Having been through a few acquisitions, I have learned the truth of this. Eventually, I learned that if a company I work for announces they're being acquired, the best course of action for me is to start looking for other opportunities.
Even if I'm not laid off (which I haven't been yet in these situations), I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted. It's the perfect opportunity to reassess to determine if I fit into the new company and to scout around for something I may fit better in.
Exactly. One of the major benefits of acquisitions is to reduce duplicated roles/teams and therefore save money. You don't need two HR teams, two teams of accountants, etc.
Yeahh its happened to me in past, my first ever job out uni. The company got absolutely gutted week after acquisition was finalised. It's painful but you eventually move on in life.
I'm pretty old, and I've NEVER had issues finding a job. I've been unemployed for 6 months now. Thinking about getting out of software development TBH. It isn't that I'm a bad developer, I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews, but nobody is hiring. The positions that do open up are swamped with tons of people. The culture also is pretty toxic, especially in the startup world, and with AI now entering the scene?
Then again, I don't know what I would pivot to. I thought about building a startup. However it is not a good time to be doing that either.
Skimming your comments: You deeply detest everything related to AI, cloud, and startups.
It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.
Coming from both a place of kindness and a place of selfishness:
1. Please keep at it. We need more people with experience staying in software. I don’t know your financial situation, but software is huge and something will land!
2. Based on this comment, I highly recommend likely not ever starting a company. It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous. And even though it’s hard times in the macro, it’s actually way harder for many compounding reasons that are not obvious until you do it.
Ya this time they realized instead they can just pocket even more profits, theres a reason inflation is 50+% due to corporate profits when normally inflation surges are ~11% from corporate profits.
"
In 2017, then-President, Donald Trump, signed the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs act, which overhauled tax codes and reduced tax – for example, it reduced the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 37%. To make the bill pass strict budgetary rules, the Senate used a process called reconciliation: adding in tax code changes that delayed tax increases. These delayed increases “balanced out” the tax reduction.
One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law.
"
Is it all due to inflation and the interest rates? Shouldn't these companies be able to issue stock to get some cheap capital to continue growth/hiring? Or anyone know why this is happening?
A lot of people exited the labor market (disabled or killed by COVID, pulled the trigger on retiring, etc.). Unemployment was very low and it was very difficult to hire. And companies had opportunities for growth, but taking advantage of those opportunities required workers, which were hard to get.
So companies responded by hiring whenever possible and keeping more employees around than they normally would. If there was less work to do, they'd reduce hours instead of letting employees go. Better to pay more labor costs now than to be stuck unable to get employees later. You pay a cost (larger payrolls) to reduce a risk.
Hoarding can be kind of self-reinforcing because as everybody grabs what is available (job seekers), it becomes more scarce, so people want to grab up even more.
But hoarding tends to stop eventually. Companies don't want to pay more for payroll if they don't have to. Once they feel the risk is gone, they'll aim to adjust things back to normal.
Once layoffs start, they could have a domino effect on labor hoarding. If a bunch of companies do layoffs, then other companies think, "Well, if we did need to hire, we could get some of those laid off workers." And then they reevaluate their own situation.
If this is what's happening, then it will take some time for it to play out. Eventually all the hoarding-related layoffs will have been done.
There are many ways to increase profits. Diluting existing shareholders by increasing outstanding shares should not be a bandaid for inefficient application of capital, which would juts cause a vicious cycle.
Stock issue dilutes ownership and lowers share price. Why would people paid in stock do that when they can just offload labor? Also, they'd be competing with market makers, winkwinknudgenudge.
It blows my mind that people aren't hiring like mad with high interest rates. It seems like just parking a bunch of money somewhere and letting it accumulate interest would pay for salaries. Shoot, for 10 million dollars you could pay the entire salary of 2 developers without touching a dime of the actual money.
Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.
Saying the stock market is surging is a bit of an oversimplification. If you compare trough (Oct '22) to peak (Jan '24) you get a 65% annualized rate of increase.
But if you compare peak (Nov '21) to peak (Jan '24) we're essentially flat at 1.4% annualized.
If a business accustomed to double digit growth every year instead saw 1.4% growth annualized over 2 years then the numbers simply can't work out to keep doing what they've always done.
