Activision Blizzard • Xbox • Microsoft Corporation • Blizzard En

The video game division of Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees, according to insiders who spoke with IGN. Layoffs follow contentious former CEO Bobby Kotick’s departure and Activision Blizzard’s $69 billion purchase of Call of Duty owner.

“Full support to those who are impacted during the transition, including severance benefits informed by local employment laws,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer wrote in an email seen by IGN. According to Spencer, Microsoft will do this. Microsoft has been contacted for comment by IGN.

Layoffs follow contentious former CEO Bobby Kotick’s departure and Activision Blizzard’s $69 billion purchase of Call of Duty owner. At its present valuation, Microsoft is the second business in history to surpass $3 trillion.

Allen Adham, co-founder and chief design officer of Blizzard, is also departing from the company that created Overwatch, Diablo, and World of Warcraft. The long-awaited survival game, Odyssey, has been scrapped. Ybarra announced in December 2022 that the development team had quadrupled in the previous year and intended to expand even further.

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Microsoft Layoffs 2024

According to an insider who spoke with IGN, Microsoft’s gaming teams had already seen serious cuts to their marketing budgets when the news of the layoffs broke.

The cuts follow a demonstration where Xbox showcased several future exclusive games, including Avowed by Obsidian, MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ninja Theory’s Hellblade 2, and Ara: History Untold by Oxide Games. The Xbox leadership was shaken up last year, with Sarah Bond being elevated to Xbox president and Matt Booty to president of gaming content and studios.

Numerous prominent studios in the video game industry have reduced their workforce or gone out of business, leading to widespread layoffs in the sector. Mass layoffs were common in 2023 and have persisted into 2024, in sharp contrast to the year’s blockbuster video game releases. Although precise numbers are hard to come by, speculation has it that the gaming industry lay off over 10,000 people last year, and things won’t improve in 2024. A recent poll conducted by GDC found that out of all the game developers surveyed, one-third were either directly or indirectly affected by layoffs that occurred last year.

Microsoft has taken strategic judgements on current initiatives in addition to reducing the workforce and removing executives. As part of these organisational changes, Blizzard has cancelled a survival game that was originally announced. But don’t worry, Booty told us that the talented individuals who were working on this project will be redirected to exciting new projects in the works at Blizzard.

Despite the fact that layoffs have been implemented by a number of large IT organisations, Microsoft’s goal is to simplify its operations and concentrate on future-oriented projects.

In the future, we intend to keep pouring money into things that will help our company expand and achieve our goal of making more games available to more people all over the globe. The firm expressed its confidence in the team’s capacity to continue creating and nurturing stories, worlds, and games that unite players, despite the challenging times they are going through.