Knowing why it happens doesn't mean you need to be happy with it happening, doesn't mean you should just cheer along as these scummy capitalist companies treat their employees like disposable trash all to make some line go up super fast instead of just fast, this American Capitalism is toxic and doomed to fail in the future when everything inevitably stagnates. And yes, I know all American public companies are this way, why would I comment on them all individually in here though, it's the Microsoft thread and Microsoft is doing the layoffs every 6 months.
Microsoft has already scorched its reputation amongst the consumer market too, now Satya is insistent on torching Xbox's reputation amongst the consumer market too, because Microsoft does not understand the consumer market, at all, they don't understand the entertainment business. They only see lines on a graph and that's all they understand. You also can't expect your workers to do their best work when they're living in constant fear of being laid off and it doesn't matter what they do, nobody is safe, Microsoft employee and specifically Xbox employee morale is going to take a nosedive off a cliff which will result in worse employee retention and worse product releases and I can't blame the workers one bit, why should they bother putting 100% in when they'll just get laid off anyway.
Also, I could make an excuse for Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard but if they touch any of the 2018 XGS acquisitions, you know, the same ones whom when acquiring they told; "We're acquiring you for Game Pass which will be a safety net, I Phil Spencer want you to do whatever you want, to have the freedom to make whatever you want, don't worry about anything else" only to shut them down when they followed that? Yeah, Phil can piss off too if that is the case, he straight up lied to their faces about being safe. I don't know how he could still be respected by his employees either after going through multiple thousands of employee layoffs, the toxicity inside of MS Gaming towards the executive staff will almost certainly be high if the worst case scenario happens, but I suppose all we can do is wait and see.
Phil's also to blame for promising Satya the moon and only delivering the sky, his promise of 100m+ Game Pass subscribers and xCloud taking over the world, or $32 billion revenues by 2030 which is in 5 years from now and they currently are about $7bn short, there is no chance they're reaching that if they start going through cancellations, closures, etc. Unless they acquire another publisher, another to layoff thousands after telling the FTC it wouldn't be needed like they did with ABK, Lol. If you're an Xbox studio capable of doing so you should be planning right now on getting back your independence, Microsoft are blatant liars and if any XGS are touched then so is Phil.
But again, Xbox isn't even doing bad right now, Xbox is at an all time high revenue and is expected to grow 6-9% this quarter, they are a profitable business before Activision-Blizzard "in the low-single digits (billions)" and Activision-Blizzard in itself was a billion dollar profitable business. Microsoft Gaming profits continue to grow every quarter as pointed out every quarterly report by Satya, Game Pass continues to grow as reported by NPD every quarter, Microsoft Gaming is singled out as being the reason that "More Personal Computing" profits increased overall, they're about to have a record breaking Q4. The business is actually pretty healthy right now but for Microsoft that's not good enough, it's not fast enough.
We can even see because it's public knowledge that all their UK studios are profitable as well, Lol. But apparently they're being hit with layoffs too.
America has God awful employee protection laws too and these companies like Microsoft take advantage of it, the reason why Japan has such fewer layoffs is because they have actual laws to protect their employees and make it harder to just mass layoff people. But yes, all billion dollar public American corporations are soulless assholes, I'm only focusing on MS because this is the MS thread.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 27 June 2025
