but Blizzard did this to themselves.
Then the pencil pushers are making the decisions and noth the creatives ... your doomed
Let's hope they don't infect other good studios, maybe just go work McDonald's. They surely can't fuck that up more than it already is
Unfortunately, they probably won't find new positions.
Stormgate
Yeah they don't get it and don't want too but well said none the less.
And here's the kicker, even if they hire new devs that are fresh graduates. They won't have the same caliber as the staff of old and it's not like replacing someone at an office.
To be fair to Ybarra, he didn't actually mean any of what he said in his post. It's just a cover-up to make it seem like it was willingly and he wasn't kicked out the door when most likely he was shown the door and given two options for how to go through it. I'd wager 99% chance it was not voluntary nor a desired career path choice by him.
Yup he was basically fired and thats obvious. He was given an option on how to deal with it because of his position and public image
Seems a bit naive. I bet he took over as president specifically to prepare for this merger and the layoffs. He was always going to leave.
You have a good point but something we need to remember is that people on Ybarra’s position are accountable to shareholders not to their workers. This sort of message is what shareholders of other companies he might apply to in the future are going to be looking for
But then EVEN MORE SO, he’s already fired, what’s up with the ass licking from all sides all the time.
You got fired - say it out loud IF you disagree with it. Nothing they can do to you
I have been playing Blizzard games since Star Craft. Now I don't even touch a single game from them. 😢 times have changed.
Same here. I will not play any of their games ever again. And I read who is behind the companies I buy my games from, and if I find any of these vultures being part of the dev team, it is an automatic no.
It's obvious the "people leaders" at all these companies don't value either their people or the people who are their customers.
Agree - many of examples of many of my US friends tell me going wrong in US economy; Nasa, Boe ing, Am azon etc and UK just as bad; BT, Post Office and its scandalous IT Horizon project; firms now run by bean counters and little knowledge / care of their product or their customers
Mike Ybarra quit because Microsoft told him he can't sell carries anymore.
bruh you may actually be right lmao
"If you think we make money of the wow token, you are greatly confused" Mikeyboy Ybarra 2023
I think a good rule of thumb to abide by is if you're a dev in a AAA game development studio (moreso in the west, but still), don't expect to stay employed there for very long
Same applies in Japan as well
Just take it as a job, basically. If it helps your resume, good. If not, then that's that.
@@akaneki7234 eh? is there something besides layoffs they have to worry about, or does it have to with often dying on the job
Wonder how much DEI bloat contribute to this?
@@UltimatePhantasm well the dying on the Job thing ain’t great either.
But on the topic of lay-offs, Japan’s “labour protection” policy sounds good on paper and in isolation, but all it leads to is companies barely hiring employees and instead hiring “independent” contractors, who are definitely not protected by that policy.
I was at Blizzard from 2010-2017. I worked at several other studios before and after Blizzard. Got burned-out from all the politics, overtime and stress. I switched to Healthcare and I'm not turning back. 40 hours a week, decent pay. I get to enjoy my life.
Working in healthcare I realized how intelligent people in the games industry are vs healthcare. I was able to get promotions quickly even though I had no prior healthcare experience. This isn’t by any means a slight to healthcare workers. Streamlining processes and technical skills (troubleshooting problems) are the main area I’m referring to. Just different skill sets.
GIVE IT SHOT!
RN here. I'm curious to know what your position is in healthcare 😊
@@naka861 I work for an IPA. Non-clinical. I assist with contracting providers and managing a network of providers.
@@NoSlow78administrative is a lot better than being in the trenches. For the regular worker it's crap pay, crap hours, and physically and psychologically taxing. Fifteen years of it until I was asked to lie to a state regulator to protect the company. I quit. Went to manufacturing and make triple what I did then.
The best jobs you can hope to get are ones you're paid according to your actual worth, but also massively overqualified for the job. The only thing is that you will always have to have "maximum effort" in your back pocket because eventually they will hire someone who can fire you, who actually knows the RoI on you is unbalanced. But that generally takes quite a while. If you're hired in the first place, their ability to get someone like that outside of dumb luck is slim.
I’m considering it as a AAA dev, hardly worth it anymore unless we get a union soon that is.
"The results produced by an institution are its intentions."
Same goes for corporate policy.
Hiring freezes and ending work from home to force people back in the office result in lower employee satisfaction and increased turnover. Most importantly, turnover they aren't legally obligated to report, which would affect their stock prices and broadcast a position of financial insecurity.
“The purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID)
It sounds like getting rid of the survival game was a good call. A decade in development hell is ridiculous.
just another thing blizzard with their billions of dollars apparently couldn't accomplish which a literal indie studio did with a staff of like 6 UNPAID guys in a basement (Valheim) could pull off really successfully.
Yeah. Same with OW2 story. And Titan the mmo replacement for wow. And D4's new season. Reality is Blizzard scraps tens of millions of dollars in labor hours. On OW2 alone they scrapped almost 300k labor and development hours. Imagine the amazing games they could have made if their teams were capable. It's an asinine amount of time wasted.
Yea innovation dies in poorly managed large businesses.
yeah they can barely make mobile games at this point
It's pretty much par for the course, we're discussing Blizzard after all.
It's amazing, all the areas of cuts is the same areas everyone has been complaining about. Activision/Blizzard & Zenimax/Bethesda DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE! They were sold, their IP catalogs were claimed, their current 'moneymakers' which got them bought are now being re-examined and the Executives are now only Microsoft employees and most of the senior staff cashed out their options and left before they were fired. This is what everyone wanted, right?
