i just read about blizzard[/microsoft]'s recent decision and it’s just so disheartening… how can i enjoy my favorite game when the people who designed it are being let go just to appease suits and fluff profit to cost ratio, their dream jobs come and gone in an snap and some even having to scramble to sort their visas because of it. this decision is the nail in the coffin for anyone that had hope that anything would get better both for blizzard employees and for players. sad
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That was very vague; would you be willing to elaborate more on the matter? (For the ignorant ones of us, like me). You buddies got fired?
i don’t know anyone at blizzard, i just read the tweets of some of the people who got laid off recently and it was a little heartbreaking. a huge amount of them are artists that worked on overwatch. i think stylosa made a video about it too that featured some of the tweets im talking about
Not a Blizzard decision. They had no say in the matter.
This is just a standard corporate process to trim fat. Especially when you look at the core of who’s been let go.
All of Blizzards consumer support team seem to have gone. Microsoft have a preference for outsourcing that sort of thing, so a disappointingly predictable move.
All of the team responsible for getting physical games out to retailers is gone. With the rumours the updated Xbox Series X will be discless and their obvious push for Gamepass subscriptions… another disappointingly predictable move.
The others seem to be where they have excess staff for the job they are doing. Even the CoD studios and Bethesda have had cuts. As have people in all Microsoft departments.
i didn’t know who exactly made the call so thank you
it’s so extremely disappointing to know that so many artists, designers, and writers that made overwatch 2 awesome were laid off from their dream jobs one by one like this and i want blizzard and microsoft to know. it’s impossible for anyone that isn’t there to really know what’s going on, but one of the people not laid off said that their department was pretty much gutted (@ AC0M with underscores on either side on twitter, they also retweeted from a lot of people affected by the lay offs if anyone reading this wants to see). it doesn’t look very good : (
just a look on Google, but anyway:
- 1900 Activision Blizzard employees were fired. nothing to be surprised about lately, but so far it is the video game company with the most staff removed;
-Mike Ybarra has retired as Blizzard president, although it is suspected that he instead was fired by Microsoft management. he had only entered this role in 2021, it was something that really happened unexpectedly; - the odyssey project, a blizzard survival game that has been in the works since 2017, has been cancelled. it seems to concern problems with the game engine and the management of release forecasts;
- there is a huge report of layoffs in the department of physical copies of games, which is suspected to serve to strengthen Microsoft’s gamepass service;
- In addition to Mike Ybarra, Allen Adham, Chief Design Officer who was there since the foundation of Blizzard, was also removed;
- COD is among the titles most affected in layoffs (30%), but no info regarding King games. in blizzard it’s about most of consumer support team;
- According to Microsoft management, there is a move of the teams to “other projects”, unspecified;
- The most interesting statement is in the ABK workers union about what happened;
In the specific case of Overwatch 2:
- in the last few hours on twitter there are an innumerable amount of personnel from the blizzard development team who have been fired. of particular note is approximately half of the artistic and environmental design departments;
- The head of writing Gavin Jurgens (the one in charge of the narrative department of dialogues and pve) was also fired;
- other personnel removed: VFX artists, hero designers, sound designers and animators;
- almost all the developers involved confirmed that they had been cut off without any kind of warning;
the consequences of these cuts may be innumerable for Overwatch, but the main concern is that of quality in the near future and above all the prospects of a continuation of PVe which are significantly receding.
Generally, I’m not too surprised by this type of reorganization in this precise period. Inflation has affected everyone, but above all we forget that large companies employ large numbers of staff in a more anomalous way than medium-sized companies. Activision BLizzard in particular was in a highly disastrous organizational state following the scandals of 2021, and there is nothing anomalous about Microsoft’s move to put all staff on the radar; However, what is worrying for Overwatch is the type of cut in the artistic and narrative department, which was what was starting to bring new small projects that had not been seen for some time (short stories, small animated cinematics, etc.) and there is the sad prospect that the PVE is a project definitively blocked by its sequel on gotheborg.
There are some pretty heavy unknowns to think about: what does Microsoft want to do with Blizzard in this way?
- First of all, it cannot be ruled out that Microsoft wants to introduce its staff into Activision Blizzard’s workforce, and if it is true that this concerns the customer support department… it is a HUGE buff for Blizzard itself. We have been complaining about the quality for too many years now, it could be an opportunity to see a real restructuring in that type of department;
- The art department being fired seems like a rather anomalous thing to do… but I don’t see any mention of the functional departments: maybe they want to start working on the functions even before the art as happened in the last years of OW1 when there was a total stop to the features? it’s not a bad idea, and season 9 seems to want to aim for exactly this. but I don’t know if it’s really optimal to leave the narrative department of the pve completely still. and we don’t know IF it was really proceeding as they said at blizzcon without showing us anything.
