2024 may not be kind for game developers.

S

Silent_Buddha

Legend
Continuing on from the 2023 version... Hoping that 2024 ends up better than 2023, thus the may not be kind verbiage. :)

forum.beyond3d.com

2023 has not been kind to game developers.

Keep in mind this is estimates and not all developers/publishers that are laying off people are announcing how many are being laid off. http://www.videogamelayoffs.com/ An estimated 6500 people have been laid off so far this year. This also doesn't include potential divestitures or...
forum.beyond3d.com forum.beyond3d.com

Looks like Pirahna Bytes (Gothic, Risen, Elex) might be shut down by Embracer. :(


And the original source for that article.

Neue Informationen zu Piranha Bytes: Das Studio hinter Gothic und Elex steht offenbar kurz vor der Schließung

Eine offizielle Bestätigung steht nach wie vor aus, aber unsere Quellen legen nahe, dass es Piranha Bytes in Zukunft nicht mehr geben wird. Zumindest...
www.gamestar.de www.gamestar.de

Rumors that Embracer is going to be laying off more people and might be shutting down other studios as it looks like their rash of studio acquisitions is coming back to bite them in the arse with the post Covid downturn in consumer spending.

Regards,
SB
 
How long after layoffs does it take on average to find another job?

They're not publishing fewer games are they?

Or is AI going to permanently replace a lot of games industry jobs?
 
wco81 said:
How long after layoffs does it take on average to find another job?

They're not publishing fewer games are they?
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There are probably a lot of games that are not profitable right now. I personally don't think we would suffer from fewer games with higher quality/passion put into them.
 
UE5 already can procedurally generate lots of stuff, it's just a rebalancing in job requirements.
 
Acquisitions usually have consolidations like this happening. 8% of the workforce is a lot though.

So MS has 20,000 XGS staff left.

Speculation time:

Including infrastructure, salaries, overhead etc... I would estimate the cost of this is an average of $250k per head = $5 billion annually.

GP subs are 33 million x $5 (subtracting 50% delivery/3rd party content costs) x 12 ~ $2 billion annually.

Activision revenues are $8+ billion alone every year.

It's easy to see how MS are making money with Xbox now, but I'm of course ignoring the cost of the acquisitions. :)
 
DavidGraham said:
Microsot is laying off 1900 people from Xbox, Activison-Blixzard and ZeniMax divisions.

www.theverge.com

Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees

The cuts primarily affect Activision Blizzard employees.
www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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It was reported that Mike Ybarra and the chief design officer are leaving too.

I hope after this everyone defending the ABK acquisition just open their eyes.

Mass consolidation is not good. Not good for developers (individual workers), that is certain.

I guess not good for consumers too, I am very skeptical of that “glow up” on ABK portfolio many people were talking. Let’s see. Personally not optimistic.
 
B m A said:
It was reported that Mike Ybarra and the chief design officer are leaving too.

I hope after this everyone defending the ABK acquisition just open their eyes.

Mass consolidation is not good. Not good for developers (individual workers), that is certain.

I guess not good for consumers too, I am very skeptical of that “glow up” on ABK portfolio many people were talking. Let’s see. Personally not optimistic.
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Im pretty sure this was expected, but just to be clear the redundancies that were referred to were not likely many developers.

You’ve got marketers, accounting, finance, strategy, sales teams, product teams, mid level management, security, IT, networking, social media people, community managers, HR, etc that would be replaced as they would adhere to MS standards.

Entire teams typically dedicated towards managing Amazon servers, well if they move them to azure, those teams will be gone. Etc

Everyone associated with working closely with Sony and Nintendo on the business side of things would also like be fully removed.

While i don’t doubt some developers may have lost their role, i can think of a couple roles that are likely to be gone, 2000 actual game developers is unlikely. That’s about 5 Ubisoft studios worth of developers assuming 400 per studio.
 
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iroboto said:
Im pretty sure this was expected, but just to be clear the redundancies were not likely developers.

You’ve got marketers, accounting, finance, strategy, mid level management, security, IT, networking, social media people, community managers, HR, etc that would be replaced as they would adhere to MS standards.

Entire teams typically dedicated towards managing Amazon servers, well if they move them to azure, those teams will be gone. Etc

While i don’t doubt some developers may have lost their role, 2000 developers is unlikely. That’s about 5 Ubisoft studios worth of developers assuming 400 per studio.
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Yes, my bad. Was thinking about that. Probably most of it was not involved in game development.