Personally, I hope Todd Howard is on the chopping block as well.
AAA games are not what they were used to be these days.
Same. Todd and Emil both can be canned it would only breathe creative life into the company. Instead of a tacky ass jacket wearing ego with a God complex - they could possibly create games actual gamers want to play
F Emil. F Todd.
@@iRemainNameless For both of these dregs I'm hoping for a harassment lawsuit or a humorous gaffe that leads to cancellation. come on 2024!
Do you think the fact that the people being laid off work in the areas that the customers are complaining the most is purely coincidence?? No boss lays off an employee that is delivering...
MS is just another Embracer. There were lots of warnings.
The whole Mike Ybarra situation is baffling to me.
When I saw the news yesterday I had assumed he may have gotten some promises from Phil when they visited Blizzard months ago that were broken with these mass firings, and Mike was leaving out of frustration. If he’s eager to jump into another “hyper growth” situation again so soon, I really don’t know.
I work with a lot of executives in gaming, primarily marketers and CROs. The phrasing is purely ego stroking for the shareholders and partners (not employees) of Blizz. Mike needs to make nice and seem like this is peak capitalism (it is), as in, he led to a huge milestone in the gaming world and wants to replicate that success.
Don't let the buzzwords spook you. This is to make nice and not get blackballed.
@@Direwarlord213 thank you for the insight, that does make a lot of sense.
Yeah, 100% man was asked to leave and that's a face saving post.
Mikes from California. He doesn't have a work ethic. He certainly didn't when wod hit. He didn't when devs worked from home and produced one patch. He didn't when they made overwatch 1.5 to monetize it
Either Ybarra got forced out overtly or giving him a sh*tpile of unpalatable things to do (like layoffs) or he was the enemy within all the time. See what happened with Nokia.
Blizzard had QA And Customer Support? Color me shocked. Those 3-week waits before getting a canned automatic response to a ticket made me thick they'd canned their CS department years ago. And as for QA? Given the massive number of stupid bugs in every patch, I can see why housecleaning the department was a good idea.
Exactly, it's hard to feel bad after all that's been done. It almost gives me hope actually
Do you work on any Blizzard games right now? How do you know that QA is to blame for bugs? Most of the time bugs are found by QA and marked as not a high enough priority to fix. Every Blizz dev I knew was overworked and underpaid even relative to other game dev studios. If you want less stupid bugs then you should advocate for less features, longer patch cycles or more staff across all development roles including, but not limited to, QA.
@@DaRealPielover1987 they have 22k employees.... what games have they really brought out recently? sorry but 22k employees for a 15 year old games dlc?? just nutty
I was mass reported for "stealing" that stupid quest in the courtyard in SW and had 3 weeks of my game time stolen after being suspended. I will NEVER give blizzard another penny. Automated bans for crap like that is theft imho.
The only Blizzard game I play is Overwatch, but they've never done proper playtesting on that game. I still remember when they decided to add recoil to Soldier's gun (think it was 2019 or 2020) and it was completely broken. If you held down the trigger for more than a second his gun would fly up in the air from the recoil and your screen would shake like crazy, it was genuinely impossible to aim. And it took them three or four days to fix the problem.
I'm an IT industry veteran of 2 decades. Listen to me: Do NOT ever believe management when they say that there will be no layoffs or that your job is safe. I have heard that said on Fridays SO MANY times over my career, then next Monday the employees were stopped at the office entrance and their laptops and badges taken and treated like criminals.
ALWAYS know your worth and options on the marketplace. Always keep your CV up to date. Have a rainy day fund enough for half a year or more.
Yup, promises are less worth than the air required to speak them. Unless something's written in an official signed document, it means nothing.
And never ... ever... trust ... Microsoft. If Satya's lips are moving, he's lying.
@@mrvwbug4423 developers developers developers
Corporations ALWAYS lie. When that tweet came about "Oh we won't do layoffs" I told all my people to start updating their CVs. Corporations always do the LEAST humane decisions, with 0 regard to people's lives. When they say "we support that game long term" don't buy it. That means they will abandon it. "We won't do layoffs" = Definitely there will be heavy layoffs.. ALWAYS, ALWAYS LIE, ALWAYS DO THE LEAST HUMANE DECISIONS.. ALL the companies.
A client I worked for got bought by a corporation and no one was laid off. I actually got a higher paying job to work for the company that bought the client because I was so valuable to the client. It goes both ways and your attitude. You may think you have a good attitude but if you go post on reddit/youtube comments about how you hate your job or it was awful. You probably subconsciously showing that without even realizing it.
@@tonic316 I speak from past experience. My experience is that what you describe either doesn't happen or extremely rare. Besides your hearsay, I haven't actually heard of any of such interaction.
When overwhelming majority of cases are like that, corporate lies, mistreat employees, trample through lives without a thought.. Just because you saw 1 example of that not happening (yet) does that make it any better? From where I'm standing it just sounds a bit desperation to prove me wrong.
