The cuts of almost 2,000 jobs in Microsoft’s gaming division hit the industry like a tsunami yesterday. Now there are first details about the affected areas, which allow interesting conclusions to be drawn.
1,900 layoffs at Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, that’s a big deal. There are now initial indications of which areas of the gaming sector are particularly badly affected. At least Jez Cordon from Windows Central claims to have obtained this information.
Accordingly, Microsoft has fired almost all of Activision Blizzard’s internal customer support teams, apparently with the intention of outsourcing these areas to external companies.
Areas of the company that were involved in bringing Xbox games to physical stores were closed. A pretty clear indication that Microsoft will concentrate on purely digital sales in the future and that a possible successor to the Xbox Series X/S could also be a purely digital console without a disc drive.
It will be interesting to see which other areas are more affected by the layoffs. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty at Microsoft and the game studios at the moment. How Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reportsthe handling of the layoffs seems to be quite chaotic and many employees don’t even know whether they are affected or not.
The full extent of the layoffs and the associated restructuring cannot yet be fully predicted. It was actually clear that there would be layoffs after the takeover of Activision Blizzard in order to eliminate areas that were staffed twice. But apparently Microsoft is using the opportunity to do a complete housecleaning. Whether and to what extent ongoing game developments will be affected by this also remains to be seen.
Sounds almost absurd, but there is actually a trailer for Microsoft’s now completed takeover of Activision Blizzard King.