The fact that equity valuations are WAY better than they were in Oct '22 doesn't really help because nobody was raising money during the down turn in the first place! Everyone is priced in on pre-pandemic valuations, which for the most part are unchanged.
Note: I used the NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector, ticker NDXT to calculate these numbers [0].
"primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted / work out to roughly 8 percent of the overall Microsoft Gaming division that stands at around 22,000 employees in total."
2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
And even if they did, after they failed so miserably at remastering an RTS they'd already made I don't trust them to make a good one from scratch. Nor do I trust them not to screw over the mapmaking and modding communities after the license changes they made in SC2 and WC3 Reforged
I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
Behavioural hacking people is certainly cheaper then making them happy, and the ultimate hack - is heroine. The final form of all unchecked buisnesses is virtual drug dealing. Invest now into the ultimate society meltdown..
> but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
Increasingly? Have you seen what mobile games make? Blizzard didn't make Diablo Immortal for the fans. They made it for the money. And people paid.
If you remotely believe in money talking, than yes, the market has been actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games for a LONG time now.
Be careful what you wish for, the soul of Blizzard is long dead.
You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?".
While D3 had it's fair criticism at launch for a number of reasons, it still at it's core had a fun gameplay loop. With the itemisation fix in Reaper of Souls they managed to turn it around and make a really fun game. Even in the launch state it felt like it was made by people who enjoyed gaming but had made some questionable decisions especially regarding the auction house.
D4 in contrast feels more fundamentally flawed. It feels like a game made by people who have been described what makes a game fun but don't play games themselves.
It's hard to put into words what feels so off about it. You can criticise that a player goes into the same tilesets, kills the same mobs for the same rewards, but at it's core that's true of a lot of ARPGs which are fun.
You can criticise itemisation, but even that doesn't capture what's so off about the game. It just doesn't have the right dopamine releases while playing. There's little to get excited about when loot drops. You might get some "green arrows" but upgrades don't feel impactful. A few up arrows don't change how you play.
When levelling up, your character doesn't really undergo a transformation from a player struggling to kill mobs in one way to clearing screens of mobs in a different way that you've grown and progressed into. You fairly early get your skills and you kill the same mobs in the same way but now the mobs have X,000 hit-points instead of X hit-points.
I might myself get criticised for this post by people saying that fun is subjective, that this is just my opinion. But fun isn't just subjective, there's a core to computer games, and in the latest season the mechanics they added were to take some of the generally agreed least fun parts of competitors and wrap them up in something that doesn't even deliver a large reward for doing it.
Twitch isn't always a reliable metric, but when hardcore ARPG fans are visibly bored and itching to play a different game, that isn't a good look.
Season resets should be an exciting time for a clean start with a new character and exploring new play-styles. Instead, around 10 levels in, everyone realises they've already unlocked all the skills they'll use this season, that they've now essentially experienced most the content they'll see this season.
Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on.
My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.
At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.
For me the big problems were 1) no power spikes, unique gear is mostly irrelevant except for a couple pieces that unlock certain builds. In D2 you’d find some crazy unique early on that makes you completely OP for a few levels, and those spikes really made things memorable. 2) too easy, and the auto-leveling on monsters. On WT2 where you start the game is just too easy and even the +2 level strongholds are not hard. If you do any side quests you quickly get to the point where you have leveled past the area minimums so there is nowhere to go to get +5-10 challenges that are actually fun. It takes so long to unlock WT4 that I was bored by the time the challenge started to pick up. I realize the hardcore players are going to do an optimized route to get to WT4 in a shortish grind, then the game begins, but just playing the game as it is presented the difficulty curves are completely wrong.
people need to get used to the idea that brand-name recognition doesn't mean anything anymore once said brand no longer represents what it once did. very few game development studios perpetuate the internal mindset they became known for, as its constituent developers get ship-of-theseus'd out. sure, you might have some fans of the old brand now working there, but merely being a fan of something doesn't necessarily confer the ideology and mindset of those who created the thing you were a fan of. as time goes on, you get to the point where studios hire fans of the latter-day output of the studio, rather than the earlier stuff, such that the studio drifts farther and farther away from its former identity. then, especially after a massive corporation like Microsoft buys the studio out completely, the studio becomes a mere husk of its former glory—completely different people with an entirely different mindset continue to wear its skin.
perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.
It's just sad I guess this is an example of post consumerism. Maybe making games for the sake of profit and not fun it was just a matter of time.