Not sure how you pulled the line between my personal job satisfaction, that you know nothing about and provable facts you can see in the news every day. I do programming, automation, and business continuity. It's better than what 85% of the jobs out there and I do it fully from home. I couldn't be happier with it. That doesn't change the fact that I have to fight with the company for every penny of increase, I have to threaten them with quitting just to they follow the inflation so I don't have to sleep on the street next month.. Every single time I had to achieve something at a corporation it was a struggle. My ex worked at corporate HR. They had mandates to rate people lower regardless of performance, just so the management can say next quarter that they "improved" people. It never mattered to them that by ranking people lower loose benefits, cannot get bonus, cannot be advanced for years etc. And that's just how things work. I haven't even mentioned that my direct manager gets 2x my salary. And there are 6 other levels of management above him. A few levels above him people get such an obscene amount of money, they literally get more than the people actually working got in a year. extreme inequality. And every time you raise these up all you get is that "this is corporate culture. 🤷♂"
I stand by any day to that statement that corporate culture is the bane of humanity. People knowing perpetuate it, since above a certain paygrade, you get enough money to not care for others. If you want to see sad statistics just check how many people have been fired from the game industry just this year. And it's not even the end of January yet. It would be informative to see how many of those were managers and how many were ground floor people. It would provide a great inside to the nature of what I wrote earlier.
Anyway. What I wrote, I did so because of my personal experience with corporations. I'm happy that your experience might be somewhat different. Doesn't change the big picture. I won't even say that it's a trend and things get better. They won't get better ever. Life sucks, and at the end you die, as they say.
@@SolearGnG how many were fired that were hired during covid when tech companies over hired. 🤔🤔🤔
You have a chip on your shoulder big time. Your experience doesn't represent everyone, you can't even claim it represents the majority.
But a simple situation is this: you hate corporations so much? Don't work for one ever again.
@@eternalsun13 Wow what a deep life advice. What if, instead of abandoning the problem I try to raise awareness of it and try to make it better? I can't even put into words how stupid this is, really. nearly every work opportunity is for a corporation in one for or another. There's no work out there that is not tied to a corporation and pays enough for a decent living. Yes I do hate corporations, but you and everybody else is a bit behind in showing me any alternative to that. So instead of not working for a corporations I advocate for ethical work and highlight problems with it wherever I can. Sometimes you don't have the option to work on things you love doing. Sometimes you need to maintain yourself alone with no help from anyone. It's easy to say don't work for corporations if you have something better lined up, or you don't need money or you have a family to support you etc.
Working for a corporation and criticizing corporate lifestyle are hand in hand. I'd argue, since I lived it all my life I have more right to do so, and better knowledge to do so than anyone not lived a similar life. When I say corporations are shit, that's coming from decades of experience working for them.
Unfortunately the damage done to Blizzard IP's Is long lasting, the Puppet Masters using nostalgia to milk us dry. Enough is Enough
What damage? There are always ups and downs. Now what you're referring to would be MS especially on their handling with Halo.
Yeah they chug down the breast milk.
1900 people is only 9%!? What do they do over there…
For Blizzard, they have a ton of voice actors, since they release the game in multiple languages - 15+, I think?
9% of Total Microsoft Staff not just ABK Staff. ABK felt it the most, but when they're using the 9% stat it's 9% of total Employees of Microsoft & Microsoft is Massive.
@@NostraDavid2 Didn't know Voice Actors were kept on a pay roll. I thought that was mainly contract work
Lmao, 1900 employees, and 19 developers. Microsoft be like: "Explain what you do here. In one sentence or less."
Heroes of the storm, the 1 janitor in charge of it appears to have been let go or is hiding in hopes of being overlooked. It worked as apparently not even you folks either remember it or didn’t see them lost.
Dude, flat-out funny! You are not part of the bloat. Cheers!
there is a fan made sc2 mod of that game thats blowing up
Hoping he gets to stay in the shadows longer. That dude recently released a balance patch.
From the beginning, it was considered that all Microsoft really wanted from the merger, was Call of Duty. With that being the case, basically everything else is fat to be cut.
As for all the other job losses from the rest of the gaming industry, that seems due to companies aggressively expanding beyond what they should have when things were booming, as it was expected things would continue to grow, but they didn't, so what we are seeing now are the adjustments.
its truly sad to see how they let some people go, they released a amazing animator who had won a fucking emmy for his animation quality... like WHAT
Who cares
The games are still shit.
Forcing a team to use an internal engine that kills a product is, ironically, a very Microsoft tactic.
Despite it being long before MS bought ABK.
and ironically not what happened. Management was upset with the devs for having nothing to show for the past six years and told them to stop jumping from engine to engine and forced them to use one because they were incapable of producing anything over 6 years.
@@SheepAmongG.O.A.T my point is that MS has done the same thing multiple times.
@@fandyllic1975What game?
@fandyllic1975 ummmm not in recent years, no. MS Gaming has allowed their studios to make what they want over a decade now. And they only are more hands on when they need to, while still facilitating a "make what you want" approach
I'm most surprised that people are surprised that Microsoft axed 1900 people from a company like blizzard that hasn't put a quality product out in a decade if not more
These useless devs have absolutely no idea on how to make a new good game. Only remasters and shitty monetized expansions is what we get now.
Does Blizzard's upcoming wow xpac "The War Within" come from the real-life struggles of the staff against years of abuse and bullying from Blizzard's executives and Bobby Kokface?
😆 🤣 😂
Beatle's "Help!" was about the group's struggle with the fame and music industry.
We've been in a race to the bottom since the 1980s and now there is nothing left to cut and no more jobs to outsource, so all that's left is laying off employees to squeeze out a few more quarters of "growth." We're looking a very dark decade.
As someone in the customer experience profession - it's hilarious when we're the first to go but 6 months later the company is desperate for help from those jobs. They're always seen as fluffy/luxuries when they're actually just as essential as the devs to create a successful product.
Difference is Blizzard hasn't been customer focused in over a decade, and the 'blues of old' are just a nice memory. Customer service in Blizzard has been dead for years, they just never held a funeral.
