Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs

Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.

AI works as a smokescreen when doing product development layoffs, but you can't really use it for sales, which is still very human-to-human, or when canceling entire projects like they're doing in XBox Game Studios.

I knew this was coming when Microsoft brought Activision. As ex game industry I nearly started crying at the news.

Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.

Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.

I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.

Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.

> games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.

Historically, games have actually performed extremely well in economic downturns.

Likely because they're extremely cheap entertainment if you count $ per hour of entertainment, but that's just my view on it.

And gaming as a whole is doing great. The only part that's falling off a cliff is the woke garbage life service games AAA studios have been releasing for the last ~10 yrs or so.

Whenever the studios didn't make dumb political messaging the core of the game... And instead made a good gameplay loop first, they've generally succeeded pretty well. It takes skill to make a game centered around political messaging and have it be good, (e.g. spec ops the line, MGS, metaphor:refantazio ), and none of the woke garbage that flopped ever had anything even attempting to create a world in which this messaging made sense. So we're left with completely nonsensical catering to politics no average person cares about whatsoever.

I mean we've even got single dev games that got to the charts of steam (schedule I).

Who gives a flying toss about political content in a game? That sounds like a weird right wing thing. Either the gameplay is good, or its not. Why does woke matter, and why should anyone care?