This is the best summary I could come up with:
While Microsoft is primarily laying off roles at Activision Blizzard, some Xbox and ZeniMax employees will also be impacted by the cuts.
His influence will be felt for years to come, both directly and indirectly as Allen plans to continue mentoring young designers across the industry,” says Booty.
Booty says Microsoft will be “shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.”
Microsoft completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October, following 20 months of battles with regulators in the UK and US.
Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick stepped down at the end of December, with Microsoft not appointing a direct replacement.
The software maker is due to report its fiscal Q2 2024 earnings next week, which, for the first time, will include results from the impact of the Activision Blizzard acquisition.
The original article contains 397 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
68 billion to acquire IP, but can’t afford to pay the people who make and maintain it.
I remember people on the Internet talking about the Microsoft Bethesda deal. I saw people saying that it’s “actually a good thing” and how Microsoft can contribute more to Bethesda and they’ll churn out better games for Xbox. Then I see shit like this and games like Starfield and understand why 99% of the people on the Internet have no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
I never want to hear “job creators” as a reason for tax breaks and special treatment again.
The industry is at its most wealthy and yet it feels like its on fire.
You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k. You get rich not paying them. So what you are saying is actually not a contradiction!
You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k.
You literally do, though. Because wealth isn’t a function of the volume of currency you’ve amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you’ve got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.
Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.
And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.
At some point, you’ve got to put forward an investment. You can’t run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don’t have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?
Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?
It’s a wonderful idea but it’s just not how the gaming industry is run. The gaming industry runs more like war machine production facility.
You pay some very good people lots of money to set things up, design how things are going to go, make up some prototype work. Then you set up for production, hire on tons of people to finish all the work. Once everything is up and running and all the products are out the door you cut back to a maintenance staff while you have the very well paid, highly talented core working on the next big thing. People are dying to get into the gaming industry so bad, the job pool waxes and wains in quality a little but there’s never truly a lack of new talent when you need it.
The saving grace for the industry is live cadence games. The whole subscription side of things that we don’t really want to see as gamers keep this ebb and flow of employment from happening. You stretch your production schedule out a little longer to begin with. You don’t hire up quite so heavily and then for the life of the game you keep releasing features and options, You run events to keep people subscribing.
I like the ideas you’re proposing, It just not a method that game companies are willing to try to entertain.