Ybarra is clearly just trying to save face when he would have been kindly forced out. He's happy though because he gets to spend the livelihoods of all the people ge got fired on vacation.
if you are assured something isn't going to happen in a merger/acquisition situation, you should assume that exact thing is going to happen.
that has been the case in just about every single situation witnessed or been a part of.
Ybarra being gone is the one piece of good new in all of this. Too bad they didn't get rid of that lawyer that's been pretending to be a dev for a decade or so.
Haha😂 yeah, he is the worst😂
5:12 I occasionally watch showbiz talkshows on TH-cam where industry people come onto the show and comment on things that are going on. One of the topics I remember them talking about was when the Discovery Warner merger happened, and the Discovery CEO went on a tour of Warner studios.
The Discovery CEO was of course described as very cordial and friendly, but the industry people on the talk show heavily emphasised that the whole “office tour after a merger” exercise is always seen as a harbinger of layoffs. The acquiring company’s CEO is always, without exception, looking for what needs to be cut in their newly acquired holdings.
When Phil Spencer of Microsoft went on that tour of the Blizzard campus, anyone with corporate experience would already know to take it as a sign that they should have their resumes up to date. There was always going to be massive job cuts at Blizzard, and anyone who took Phil Spencer’s niceties at face value was simply naive.
1800 employees making a video game... let tat sink in. Most of the big hits recently were made by solo developers and or small teams. The problem with triple a studios is the bloat. middle management and game dev university graduates who have no real interest in actually playing games. It is just like the lifeless animators who come out of universities or the people that can't seem to give any life to their art due to school. Universities and bloat is killing entertainment.
Remember the people who got laid off will be disgruntled ex employees and what they say about what happened will be painted with an awfully stinky brush.
bloat is decidedly not the issue. upper management is the issue. And those ppl always end up keeping their jobs. Look at Bethesda, blaming customers for Starfield's problems. "you don't play the game properly." Their head writer doesn't want to write a story. He also directs game design and doesn't believe in meetings and planning things to keep ppl on track. They have to run everything past Todd Howard who's never around toward the end of development.
That's how they're being managed. No one is going to succeed in making the game when management isn't effectively managing. I'm tired of ppl always blaming the coders, programmers, art ppl, qa, etc. when the ones in power who are leading the ship are opting to simply do nothing and just wait around for it to somehow all come together. "It just works" indeed.
I see this as an absolute win. If a company fails in delivering quality products, then that company does not deserve to stay in business.
Long live capitalism.
Both companies were profitable before the merger. There was no risk of either going out of business.
@@Fenrakk101 Yeah but that's not proof they were delivering quality products. It only proves how stupid their customer base is.
@@red5standingby419ain’t that the truth!
@red5standingby419 stupid customers still evidently have money, and the point stands that microsoft-activision-blizzard aren't going away anytime soon
oh no. anyways
To me it sounds that ActiBlizz was way overbloated, without producing anything in the quantities or of the quality that would excuse such size, and MS is cleaning house.
A game already 6 years in development, that would reach at least 9 years and not be ready yet? With nothing to show of it, not even a trailer or a name? That doesn't sound like there was any actual work being done.
Minor thing, but I'm so glad you got "decimate" coreect. A friend of mine is an author and he went on a soabox rant about how it's incorrectly used, and I started noticing how many people use it incorrectly! Thank you!
Like with Bungie, it blows my mind when people are surprised Pikachu face when layoffs happen after the company/devs have been underperforming for years on their main titles. Many of these game communities complain and cry nonstop about how bad their games are run, how bad the devs are doing, etc. then suddenly have a heart and care when the layoffs hit. It's just such an odd dynamic in gaming communities. Content creators do the same thing, nothing but shock clickbait titles all year about how the devs/company sucks and then it's all shock and surprise when people get fired.
While the execs f'd up quite a bit, the Overwatch dev team has screwed up the game's development for years. Every new thing they implement is a balance disaster, they can't get balance changes into the game fast enough, can't prevent stale metas and op/broken heroes from dominating the meta constantly, and made a terrible choice to go to 5v5 while also cutting out a ton of content. They also made the decision to waste time on PVE in the first place, which literally no one outside of a tiny vocal minority on reddit wanted, and let PVP/Comp twist and die on the vine for it. OW/OW2 has always been a PVP centric shooter that offered a great objective based alternative to COD/Battlefield, etc. and they screwed with that and paid the price trying to shoehorn in PVE that no one wanted. I hope Microsoft jettisons PVE altogether and makes the team focus on rebuilding and fixing the PVP experience.
I'm with you. I don't understand how anyone could be surprised. They've killed every IP they have. Have wasted hundreds of thousands of hours of labor time in scrapped projects. They could have made half a dozen good games and fresh IP's with that wasted time. Imagine if a construction company was working on a bridge. After 7 years of development they were barely started and tore it down and gave up. That's essentially what we see time and time again with blizz. It's sad.
Blizzard has always suffered from disastrous team and project management. They put far too much power and decision making ability in front line workers and it makes it impossible to change directions in an agile way. It's why all of their newer projects have suffered from one level or another of development hell. (IE: Pansey and incompetent middle management)
The situation over the years is so bad that all the press on upper management folks leaving is because those are the people that failed when they were middle managers. So Blizzard like every company in America rewarded that incompetence to the point of failure. And it only resulted in lots of general labor folks being burned.
How we consume games hasn't changed. How they expect us to and the current toxic business models being pushed has. It won't get better until game companies get back to making games, and stop trying to stick a vacuum hose into everyone's wallets. Again, this is a failure of upper management. All who were middle managers 15 years ago.
