"Before there were plenty of places to land and studios would respond to swoop up talent," she said. "This time, they're not there because everyone is drowning it feels."

Short sighted executives going to cause so much damage to the industry, less people will enter the industry right now and those who can't get a job because barely anyone is hiring will leave the industry for a different career path, then we'll have another shortage of employees.

Rumours Toys for Bob have been shutdown but it could just be they're downsizing offices, would wait for official confirmation but nevertheless Microsoft's PR/Marketing is without a doubt the worst in the industry, how it is hours to confirm the status of the studio, I'm going to be very pissed off if TFB is closed.

Chill the fuck out people my god.

Me and Microsoft are about to throw hands if they keep this shit up. "They're not needed for CoD, let's layoff our best 3D platformer studio when we own not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 3D platformer IP's, Banjo, Conker, Spyro, and Crash. Fuck those 3D platformers gamers, we know you want more CoD and only CoD from Activision!"

It's part of the 1,900 layoffs, same WARN act I posted the other day, it could be them downsizing their offices because of the layoffs/WFH since they closed Sledgehammer's office too but meh it ain't looking good.

Hope every single employee at Microsoft Gaming unionises.

Looking at that graph, if the trend is similar, we'll be quiet in February but March will have another large round of layoffs around the industry.

I feel like just fucking off until June

Finish Infinite Wealth then hunker down with TV Shows until Dragon's Dogma 2 then more TV Shows until Hellblade II.

Honestly, it's feeling more and more like we were mislead about this acquisition. Both Phil Spencer and Bobby Kotick did interviews suggesting that Microsoft would revive Activision series which had been left by the wayside in favor of chasing CoD money:

https://www.eurogamer.net/xbox-boss-keen-to-revive-dormant-activision-franchises

https://venturebeat.com/games/bobby-kotick-interview-why-activision-blizzard-did-the-deal-with-microsoft/

Meanwhile Phil at one point suggested that CoD may no longer be yearly after the acquisition, and 2 anonymous sources familiar with executive level discussions between Microsoft and ABK speaking to Bloomberg reported the same, and yet we've now heard we are getting a CoD game yearly these next 4 years, even though CoD 2025 currently has no lead developer 22 months out from release and is looking like it will be a MW3 tier rush job as a result. They laid off so many Activision devs that it will basically be impossible for Activision to develop anything but CoD while sticking with yearly CoD games + Warzone updates.

Another odd thing, Parris had an interview scheduled with Mike about the future of Blizzard (after acquisition) but then he was let go from Blizzard, despite Blizzard scheduling one after the acquisition closed. Really just feels like the bean counters of Microsoft have shoved themselves in. It's a bit crazy that ABK went from 10k employees to 17k in 2 years but still, some of these layoffs feel completely against sense.

I don't actually think COD would have ever been made not yearly though, it simply brings in far, far, too much money, but I figured they'd do things to improve the schedule, not lay off COD development teams. Also there wasn't meant to be a COD in 2023 but Activision changed their mind for whatever reason, I guess they were terrified of their stock price absolutely plummeting if they didn't release one but the fact that COD is planned for up to 2028 with a COD in each year shows that they were never really serious about taking COD off a yearly rotation.

It appears like they'll have to make a 4th core COD studio if they want every studio on a 4 year rotation, probably High Moon, otherwise 1 studio will be screwed over with double the workload, maybe they can get away with making COD 2025 DLC to COD 2024, a meaty expansion priced appropriately, they could also simply do proper remasters of Modern Warfare 2/3, Black Ops II/III after seeing how huge they were when the servers were fixed.

Crazy how they went from the amazing Direct to this, Lol.

It feels like when Xbox closed Lionhead and shutdown Scalebound.

Be nice to have one year where they don't start the year off with negativity.

And I don't even really care about the multiplatform news, or even physical, it's the layoffs.