I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.
You might remember the release of D3 with rose-tinted glasses ?
Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.
Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).
Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.
I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.
Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.
The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.
But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)
I agree. D3 at launch was meh but over time became excellent and super fun. D4 at launch was good but then it wore off and everyone I know stopped playing even one person who was a d3 fiend.
The 22,000 number makes it look better, yet if they're "mostly" coming out of the Blizactivision employees, then the real math is ~1900/9200 (Wikipedia article number), or 20%. So, welcome to Microsoft, there goes 1/5 of your coworkers.
Quick web search indicates that Activision Blizzard was 13,000 before MS bought them and Zenimax was 2,300. I have no idea how they split that layoff up, but 1,900 of ~15,300 (or 12.4%) is more accurate.
I recently saw that ZeroSpace is raising money. Looks like StarCraft 2 and the investor brochure confirmed that there's lots of ex-Blizzard on the team.
If you love Starcraft just a quick reminder that the Korean Brood War scene is still going strong, and is now getting bigger. BW is a near perfect game and it's clear with how they handled SC2 "Blizzard" is not going to make anything close to BW ever again. I would highly recommend checking it out if you love Starcraft. For starters, Artosis casts a pro-level ladder game every day on this channel:
The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.
I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness.
Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).
With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo
Do you have information on this particular acquisition though?
Layoffs made post-acquisition are totally different from business climate layoffs.
A major part of acquisitions is eliminating redundant positions/teams. You don't need two HR or accounting departments, and the new combined department isn't going to be twice as big.
Whereas if they intend to keep putting out games at the same pace, there are little to no efficiencies to be found in laying off designers and engineers.
(It does sound like they've canceled one of the games though, resulting in some layoffs there, but unclear in which departments. Acquisitions often involve a change of strategy as well, so that could affect designers/engineers if they can't be absorbed by other games in development.)
When this was announced my question was "is Microsoft buying Call of Duty or are they buying Activision-Blizzard?" CoD is a reliable cash cow and driver for consoles with an annual game release. It makes a lot of money.
Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Blizzard IP mostly not being on consoles.
It's worth noting that Microsoft just became the second $3 trillion market cap company. Yet we still have the same old playbook of raising prices and cutting costs, employees be damned.
I do wonder if Microsoft will try and replace artists with AIs to further save costs.
I'm aware of Candy Crush being a money printer but we're talking about Activision-Blizzard. CoD is important not only because it sells a lot of copies (and, more importantly, cosmetics in-game) but it's one of those titles that's key to selling more consoles. There's a synergy between CoD and Xbox.
It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.
Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.
Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.
This same comment gets posted on nearly every layoffs thread. A lot of people work at tech companies. Despite that, it sucks for someone to lose their job.
As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.
>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
Larian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game
Crazier still is the cost of employing 22,000 people in one division. Even at a low ball of $100K/year/employee, that’s $2.2 billion in people costs per year. Microsoft needs to be recouping at least $50/year from every single Xbox owner (estimating 50 million out there) to cover that cost alone.
Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.
Readit News
Always on the table after an acquisition. Especially close to earnings
I hope severance is nice for all impacted
Even if I'm not laid off (which I haven't been yet in these situations), I'm effectively being hired by a new company that I haven't vetted. It's the perfect opportunity to reassess to determine if I fit into the new company and to scout around for something I may fit better in.
I'll disclose one long enough ago: HostGator
100% start looking, the company will fundamentally change
Sure, hopefully for the better, but I'm batting 0
This is a great point. I've been through two acquisitions and both times the company was a noticeably less pleasant place a year later.
Yeah there’s a level of discernment you get from that point on
+1 on wishes for good severance!
Being laid off just plain sucks.
Deleted Comment
Then again, I don't know what I would pivot to. I thought about building a startup. However it is not a good time to be doing that either.
It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.
1. Please keep at it. We need more people with experience staying in software. I don’t know your financial situation, but software is huge and something will land!
2. Based on this comment, I highly recommend likely not ever starting a company. It’s fucking hard, and it’s not glamorous. And even though it’s hard times in the macro, it’s actually way harder for many compounding reasons that are not obvious until you do it.
Again, coming from a place of love.
