What was that? Couldn't hear you over the layoffs
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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They said their profits (not just revenue) were up by more than the cost of those 1900 employees they just laid off.
I mean at least they're also removing managers at Blizzard and Activision with the layoffs. That it hits workers, too - sadly utterly expected 😑 - but at least MS isn't above letting useless and redundant managers go.
(edit) Ugh, sorry. I should have added an explicit /s, it's not as obvious as I thought it'd be. 😔
...are you fucking trolling?
I'm not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it's probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don't need an entire second company's worth of those departments.
These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it's good to be realistic about why they happened.
So you're saying that if Microsoft hadn't hoovered up another company due to being creatively bankrupt, almost two thousand people would still have a job?
They also laid off part of Microsoft though
What you say is true but if you followed the reports you'll know they fired the whole of the blizzard survival team, a good chunk of the Overwatch team and writers/story people from WoW. Very much not only the redundancies.
That's news? If I spend that many billions of more people to fire, I damn well expect that my monthly revenue goes up. They've got to have some dedicated whales paying for lootboxes, after all.
This merger was a fucking mistake.
You've just summed up the last 40 years of antitrust.
Oh I know. This is just another anvil on the (incredibly) dead camel's back.
An increase of only 49%. Time to fire a couple thousand more people.
Good thing they laid off all those people, too. /s