I stopped playing Diablo months ago.
you bought Diablo 4? lmao
@@_Mutto_ no your mother got it for me.
@@JayzBeerz Damn, you're cheap then. You poked that hippo for only $70?
@@JayzBeerz got scammed for those 70 bucks like a real sucker huh xD
You are a wonderful example of the integrality and honor reporters and journalists should have, you're a great example of genuine journalist, so happy to see you are as dignified with your integrity, gives me hope for people looking at you as a role model. (:
Thanks for making this video and covering it.
I am honestly absolutely tired of this world and the economic rules ..
Its like the whole effing world lost the ability to just do some common sense or act with a tiny sense of decency.
People creating value are being treated as trash left and right .. while useless bigots are made rich. Society develops in an absolutly 'me first and only' kind of approach. And your whole life you are being taught that this is the way it should be.
And really, none of this BS is serving any real purpose to begin with.
Nowadays we teach the younger ones that they have to invest in companies because there is no other way to really prep and save up for life. These invests again fuel the whole economic nonsense we are seeing everywhere.
Its an utterly prepdatory cycle that prevents evolution and good products to actually be made, because everything is just effing focussed on profits. Again, none of this nonsense is really required.
Am i so out of touch to just be unable to see anything useful in the rules we play by?
This whole story in the vid is just one tiny piece of the entire shiatshow happening in the world :(
Hope that with your information being out there and your popularity .. you do create enough awareness that at some point, a critical mass of people actually grows a brain again ..
Why are you assuming those people who were fired were doing anything useful?
Might wanna go vote. In the US it still counts for something.
You're quite correct. The problem (one amongst many) is that the real-world economy died a while ago and the consequences are just now setting in as governments are correcting. Basically, people were allowed to borrow and accept vast sums of money, which were used by large and inefficient companies to put their smaller competitors out of business. And these large companies got addicted to the idea that they could spend more and more money without returning a profit. Theranos Medical Tech, Credit Suisse, WeWork, Nikola Motors (which literally initially got valued more than freaking Fiat-Chrysler without even delivering a feasible product, something it will never do), and Elon Musk's various ventures all come to mind here. AAA gaming and other entertainment media are all too often the same.
It's basically like if you owned one store that generated 100,000 dollars a year selling goods at a decent price, but were immediately undercut by a company setting up dozens of stores around you that sold at massive losses that put them at say -10 million $, but who eventually out-competed you because they kept getting money funneled into them to undercut you. And then, when you've been outcompeted, they buy up your business for cheap and start to run it into the ground with their method. That's the venture capitalist economy and it's currently in its death throes.
And you're also very very correct about the need to incentive people who actually do work, not people who tell others to do work. I've considered the feasibility of stuff like a 5X cap on wages (i.e. the top jobs earn up to 5 times the wages of the lowest tier jobs), enough to incentivize people to go into fields that are difficult, dangerous, undesirable, etc. but not enough to create the sort of anti-democratic money-based oligarchies that we have running around. Hard to get that sort of thing through governments though. Also, something needs to be done to dramatically deal with the scam/fraud/theft economy. And that's also a difficult thing to do.
I feel bad for those that were the common workers/programmers that had nothing to do with the terrible direction the leadership took Blizzard in, but there is only so long Xbox is going to let them ruin the IPs they paid millions for. Overwatch 2 pretty much dead, Diablo 4 is dead once POE 2 comes out this summer, who even remembers Starcraft? WoW is super mid. I'm pretty sure the last straw was them having nothing to show for with the 6 year development of the survival game.
So true. People loves using the word "Veteran" or "Senior X" as if that makes the people complete saints and absolute professionals without any issues or removes all type of responsibilities. If these said "Veterans" works on a project for 6 years, and it turns out to be complete dogshit, or hasn't even come anywhere near the original plan, then they're just wasting time and space, space that young and excited people could use instead.@@solarydays
Yeah, senior man. closed the door and got high on their collective butt fumes, losing all sense of reality. Figures.@@solarydays
nah Xbox will let them ruin IPs forever. Microsoft just wants the IP they don't care about the quality.
Not unexpected, sad for those losing their job tho
Never trusted Ybarra.
"If you think we make money of the wow token, you are greatly confused" Ybarra 2023
In the IT industry it's also horrible with layoffs right now. I'm physically disabled and even with Schedule A Hiring authority I haven't been employed since I was separated from the military.
I just hope these talented developers and artists take their considerable skill and make great Indie games.
Never trust corpo, seriously? Who expected Microsoft to do "the right thing'"?
Its obvious blizzard is massively bloated and not producing much with the massive amount of people supposedly working there.
Everyone should’ve stopped giving them money years ago.
You still pay money for games ..?
Yeah, I did, too😮
How does blizzard have all these employees but can’t make a quality product to save their lives
Microsoft asked the same question, and found out that 1900 people had a part in it.
California that's why
@@PrimyFritzellz well not quite Blizzard alone. Zenimax also was in the blast zone
Software development has this funny thing that when you get enough people working on a project, the more you add the less shit done.
Plus they lost all the talent. Nobody talented is working there anymore.
It is not uncommon when one company takes over another that a lot of bloat is cut.
I honestly think that we're gonna be seeing more stuff like this over the course of the year. I think most of Blizzard's current games are gonna go into "maintenance mode" like what happened with Heroes of the Storm, and Microsoft will give Diablo a couple seasons to work its stuff out and giving WoW till the end of the Worldsoul Saga, and if neither have improved their numbers by then, then it's maintenance mode for those 2 as well.
Very doubtful. They wouldn't buy a dead investment.