Due to some GREAT legislation you can no longer write off engineers as an expense... it makes SWEs a tax liability instead of a write-off.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law. "
A lot of people exited the labor market (disabled or killed by COVID, pulled the trigger on retiring, etc.). Unemployment was very low and it was very difficult to hire. And companies had opportunities for growth, but taking advantage of those opportunities required workers, which were hard to get.
So companies responded by hiring whenever possible and keeping more employees around than they normally would. If there was less work to do, they'd reduce hours instead of letting employees go. Better to pay more labor costs now than to be stuck unable to get employees later. You pay a cost (larger payrolls) to reduce a risk.
Hoarding can be kind of self-reinforcing because as everybody grabs what is available (job seekers), it becomes more scarce, so people want to grab up even more.
But hoarding tends to stop eventually. Companies don't want to pay more for payroll if they don't have to. Once they feel the risk is gone, they'll aim to adjust things back to normal.
Once layoffs start, they could have a domino effect on labor hoarding. If a bunch of companies do layoffs, then other companies think, "Well, if we did need to hire, we could get some of those laid off workers." And then they reevaluate their own situation.
If this is what's happening, then it will take some time for it to play out. Eventually all the hoarding-related layoffs will have been done.
Yes, but then the stock price would go down, which obviously isn't allowed.
Dead Comment
Big tech fuels R&D via very low-interest loans. This is what everyone in the financial community has been saying for a long time.
Of course I know the economy doesn't work that way, but it is fun to think about.
But if you compare peak (Nov '21) to peak (Jan '24) we're essentially flat at 1.4% annualized.
If a business accustomed to double digit growth every year instead saw 1.4% growth annualized over 2 years then the numbers simply can't work out to keep doing what they've always done.
The fact that equity valuations are WAY better than they were in Oct '22 doesn't really help because nobody was raising money during the down turn in the first place! Everyone is priced in on pre-pandemic valuations, which for the most part are unchanged.
Note: I used the NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector, ticker NDXT to calculate these numbers [0].
[0] https://www.tradingview.com/chart/34OYpFIv
2k employees look like a lot, 8% looks kinda better. I need Starcraft 3 badly :)
I do too, but I don't think Blizzard are going to be the ones to make it[1].
[1] https://playstormgate.com
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605850/ZeroSpace/
Your best hope is that they license the IP to a company that actually cares, like Bethesda did with Black Isle for Fallout New Vegas.
This feels at least tangentially relevant :
https://battlechat.co/15-wow-mount-outearned-starcraft-2/
I haven't personally double checked the math behind this claim, but it does broadly track and makes me slightly apprehensive. I don't mean this as an absolute because there are clear and obvious exceptions, like From, but it increasingly feels like the market is actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games.
Increasingly? Have you seen what mobile games make? Blizzard didn't make Diablo Immortal for the fans. They made it for the money. And people paid.
If you remotely believe in money talking, than yes, the market has been actively disinsentivizing devs from making good, unpolluted, games for a LONG time now.
You can see this with Diablo 4, which is a completely soulless ARPG. With the latest season 3 launched yesterday, it's just not a fun game and it's clear that whatever processes and people they have at Activision Blizzard, they haven't got something in place that lets someone say, "Wait, shouldn't this be fun?".
While D3 had it's fair criticism at launch for a number of reasons, it still at it's core had a fun gameplay loop. With the itemisation fix in Reaper of Souls they managed to turn it around and make a really fun game. Even in the launch state it felt like it was made by people who enjoyed gaming but had made some questionable decisions especially regarding the auction house.
D4 in contrast feels more fundamentally flawed. It feels like a game made by people who have been described what makes a game fun but don't play games themselves.
It's hard to put into words what feels so off about it. You can criticise that a player goes into the same tilesets, kills the same mobs for the same rewards, but at it's core that's true of a lot of ARPGs which are fun.
You can criticise itemisation, but even that doesn't capture what's so off about the game. It just doesn't have the right dopamine releases while playing. There's little to get excited about when loot drops. You might get some "green arrows" but upgrades don't feel impactful. A few up arrows don't change how you play.
When levelling up, your character doesn't really undergo a transformation from a player struggling to kill mobs in one way to clearing screens of mobs in a different way that you've grown and progressed into. You fairly early get your skills and you kill the same mobs in the same way but now the mobs have X,000 hit-points instead of X hit-points.
