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We lay out what we’ve learned since Microsoft announced a layoff of 1900 employees across its games divisions including Activision Blizzard. How will this affect World of Warcraft?
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0:00 Intro
0:35 What we know so far
4:11 Challenges with unionizing
7:30 Leaving the survival genre they never entered
8:25 Impact on WoW, the silver lining
9:38 So what now?
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We lost Mike 🙁
I will say for the workers at Blizzard either let go or not. That just bc you lost your job or kept it, when mergers happen 9 times outa 10 the culture of the company changes. this could be great or bad too. The Blizzard that you got hired on to work for is now Microsoft and the company will begin to reflect that. Keeping your job is not always a good thing as the new work environment could suck. Hope you all find a great work environment moving forward!
I wonder how many of those laid off had just relocated because of the prior Blizzard crackdown on working from home.
I wouldn't buy the xpac unless it comes out first.
I'm skeptical on the severance packages. They all said something about "severance packages as required by law" sounds like maybe paying off the sick-vacation days and collecting unemployment to me.
I appreciate this post, it was thoughtful, intelligent and informative. Thank you ⚔️
Sucks about the survival game, was looking forward to seeing what it was and how it would play… oh well. This happens all the time
The walk outs and demands they had pretty much confirm that most of the staff was doing nothing much like the Twitter layoffs.
Thank for your time and love you for spending your time with all of us.
Can GMs get worse? Let's find out!
A very dumbed down opinion incoming.
WoW will not be directly affected, but WoW players will be directly affected. The CS loss is a significant one that an outsourced company will not be able to take over either fast enough or competently enough for it not to affect players.
I think that is one of the most selfishly frustrating part of this for me. This isn't being handled well to minimise the issues from transitioning to another team. The new CS teams don't appear to have been slowly brought in over time, it feels like this is just all going to be dumped on to their laps and told to just "get on with it" as if customer support is the same for every game.
Based on the explosion of tweets on twitter, I am deeply concerned that the animation team(s) have been hit rather hard as well and I fear the Microsoft might start to force Blizzard to do what so many other development houses have been doing for the last decade, and that is to outsource cinematics completely.
For people wondering what I mean, if you are familiar with those high quality cinematic music videos that Riot use to promote League of Legends (titled Awaken, The Call, Warriors for some of the best examples) every year, those are outsourced cinematics. They are made by animation studios that work on movies and TV shows, with some of the studios having reoccurring works on shows like Love, Death and Robots. They are not done in-house. The premise of the videos and signing off the final product obviously is done by Riot teams, but otherwise they are at the mercy of an outside company's work flow, and anyone that remembers last year's LoL cinematic will be familiar with how wrong this can go.
Other examples of how outsourcing can go wrong only need to look at Warcraft 3 Reforge's art design and the utter fiasco that was the first 4 or so years of Final Fantasy 7 Remake's development.
Too
Many
Cooks.
You're asking if it will hurt WoW… as if it was doing great to begin with.
It's too bad there is no more specific information about who is affected. From the general news I saw, I was under the impression that WoW team was affected as much as any other. But this doesn't seem to be true. It would help and reassure players if it was specified what teams were affected so that we could make better sense of the decisions made. Some games are performing better than others and it would be a shame to see the performing teams affected.
If it is true historians have gone, that's a good sign 🙏 dogshit lore for years
The internet industry, gaming including, was severely overbloated thanks to the 'free money policy' of the last years. An adjustement was necessary for it to survive, all the latests layoffs, Microsoft included (also, for Microsoft/A-B situation, merging) are a part of that adjustment, and I'm not sure it will be enough, we might see more people going down the drain soon.
At least Holly is still here. I hope laying off the lore team doesn’t make everything disjointed. They were working on getting it all back on track. I guess as long as they have Metzen they don’t need a lore team.
I am neutral-ish to unions but the gaming industry probably needs to unionize more than most industries.
I love how ppl were all "Microsoft will save Blizz" and now they're faced with the cruel reality.
sry but Blizzard is dieing since the sexual assaults came out. everyone dening is delusional
Microsoft is usually hands off with their acquisitions so Blizzard must have been in rough shape for them to come in with an axe like this.
People blind themselves with pleasures and entertainment, they just see life and issues through tunnel vision failing to see the bigger picture. You will own nothing and you will be happy. Cheers.
Of course it will hurt World of Warcraft. If they can't fix issues that have existed since 2004 with adequate staff, imagine with less.
Go woke go broke. This all happend a week after Davos.
Unionizing tech workers wouldn't do anything to prevent layoffs. It doesn't in any other industry if they want to cut costs.
About that fast food part, any company that can't stay in business paying their employees a living wage should go out of business. Make way for businesses that can.
With the success of DF, it’s clear that wow is still their most profitable franchise
i thought blizzard was doing better to
I'm not too surprised about the survival game. The GM thing bothers me quite a bit, though it's been going this way for a while. At least for a game like WoW, GMs are among the most important thing to have plenty of and at a high quality. There should be GMs doing spontaneous events, etc. Outsourcing support services also is pretty much "pay someone else to dramatically underpay their employees so that we don't have to".
Honestly, I figured when Metzen announced the big 3 expansion saga to thunderous applause, hyping Microsoft to avoid getting his team shrunk down was the exact intention. And if that's true, it seems to have worked.
Microsoft is why the layoffs are happening. Their gaming hardware team has been cratering for 15 years. Every release they are down about 50% since the last major hardware. Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox one S, have been down around 50% from the previous platform. It sounds like upper management have finally noticed.
Unfortunately, these places paying people more don't take into consideration the outcome of paying people more. When we are paying fast food ect, $20 it just dost appear from nowhere everything else has to go up.
I was expecting layoffs – they always happen in mergers as much as it sucks. I thought most cut jobs would be administrative and support since MS already has those roles. The canceling of the survival game is disappointing as I was looking forward to that one, but perhaps MS has one in development that is further along. Still would have liked to see Blizz's take though. Kinda sucks that the lore historian team was axed – the devs need all the help they can get keeping track of lore since they often seem to "forget" things. Too soon to tell if this will negatively impact WoW or other games, but I do feel sorry for those that were let go, especially the ones that had to move to (or back to) Cali recently.
When a company takes over, they immediately cut people that are basically collecting paychecks. Yea, you can fantasize about these people are hard working, but the reality is they are not worth their salaries. Elon Musk did the same thing with Twitter, soo much dead weight was let go.
To be honest all the management developing D4 should be shown the front door
Well overall all those games failed to deliver so yea Microsoft is cleaning the house and to be honest what i see on Twitter many of those fired are those "Woke" people in blizzard and we Just don't care about that in our games we want freedom not get political stuff jammed in our throats does it suck to get fired of course it happened to me too before but that's life and you need to keep moving forward.
Well done. I am more satisfied that you used the correct words to describe the layoffs. The new snowflake words are a pain in the quiver.