Barozi said:
Very naive thinking. How is that supposed to work? Clone developers? There's a limited amount of workforce and all companies in that industry are competing for them. You can't hire what doesn't exist. Besides, you just compared a company to a government. There's no difference between opening new studios and then poach experienced developers from other studios to fill up the vacant positions or just straight up buying entire studios. You can't just fill up all the spots with newbies. |
There is no limited amount of workforce in gaming business. There is no shortages of developers either. There is an excess of gaming dev students who just don't get jobs and have to pursue other engineering careers.
Microsoft do not hire them because it's take some time to train. It's not like Microsoft lacks senior designers, they have enough to train new generations of designers and developers with the available entry level workforce. They simply don't bother because it's faster is most cost effective to just buy studios.
Edit: And by cost effective I do not mean buying studios is cheaper. With the money MS is paying for Blizzard they could have hired every single employee on Blizzard and keep them working for 30 years with wages of over 300k USD a year. Pretty sure they could have just hired some dozens of senior devs for less than 1% of what they are offering Blizzard
By cost effective I mean their buying spree will have an actual pay off, because they are acquiring IPs and games that are very well stabilished. The workforce they will get is just the cherry on top, but ultimately hiring issues are by no means a reason behind acquisitions, as they could have solve ANY kind of staff deficit with much lesser investments
Last edited by IcaroRibeiro - on 03 April 2023
