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  • pure corporate greed.

    i think its the stock market. it creates this false reality where things need to keep climbing.

    if you have a company where everyone gets paid, and the customer is very satisfied and you have no profit you are somehow a complete failure. because we all just cant be.

    the stock market is humanities downfall... human greed distilled, authorized and removed from all responsibility.

  • There's some off-base comments here that ignore why the industry is being hit particularly hard. Note that when it comes to companies like Microsoft, you're right it's pure greed. They don't need to shed those jobs, but that will make shareholders money, so bye-bye livelihood. Fuck Microsoft in particular on this round of layoffs, money for a 65 billion purchase but nothing else, pricks.

    But for most of the job losses, it really comes down to high interest rates. High interest rates disincentivizes investing. And the past decade or so has been highly investment based.

    A lot of the traditional big publishers like EA and Activision went entirely in-house, so any studio outside of those big ones needed to find funding somewhere. They turned to investment companies.

    This works whilst investing is cheap, but when it's hard to come by, suddenly you have to make payroll and can't. This is why Embracer has failed, for example.

    • Why were people laid off by Microsoft? Were they redundant after the acquisition? Were they part of departments that were cut? Like 90% of acquisitions lead to layoffs.

      • But Microsoft told the FTC they specifically were not gonna do that after the merger, which is why the FTC is angry at them. https://www.polygon.com/24065269/ftc-microsoft-activision-deal-layoffs-appeal

      • Very true, and Microsoft in particular could have just shouldered the cost of those employees and likely found more work for a lot of them. Some of what I've heard from Jeff Grubb in the past week or two is that ABK expanded by 3000 employees in the past two years while interest rates were cheap, so it was unlikely they did so sustainably; and hundreds of those who were laid off were basically the entirety of Microsoft's physical distribution department, which we'll probably hear in this upcoming business update no longer exists for Xbox going forward.

  • The line went up but not as high as expected so now Riot games owner of the most popular videogame League of Legends need to fire 500 people.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 … barely a week passed without some blockbuster hit or independent gem.

    Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, one of the most successful titles of the decade, laid off 830 employees; Electronic Arts shed 6% of its workforce, amounting to approximately 780 jobs.

    The effect was twofold: strong sales for titles such as Animal Crossing and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare boosted revenue and sent share prices soaring, thereby attracting the attention of external investors who flooded the industry with funds.

    For publishers looking to cut development costs, expanding the use of AI in production (already a limited element in the process) may be a tempting prospect, especially in areas such as quality assurance and performance capture.

    In January, the Sag-Aftra union was criticised for reaching an agreement with an AI company that would allow it to create digital likenesses of actors’ voices, prompting furious responses on social media.

    Starfield and Mortal Kombat actor Sunil Malhotra wrote on X: “I sacrificed to strike half of last yr to keep my profession alive, not shop around my AI replica.”

    The original article contains 1,217 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

71 comments