Xbox Is Employing 'A More Focused Strategy' After Merging With Activision Blizzard

Employing is an interesting word choice for the headline.

Mass lay-offs are never good. 1,900 pwople lost their jobs.

It sounds bad, but I will bet that a good portion of those lay-offs would be in corporate roles such as high level leadership, IT, payroll, HR, finance, payables, receivables, legal, treasury, health, safety, environment, etc positions. Being part of MS there would be a lot of duplication in those departments that could be handled by MS existing related departments.

There is no statement here on how many of these positions are actual game building related staff. We know a Blizzard game was cancelled, but did those people move back to existing teams or get purely laid off?

We simply don't know. And speculation without facts to me is not good.

Talk about upper management hogwash in terms of the words here. Could play management bingo and everyone would win. 😅

And apparently shutting down departments responsible for physical games. Xbox is hurtling to digital only

More like UNEMPLOYING am i rite

at this rate there won't be many people left making video games industry wide. are they setting up the a.i. in their place already?

@carlos82 as is most of the industry and society as a whole. I can't remember the exact figure, but a significant proportion of games are already bought digitally rather than physically. It isn't surprising that Xbox is heading in this direction when it is what the consumers are doing.

Wasn’t sure where to mention this but another big story I haven’t seen here yet today is Apple is now allowing game streaming apps on the App Store. Finally will be able to have a real GamePass app!

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/apple-clears-way-for-xbox-cloud-gaming-and-nvidia-geforce-now-in-app-store

@Lightning720 yes and no, those numbers are misleading in one respect as it includes games only available digitally anyway. Sure digital is increasing but Nintendo games still sell better physically and even new Sony releases still sell more physically at launch and it's always better to have options whilst we still can

@rustyduck Shouldn't be a surprise how AI will eventually replace the former need for a lot of jobs. Most of the desired employment will become increasingly focused on creative work.

@Kaloudz Yeah, was hoping someone here might see that comment and put up a story. Pretty depressing news day for MS so at least some happier news there.

@Kaloudz good grief

@carlos82 All digital means I'll never, ever buy a digital game until it is on sale for $20 or less. I want to have a disc, a box, and artwork.

Highly doubt I'm the only one or even the minority with that opinion.

@JayJ it’ll be like that episode of South Park recently where all the high paid office jobs have gone to AI and mechanics and manual workers become the rich 😂😂

@NeoRatt Exactly - and don't forget both Blizzard and ABK had there own 'Publishing' and 'Marketing' side - people who'd organise releases, physical printing, distribution etc etc so a lot of those jobs are doing the same role but now under MS and Microsoft 'Publishing' - those are in name only - sub divisions of at most.

I bet most actually 'developing' games will be retained and a lot of the 'streamlining' is part of that integration - one team handling Marketing instead of 3 or more for example.

Of course no one likes to hear of job losses and I hope they all find successful employment elsewhere quickly. However it was inevitable....

So what projects will stay, what IPs will be used, what management practices will happen? I still don't have high hopes for any of this at all.

I always have questioned many directions their first party games have gone let alone, physical (retailers they talk online or Mall or whatever retailers in their own store spaces extents even if not disk production slow down).

@NeoRatt they laid off the entire community team, widely regarded as the best there is, and shipped the roles abroad. Go on twitter (i refuse to acknowledge x) and you will see quite quickly that the bulk of those let go are nowhere near executive levels.