Microsoft Lays Off Another 650 Game Division Employees | MMORPG.com

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Microsoft Lays Off Another 650 Game Division Employees | MMORPG.com

Microsoft has confirmed a new round of layoffs affecting 650 people. The new cuts amount to about 3% of the global workforce. 

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Scot

I have to ask, is a CWA staffer better than one who is not?

But more generally this is just further evidence that gaming is getting some player kick back, live service anyone?

Xiaoki

Scot said:

I have to ask, is a CWA staffer better than one who is not?

But more generally this is just further evidence that gaming is getting some player kick back, live service anyone?

Kick backs? Live service? What are you talking about?

Phil Spencer confirmed this was redundant corporate and support people at Activision Blizzard.

When a trillion dollar publisher buys a billion dollar publisher there will be some overlapping positions but none of the people on Microsoft's side of the overlap got laid off.

Neoyoshi

Sucks, hope the people land on their feet.

Angrakhan

Other than CWA injecting themselves into a situation that really isn't their business to try and politically muscle flex, I'm not sure why this is news. My wife works for Verizon and they just went through a voluntary separation package involving around 5000 employees. Is anyone here wringing their hands in concern? No. Why? Because it has nothing to do with gaming, and to which I reply... exactly. This layoff had nothing to do with gaming. It wasn't developers or QA or level designers or any of that. It was redundant "corporate and supporting functions" meaning accounting, finance, legal, maybe some desktop support personnel. All roles that CWA doesn't represent.

Vrika

Angrakhan said:

Other than CWA injecting themselves into a situation that really isn't their business to try and politically muscle flex, I'm not sure why this is news. My wife works for Verizon and they just went through a voluntary separation package involving around 5000 employees. Is anyone here wringing their hands in concern? No. Why? Because it has nothing to do with gaming, and to which I reply... exactly. This layoff had nothing to do with gaming. It wasn't developers or QA or level designers or any of that. It was redundant "corporate and supporting functions" meaning accounting, finance, legal, maybe some desktop support personnel. All roles that CWA doesn't represent.

It was "mostly corporate and supporting functions". Which means they could well have laid off over a hundred devs.

Also the development isn't going to be unaffected by laying off corporate and support staff. Usually it means the actual developers have to do some of their previous jobs, and consequently have that much less time for developing the game.

The 650 layoff is relatively small and it's not going to have much effect on Microsoft's game development, but it's bound have some effect.

Angrakhan

Yeah well I can tell you as a professional developer with over 25 years of experience not every person that rolls a chair up to a keyboard and slings code is an asset to the team. Sometimes you gotta cut the dead weight and it ends up being a positive thing for the team as you spend less time holding someone's hand and cleaning up their messes. This is all assuming anyone affected by the layoff was a developer, of course. The word "mostly" doesn't really say conclusively one way or the other.

Scot

Xiaoki said:

Scot said:

I have to ask, is a CWA staffer better than one who is not?

But more generally this is just further evidence that gaming is getting some player kick back, live service anyone?

Kick backs? Live service? What are you talking about?

Phil Spencer confirmed this was redundant corporate and support people at Activision Blizzard.

When a trillion dollar publisher buys a billion dollar publisher there will be some overlapping positions but none of the people on Microsoft's side of the overlap got laid off.

I am not the only one who thinks "mostly" could mean developers, so I stand by what I said. But we don't know this is guess work based on the limited information that drips down to us as always.

mitech616

Not surprising they're cutting middle-management, random support staff, etc. after acquiring more studios. Things like PR staff don't need to be double and triple covered.

Antarious

Well there are certainly some "developers" working on various versions of WoW that should have been let go.

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