@@Patrick_0n Its not really a dead investment though, even if the games go into "maintenance mode" they'll still generate a lot of revenue even with skeleton teams, just look at classic.
With all the layoffs and what's to come, is it just me or are video games entering a dark age in a metaphorical sense? Right now, creativity is being silenced for profit and the passion of gaming seems to be dying. It is grim how the industry is looking right now and wonder if there is going to be any resurgence at this point as it's all about money now a days.
AAA games have been a plague on the industry. Almost all of the New ideas have come from the Indie sector.
Its not really a dark ages, its a culling of rhe herd.
I'd say more of a transition point. I think it has been obvious for a while that AAA hasn't been sustainable, given that each generation has doubled or tripled production cost, but the gamer population hasn't been increasing at anywhere near the same rate. Now, AAA games cost as much as, or even more than, Hollywood blockbusters. Creative bankruptcy and abusive monetization is almost guaranteed with that amount of money on the line. When you are spending $250M developing a game, and at least that much marketing it, everything is *has* to be about the money. You'll very quickly run out of money otherwise.
On the other hand, there are signs of alternatives popping up. Nintendo has generally lagged the industry in doing the stuff that drives cost, and really has been showing the industry an alternate path with medium cost and distinct IPs. And more broadly, we are observing that the old gatekeepers are getting bypassed. Getting into Steam and the console stores are now easier than ever before for a tiny team without a publisher. Commercial game engines are highly affordable to indies and can do pretty much anything a proprietary engine would. The rise of game streaming allows for random games to become the flavor of the month without much advertising nor PR (think Among Us, Fall Guys, Lethal Company, and, most likely, Palworld). The big issue really is discovery. There are almost certainly tons of fun and innovative indies, but they are buried under the dozens of other, lower quality, indies that released that same week. If there was a way for the best indies to be found by their target audience, the indies crack the industry wide open.
The AAA model has been broken for at least a decade. I'm hopeful though that a solid AA and indie scene can spring up in its place.
Yes and no. The gaming industry keeps growing every year. It's the big companies that are entering a dark age, and deservedly so. I think we are now seeing the consequences of growing too much at the expense of passion. These companies are out of touch and treat games as a means to profit and nothing else. On the other hand, we are seeing small studios and even solo developers cater to what consumers actually want and bringing back creative levels we haven't seen since the 90s and early 2000s. We are simply in a turning point, perhaps we may see games that are not as impressive in terms of quality (graphics, cinematography, mocap animation, etc.) but are instead impressive in terms of creativity, innovation and overall fun. But don't fret, technology keeps advancing at a staggering rate, and now with AI knocking on the door we may see small studios do crazy stuff that only AAA companies were now able to do.
gaming is moving away from the big mega corps. I have had more fun from games created by relatively small dev teams in the last 5 years than I have from mega corp games
Microsoft is doing their best to save the gaming industry. They aren't about to squander their investment, and their analysts know better than any of us arm chair commenters. These studios are so obviously bloated and full of fake jobs that do nothing but slow things down. Blizzard hasn't made a good game in years. Do I even need to comment about what Bethesda has been up to?
I mean seriously. One week we have a video laughing about those terrible "Dev" responses to Starfield's Steam reviews, the next week we have a video bemoaning the deconstruction of marketing offices at Zenimax. Which one is it, eh?
I mean, Microsoft isn't that trustworthy, but very few can say they'd trust Blizzard and Activision over Microsoft. I think most of us are all for Activision Blizzard getting slammed, and then hoping Microsoft doesn't do something stupid afterwards but prepared for them to do so anyway.
Edit: As for saving the gaming industry? Highly doubt, Activision Blizzard wasn't the only one ruining gaming. If anything, Larian and other indies are. Doesn't mean Microsoft ain't doing nothing for it, though, this certainly is an improvement.
@@thefiresworddragon927 The industry is infested with do-nothing positions and fake jobs. I hope this is the start of an industry-wide chain reaction cleansing of unnecessary departments, with a re-allocation of resources into actual developers. That sort of thing might indeed result in better products for the consumer. "Saving the industry" is ofc a little bit dramatic, but the sentiment is there
Good point.
Take your 3-6month incentive then ride unemployment for 6-12 months after that, the hiring market will be a lot more friendly after the storm.
My working theory is that Bobby Kotick is a void elemental. cause wherever he goes he leaves this huge empty cavity and then everything implodes on itself.
we are required to give a two week notice, but they don't even need to give a two day notice.
in the US you're not "required" to give any kind of notice unless you signed something in your contract stating otherwise.
not sure if it applies to all provinces@@turtletheorytv
@@majdavlk649 most of the US is "at will" so anybody can be fired or quit on the spot without notice. The "we must give notice" is often just a company policy or gaslighting
@@majdavlk649 afaik if they can fire you without notice then it's "at will" employment, in the states where it's not "at will" there are also notice times for firing.
They can let you go on the spot but usually they have to pay you out that "notice period" i.e. you are paid for doing nothing.
it would also be interesting to see the names of the peopel laid off with the names mentioned in the california lawsuit
I'm sure everyone involved in that suit in the plaintiff class is out. And I'm sure Ybarra is fleeing the country before the next lawsuit hits
The market is in fear of a big recession, so the banks made the price of loans higher because of risk, the companies need to cut cost so they can still show "growth" since there is a lot of other mass layoffs the market of people looking for a job is bigger, the people without jobs will accept less money for the same role as before, depressing the cost per employee, they are just cutting costs so they can still show "growth", they don't care for you or your family, unionize and fight together, they are robbing your family just to see "imaginary number go up" like a person with the worst case of OCD in history.