- I was highly surprised that Ybarra left. there are very strong doubts that it was his decision, shortly before the acquisition was formalized he was highly optimistic about his position as president. His successor will be named next week, and it will be interesting to know whether it will be someone from Microsoft’s ranks or someone from Activision Blizzard;
- the really strong concern concerns some previous statements by Microsoft that it is interested in strengthening the mobile market: many thought that King meant Candy crush, but now we are not entirely sure of this;
- I am absolutely not surprised by the numbers on COD: it is a franchise that has been risking a lot in marketing for several years now;
- We can’t even rule out the possibility that Microsoft wants to move a lot of staff… to blizzard projects that are currently inactive for no particular reason. It has always been thought that the acquisition wanted to initiate a restoration operation on Starcraft and W3 Reforged as they did not long ago for the Age of Empire franchise. or enhance the current live services, of which we already see a strange movement in Ow2 starting from the next season and in its esports plan. And the same goes for WoW with the countless new quality of live features with Mercer who is back in the team;
I wouldn’t worry too much about Overwatch 2 too soon, but the movement that’s happening right now can’t make us rest assured: do they want to save the future of Overwatch or have it gradually shut down because too much time has been lost in the uncertainties of the past? 
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Yeah,. It sucks, and you feel for the people who lost jobs.
But business is brutal. Microsoft haven’t got where they are being nice and a soft touch.
Do we know if they were specific Team 4 staff or still just reported at “Blizzard” ??
One theory is they are cutting the fat to focus on slower, potentially higher quality, development. Obviously we won’t know for another year or 2 as to if that is the case. But I imagine we will see more pooled resources from Microsoft studios going forward.
The source of the number of layoffs is in Microsoft’s official press release. the one about the departments affected in Overwatch are the same developers of team 4. some tweets easily found online:
lead writer of Overwatch team
Ok. So look at the list it is not alarming levels of cuts. Just sucks to be them, having been in that position myself years ago… it is awful.
But from a business point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Seems a lot of “we’ve got 6 and work for 4, so 2 have to go” type stuff.
yes, in fact, I think it is a bit physiological for an acquisition like this. I’m not entirely sorry for the Odyssey project because frankly I don’t think that a project in development that has seen three Blizzard presidents with different ways of doing things could have a clear direction.
For Overwatch… I can understand that it is frowned upon by Microsoft management, especially if you have to go and explain what that “2” on the title means to your new boss. but at this moment I can only hope that they don’t stop it, and that in fact it is a symptom of “ok, stop accumulating resources for uncertain projects, in the meantime work on the functions necessary to re-establish some credibility of the features” (the things of season 9, I mean ). the only problem is understanding what to do with PVE if a construction site still exists.
Totally.
I think on the PvE side, that is dead in the water, and probably will never see the light of day.
I think the big “development” next for Microsoft is to get some of the IPs to TV/movie productions. Certainly if they want to push to monetise those IPs as they said they did.
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Totally unsurprising. Microsoft are not renowned for caring. They’ve been sued a lot for their use of temporary contract staff.
But if your objective is to go from 22,000 staff and get that under 20,000… you probably don’t want people who are emotionally involved making the decisions. But then sadly, this is what you get so it is a bit of a catch-22.
these are people with lives and bills to pay, not numbers to crunch… i really hope things work out for everyone affected. it’s sad
They are, and it is a horrible position to be in.
But sadly, business doesn’t care. Certainly businesses like Microsoft. The see it literally as a numbers thing.
I always found it hilarious how people thought microsoft was going to save blizzard.
Nothing more baffling than seeing people make themselves believe any of these megacorps actually cares about you
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The problem is not so much “Microsoft will save Blizzard, it will make it better”… but that objectively before the news of the acquisition it was a company destined for total decay. at the bankrupt, I dare say. I remember very well that with the acquisition the actiblizz shares increased and with them also the hiring of staff (especially in the technological departments) also thanks to Microsoft’s support for the workers’ union which still exists.
I don’t think we should regret this acquisition, from the point of view of the business survival of its IPs. But for obvious reasons Microsoft still took on a company that needed to be extricated from the errors of the previous management, it is almost normal that it should hit ESPECIALLY the customer support departments (for the artistic one of Overwatch… in my opinion something happened to define the “2” on game title)
Worst case scenario we had Sony closing blizzard franchises to its ecosystem for future projects at an extremely high probability rate, no one can deny that. Or even end up in the hands of rich but inexperienced companies in the gaming field (amazon, apple, google)… I don’t know, in the end I just think that we entered into the lesser “evil” among the options available at that moment, in order not to see the news “Blizzard gone bankrupt: everyone fired, IP dead”. Whether Microsoft develops advantages or disadvantages from its choices can be said approximately towards the end of this year, as the “annual balance sheet”.
Stylosa was very interesting because he made a good point: most people were working on events/art for the game/lore. That’s just extremely concerning for the future of the game.
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True.
Untill we have specific numbers for specific teams it’s hard to tell.
If they released 2 people from a team of 10, it’s probably not going to have a huge impact on the outflow.
They’ll also pool more resources, rather than being isolated teams like they were under Blizzard.