Huge number of lay offs, 2024 is not going to be kind for people working in this industry. That's 1 in 12 people working on gaming for MS gone like that.

"It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft. As we move forward in 2024, the leadership of Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard is committed to aligning on a strategy and an execution plan with a sustainable cost structure that will support the whole of our growing business. Together, we’ve set priorities, identified areas of overlap, and ensured that we’re all aligned on the best opportunities for growth.

As part of this process, we have made the painful decision to reduce the size of our gaming workforce by approximately 1900 roles out of the 22,000 people on our team. The Gaming Leadership Team and I are committed to navigating this process as thoughtfully as possible. The people who are directly impacted by these reductions have all played an important part in the success of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and the Xbox teams, and they should be proud of everything they’ve accomplished here. We are grateful for all of the creativity, passion and dedication they have brought to our games, our players and our colleagues. We will provide our full support to those who are impacted during the transition, including severance benefits informed by local employment laws. Those whose roles will be impacted will be notified, and we ask that you please treat your departing colleagues with the respect and compassion that is consistent with our values.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to invest in areas that will grow our business and support our strategy of bringing more games to more players around the world. Although this is a difficult moment for our team, I’m as confident as ever in your ability to create and nurture the games, stories and worlds that bring players together.

- Phil"

It's hard to remain positive about this industry lately, so many awesome games we should be excited about but it's just constant layoffs, on the people making those games, I should be happy playing Yakuza but now I'm disgusted once again by this industry.

Wonder how many of the 1,900 is ABK and what areas are being cut.

Mike Ybarra has also left Blizzard and Blizzard's survival game has been cancelled.

The article says it's primarily Activision affected but XGS and Zenimax are also effected. Google tells me Activision had around 9.2k employees in 2019, so if 1,000 of those 1,900 employee's are Activision that's over 10% of Actvision gone. Acquisitions often result in things like this but pretty terrible for those employees and I bet they're wishing MS didn't acquire the company they work for now.

I'm not sad to see Mike go, I said before he was on thin ice for me personally, he said a bunch of dumb shit in the past at Blizzard and pissed off employees, Chris Metzen leading Blizzard would be 100x better if that was a possibility. Awful to see the survival game cancelled though, I had heard good things about the team, as in it was ran by a great leader and the team unlike other parts of Blizzard wasn't full of toxicity, it feels especially weird to cancel a survival project when survival projects are all the rage nowadays and a Blizzard one should have been a hit.

The only thing I know about Mike Ybarra is he had long hair and came out and apologised about some controversy about China a year or two ago. "Allen Adham, Blizzard’s chief design officer, is also leaving the company." No idea who that is or what a chief design officer even does but there we go.

Edit: Just googled Mike Ybarra, that's not the guy I was thinking of. Never seen him before in my life.

Allen Adham was the last remaining original Blizzard co-founder. He didn’t make much public appearances but he championed Blizzard moving into mobile games. So much so he was the one that came out after the Diablo Immortal announcement to inform everyone that Blizzard was working on mobile games for all of their IPs.

you’re thinking of J Allen Brack 

That 9.2k is a bit outdated, ABK was way over 10k after the acquisition, the memo says MS Gaming has 22,000 employees, I think ABK is around 12-13k employees nowadays so XGS + Zenimax would make up another 10k combined. We've always been told that ABK was larger than XGS + Zenimax combined.

And Idk about that, as awful as it is, layoffs are happening across the entire industry, nobody is safe and Activision-Blizzard would have laid off even if they hadn't been acquired. It's the industry as a whole now, it fucking sucks, I don't know why anyone would want to jump into this industry right now. Toxicity, layoffs, crunch, high burn rate, musical chairs with jobs.

I do wonder why the cancelation of Odyssey. Far from the first time Blizzard has cancelled a deep into development AAA project, but from the leaks, it didn't seem like a Redfall situation where the devs didn't want to work on it.

It's hard to feel excited about games at all right now. Many great games have released or will be releasing and yet you can't help but wonder "but at what cost?"