And all of these layoffs are only going to exacerbate things. More people with less money, more people afraid of losing their job, means more people spending less and saving what they can. Which is bad for the economy
@@Snuzzled Central banks create the thing they were created to prevent.
So we'll go from month waits for GMs to help with things to indefinite ones.
Nah... You need help with a bugged quest? You probably tried doing something funny, dind't ya? Pre-emptive ban from the "ai" that's just a bunch of scripts to save on employees. So don't worry, things will get more efficient than ever before! 😆
As someone who works in the gaming industry I am so sick of it by now. Years of trainig, sacrifices, sleepless nights because you love your craft, only to endup in an industry that doesn't provide you the absolute bare minimum. Job stability...
Fear produces stress. Stress produces burnout. Burnout produces bad results. Executive and stock holder muddling to manipulate design for cash over their consumer interest drives consumer interest into the ground. Creativity and interest isn't something you can force. It can't be squeezed out of a rock. It has to be grown and supported by passion.
I am sorry but when everybody was praising the Microsoft takeover I was not (forever the skeptic). I felt their praise was misplaced due to lack of knowledge of mergers/takeovers. Having worked for a division of one of the worlds biggest companies that got taken over by the mother company, I watched the same thing happen with my fellow employees and as I said to them 'you will see that your praise is misplaced and you will be sorry it happened come {this date}, that being the date when the mother company takes full control. Come that date sure enough the "bad news" started and never ended until that division was resold to another buyer for higher profit and that is the key word...profit. Big companies don't buy/merge with smaller companies to spend a big amount of money on that company and if anything they cut cost, cut spending and reduce staff. It is a the same process every time.
Honestly I think it's a good thing if they fire off many of them, sorry if it should shitty. While the leadership is a big problem yes, so little of the games content is decent let alone good. Blizzard has been infested with bad devs and writers for a very long time now on top of their leadership. The only people I respected where the art teams as they tend to do great most of the time.
This is the thing that convinced me to finally cancel my Xbox gamepass.
Star Rail 2.0 livestream was surreal, Wuthering Waves is sounding incredible, Microsoft is gutting ActiBlizz. What a great year for gaming.
The people who hate me, my politics and my skin color lost their jobs.
Oh darn....
Im surprised people are so worked up over layoffs after a merger. This is very common and expected
Gen Z has no clue ... 🙂
This is not all bad. Usually when these things happen, the best and/or most driven people will team up and make new companies. And we may see a new studio and IP crop up in five to seven years.
Lay-offs suck, but stirring up the pot is good in the end.
Why is anyone surprised that there are layoffs when companies merge? This is normal business practice. Organizations always review the overlap of functionality/job roles/skills and purge those that are not required. Welcome to reality.
I really do think the industry crash is here. AAA is going to die this year
See you next year when youll probably say the same thing. And the year after.
GTA 6 is coming. Not dying anytime soon.
@@atelierbagur3831 We've never seen so many layoffs like this before, it's not even about what the consumers confidence is in the companies, theyre hemmoraging staff and expected to keep making more money each year and assuming the customer will accept greatly increased prices, which i dont think is the case people are hurting economically rn. The bubble is bursting as we speak dude, itll be a huge shakeup and a couple giants might go as a result. There's no way there wont be downsizing efforts made.
I am going to disagree with your assessment of Ybarra's note on LinkedIn. It was the usual corporate speak for "I'm gone, gonna have to look for a job." He can't go out with the "I hate these people" speech, especially on LinkedIn, that's job suicide. He was probably told "you're out" and he had to put a face on it. He's not being callous toward the others who got pink-slipped, he got the same RIF they did. He's got to find a new job and stabbing your old bosses in public isn't going to help that. My husband has been through 14 of these over the years from the 1980s to today. One of them he had been there for 10 years, was the only IT guy in that branch. The company got sold to someone in Oklahoma who wanted to shut down the branch here. He didn't even get a possible move to Oklahoma, it was just "see ya, here's 5 months severance." He was out for 8 months. The last one was when he was almost 60 and we had no income for 11 months as he searched for a job. Thankfully I play World of Warcraft and a guildie had a job opening in his company. They talked, and then the guy said "Hang on a sec, let me check something." Then he came back and he had my husband's resume in his hand. They thought he would be perfect for it but he would be bored so they didn't contact him. He got hired and is still there. Thanks for WoW friends.
Hopefully these folks will get a new job soon, it sucks to be laid off. I expected it would happen, a buy out always results in RIFs until they get a handle on the new product and group. It will eventually come back up.
If I evaluate how it affects my gaming:
Activision: I never bought one of their games since the old Modern Warfare 3. So I don't care.
Warcraft : Never played WoW. I used to be a big fan the Warcraft IP, but only the RTS. Still got my old Wracraft III and Frozen Throne DVDs somewhere, but after I finished the campaigns, the only thing I liked was trying the mods (mmh, Wanderers of Sorceria). I was weary of the Reforged game, so I waited, and when I saw what a terrible product it was, I didn't buy it. For me, WoW, with its ongoing continuous story, killed any hope for future RTS under that IP.
Diablo: never was a big fan. Played a bit of 2 with my cousin, but never touched 3 or 4. I was more of a Torchlight guy, but since Runic went down and this IP has been bought, it has turned bad (I played Torchlight Infinite, a few good ideas and cartoon graphic, but a big cashgrab otherwise).
Starcraft: big fan, completed I and II (the whole trilogy), but there will be no more games under that IP from what Blizzard said.