I might myself get criticised for this post by people saying that fun is subjective, that this is just my opinion. But fun isn't just subjective, there's a core to computer games, and in the latest season the mechanics they added were to take some of the generally agreed least fun parts of competitors and wrap them up in something that doesn't even deliver a large reward for doing it.
Twitch isn't always a reliable metric, but when hardcore ARPG fans are visibly bored and itching to play a different game, that isn't a good look.
Season resets should be an exciting time for a clean start with a new character and exploring new play-styles. Instead, around 10 levels in, everyone realises they've already unlocked all the skills they'll use this season, that they've now essentially experienced most the content they'll see this season.
My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.
At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.
perhaps after more of this corporate downsizing continues to occur, people will start small, passionate studios again, and this time maybe some of them can effectively gatekeep when hiring so as to perpetuate a brand identity/mentality going forward—but I doubt this will happen in any significant way.
I was an avid Overwatch player and just seeing how Kotick essentially destroyed that team from within at Blizzard because to some the price of the stock is the only thing that is a measure of value of a public company.
Between the server issues (for a mostly singleplayer game!), the real money auction house, criticisms about the story and the visual palette, as well as a missing PvP mode, it had a LOT of criticism.
Meanwhile D4 somehow actually managed the feat of mostly stable release servers (though the online-only criticism still stands).
Hardcore dungeon zoomer fans used to current D3/PoE1 might not have been the target demographic here. Probably also why you unlock most skills so quickly (which is probably barely quick enough for most players to see, as 80% of them don't finish the campaign). And I find these complaints hard to believe, as after all, the top end playstyles still tend to be much faster, and different from early on thanks to how the paragon points and especially legendary aspects and finally unique items tend to transform the skills.
I found the last open beta of D4 so compelling (even more than the D3 beta) that I completely changed my mind about (not) buying it. They really nailed (again) that "Diablo feel" (whatever that is) that I have been missing in competitors'. I have also been surprised how well the dodge mechanic worked and how enjoyable it was. The campaign is good, the art is top notch, as usual.
Now sadly the way that the leveling works in the campaign is screwed up in that it's easy to end up with a too easy game if you start on non-easy mode and start doing even the slightest sidequest (which is a shame as some of them are great !). You would have thought that, after D3's evolution, there would be more than 2 difficulty levels available for the first half of the game ! I also don't understand why the seasonal mechanics have been pushed out of the campaign.The worst issue IMHO creeps up late game (and even mid-game for the season 2) : item spam, especially for "legendary" items. (Listening too much to the most obsessive fans of the current D3 ??) Even worse, for some unfathomable reason, the legendary aspects don't even have unique icons to distinguish them at a glance in the inventory (ditto for dungeon sigils), which is frankly shocking for what is a Blizzard game with ridddddddddiculously long credits, and not some kind of small budget beta.
But then, just like D3 changed a LOT, I'm cautiously optimistic about D4 improving over the years. (The online-only / no mods issue will remain, and this lack of future is sad to see considering the man years of effort spent on it...)
https://www.youtube.com/@ArtosisCasts/videos
If you like that, the main BW tournament is called ASL and happens a couple times a year. The next one should be starting relatively soon.
It has a lot of pacing and quality-of-life issues.
Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).
With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...
Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.
It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.
Sorry what?
Something tells me a lot of game design and eng we’re not affected.
Layoffs made post-acquisition are totally different from business climate layoffs.
A major part of acquisitions is eliminating redundant positions/teams. You don't need two HR or accounting departments, and the new combined department isn't going to be twice as big.
Whereas if they intend to keep putting out games at the same pace, there are little to no efficiencies to be found in laying off designers and engineers.
(It does sound like they've canceled one of the games though, resulting in some layoffs there, but unclear in which departments. Acquisitions often involve a change of strategy as well, so that could affect designers/engineers if they can't be absorbed by other games in development.)
Activision-Blizzard owns a lot of valuble IP that they could absolutely further monetize. It remains to be seen if Microsoft has the vision or desire to capitalize on that. There is a huge gap with Blizzard IP mostly not being on consoles.
It's worth noting that Microsoft just became the second $3 trillion market cap company. Yet we still have the same old playbook of raising prices and cutting costs, employees be damned.
I do wonder if Microsoft will try and replace artists with AIs to further save costs.
Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.
The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
[1] https://ironstorage.blob.core.windows.net/public-images/luxu...
The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places