Overwatch: really liked it at first, I was a bit unconfortable with the seasons thing, I became rehyped with the announcement for Overwatch 2 and its PvE content. The rollback on that part, plus the paywall for the meager PvE that was left was the last straw for me. I uninstalled the game and unless there's a huge change for good, I won't reinstall.
The new survival game: it was the only thing I was really hyped about in Blizzard, but with its cancellation, and reading how it was handled internally (I prefer a average/above average looking fun game that runs well over a game that looks good but is buggy and flawed, so if the best content could only be put in working order in Unreal Engine, just do it), well I am disappointed yet again.
So in the end, unless Blizzard can put Overwatch back on the right tracks or come up with a fine game using a new IP (maybe by salvaging the good in the aborted survival game), they won't have me as a customer anymore. I prefer to spend my money on games from smaller companies who make good games with passion.
Palworld launches off a 10000$ budget.
Microsoft " what the f*** are all these people doing"
I am sure Palworld had a 6 million budget.
I’ve been saying for the past two years, the gaming industry will be sinking and shrinking over the next five years, so three years to go. Many people will be losing their jobs. AI will be taking over a small amount of people in each studio will carry the rest. Big companies like Microsoft will take over pretty much the gaming sector…. gaming, as you know, it is slowly coming to an end… with new developments and new ways of playing games are coming… i’ve worked in the game industry at Ubisoft I’ve seen what’s coming
I'm surprised it's not 9000. There's was 9000 staff credited on Diablo 4 right?
Diablo 4 has been profitable due to just being released so they let these useless devs keep their jobs. LOL
It's worth noting that, of all the layoffs, *NONE* of the unionized jobs were hit.
What? You mean the corpo's promised they wouldn't fuck over their employee's, then merged, then the big shots got paid and walked, and everyone left behind got fucked over? I'm shocked. Really.
It's heartwarming to know that Yberra will be "travelling the world" though while all the employee's that got knifed in the back are looking for work in a tough industry to find it.
Meanwhile microsoft will have record profits as a 3 trillion dollar company, at least sony tried transferring people to other gaming companies and having a smooth transition, Microsoft just kicked them to the curb
That's what companies do. It's literally their purpose. Maximize profits for shareholders. Not to take care of their employees, do charity or be nice. Not saying that it's right, but it's the entire system that is at fault. It's literally capitalism. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Also, with their AI team, they probably will cut permanently position like customer service and shit. People chanted that MS would save Blizzard when they forgot that MS is almost as bad as EA in terms of killing/neutering the companies they buy.
Everyone at Sony should be fired.
@@Cincy32 their quality is fantastic, I only wish microsoft would put that much effort into their games like they used too 15 years ago
@@ryue5626 They're thieves. They ban & suspend players for what they do on non-Sony platforms. How do they have the time or resources to do that? Why do they think that's a smart business move?
Sorry but when your bar is just laying on the floor, any action will raise it.
I almost puked in my mouth when I heard "hyper-growth".
Blizzard has ALWAYS been greedy. They NEVER discount their games. I've always seen them at full price, and always going up. 😑 Yes, joining with Activision made things worse, but Blizzard management has been a greedy shitshow for a LONG time. I'm not surprised about all the abuse, neither.
Just depends who they fired. If they are thinning the diversity hires that they have realized are worthless, then it’s an overall gain.
just quick question: why do you need 8000 peoples to make sh it like diablo 4, when baldurs gate 3 was made with 300, why ??
Education is important, you can still learn and not look dumb
because you don't have your facts right at all for starters
The question is why wouldn't Microsoft do this.
And the answer is - there's no reason not to.
Even more so, taking out the most rotten part(s) of blizz prbably wont help
I put in a ticket 24 hours ago and usually it doesn’t take this long to respond …I wonder why lol
Not even one of my tickets ever got resolved so good riddance i guess.
@@alexanderdimitrov6916 my wow tickets usually are 12-14 hours ..I put in a ticket a month ago about not getting a mythic plus achievement and it was fixed in 12 hours
To be fair, AB couldn't keep that promise of no-layoffs, because as soon as the merger occurred, they'd cease to exist in any decision-making capacity. They never should have made that promise in the first place.
So 250 people got laid off because the game they worked on does not exist anymore? Sounds good to me, they are not needed anymore. Why are they crying they knew that would happen when the game finished, its common practice. It happens in many more branches than game dev and they dont cry as much.
Also remember how much Microsoft just invested into OpenAI in recent years. Environmental artists for example. Will only need one artist. they will just need to create concept art and maybe a room or two, drop the encounters, and then tell a deep learning ai tool to build everything else in-between, in the same style as the focus pieces. You're going to see this a lot in game development going forward. It's going to be super tough to get experience doing "the in-between encounters" stuff going forward.
Lottsa people gonna get f'd by AI--consumers and employees.
Algorythmically generated Assassin's Creed.
Can only hope further/deeper cuts and restructuring are coming to the D4 team. And not from the artists who are probably the only ones who did a great job on that team.
Blizz art team is on a whole other level. I get that WoW is still this "cartoon style" game, but what they manage to push out of a nearly 25+ year old graphics engine with each new expansion boggles my mind.
We're at a point where the Blizzard brass are about as believable as the average Russian propagandist. If they say one thing, you can expect the opposite to be true.
Make sure to clearly point out what departments saw the biggest purges. It will inform a lot about the thinking behind the layoffs.
This is extremely sad to see. They definitely cut projects and people they said they weren't going to.
Now, the QA and customer service is not a shock at all having lived through that internally in the late 2000s.