But 1900 is a big number anyway, so some of the names are possibly developers. For example, the chief design officer of Blizzard is leaving, and he was involved in game creation. Also, Blizzard survival game was cancelled. That was a weird day.

But also, we don’t know the reasons behind it. As I said, let’s see what happens, we have to wait some years to have a clear view on all of this.
 
iroboto said:
Im pretty sure this was expected, but just to be clear the redundancies that were referred to were not likely many developers.

You’ve got marketers, accounting, finance, strategy, sales teams, product teams, mid level management, security, IT, networking, social media people, community managers, HR, etc that would be replaced as they would adhere to MS standards.

Entire teams typically dedicated towards managing Amazon servers, well if they move them to azure, those teams will be gone. Etc

Everyone associated with working closely with Sony and Nintendo on the business side of things would also like be fully removed.

While i don’t doubt some developers may have lost their role, i can think of a couple roles that are likely to be gone, 2000 actual game developers is unlikely. That’s about 5 Ubisoft studios worth of developers assuming 400 per studio.
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I remember when talking about my concerns about all these huge amounts of new studios now coming under Xbox management, many people would try and defend it and say, "Dont worry, they're still going to be run independently as they always had. Nothing will really change". Of course this was a naive, foolish argument as of course Microsoft didn't just spend all that money to not take these publishers+studios under their own management umbrella.

Also, the fact that Bethesda and Xbox were also mentioned alongside Activision/Blizzard would suggest that it's gonna be more than just some scant few developers getting laid off.
 
In the last week, MSFT hit all-time high. May now have higher market cap than AAPL.

Good look to be doing layoffs with that timing.
 
wco81 said:
In the last week, MSFT hit all-time high. May now have higher market cap than AAPL.

Good look to be doing layoffs with that timing.
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Good look to Blackrock and the other institutions that drive stock price. They love to see companies watching the bottom line.
 
Seanspeed said:
I remember when talking about my concerns about all these huge amounts of new studios now coming under Xbox management, many people would try and defend it and say, "Dont worry, they're still going to be run independently as they always had. Nothing will really change". Of course this was a naive, foolish argument as of course Microsoft didn't just spend all that money to not take these publishers+studios under their own management umbrella.

Also, the fact that Bethesda and Xbox were also mentioned alongside Activision/Blizzard would suggest that it's gonna be more than just some scant few developers getting laid off.
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I’m not sure anyone here made the statement that being independent wouldn’t involve sharing resources or remove redundancies roles, or streamlining of programs.

I think most people were referring if they would have autonomy to create their own titles or whether they would continue releasing to. multiple platforms.
 
iroboto said:
Im pretty sure this was expected, but just to be clear the redundancies that were referred to were not likely many developers.

You’ve got marketers, accounting, finance, strategy, sales teams, product teams, mid level management, security, IT, networking, social media people, community managers, HR, etc that would be replaced as they would adhere to MS standards.
Click to expand...
At the same time, I presume these people weren't sitting around idle most of the time, and MS's existing staff doing the same job also aren't sitting around idle. How much extra workload does it put on other staff to take up the work of a large publisher on top of their pre-existing commitments?

If we look at it another way from the perspective of work hours, there's 1900x40 = 76,000 man hours of work that was either empty in inefficient organisations, or needs to paid from the exist man-hour budget.

Or, from a hardware POV, it's like taking a lot of work off the CPU to move to the GPU. How much spare cycles has the GPU got to spend on this new AI workload? Why wasn't it's saturated with graphics work beforehand such that it's unable to fit in more AI work? Or are there just large efficiencies of consolidation possible?
 
They have to find some way to pay for the expensive acquisitions.

It's probably incorporated into the acquisition proposal, how much savings of "redundancies" could be realized to offset x in purchase price.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
At the same time, I presume these people weren't sitting around idle most of the time, and MS's existing staff doing the same job also aren't sitting around idle. How much extra workload does it put on other staff to take up the work of a large publisher on top of their pre-existing commitments?

If we look at it another way from the perspective of work hours, there's 1900x40 = 76,000 man hours of work that was either empty in inefficient organisations, or needs to paid from the exist man-hour budget.

Or, from a hardware POV, it's like taking a lot of work off the CPU to move to the GPU. How much spare cycles has the GPU got to spend on this new AI workload? Why wasn't it's saturated with graphics work beforehand such that it's unable to fit in more AI work? Or are there just large efficiencies of consolidation possible?
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Organisations like ABK are massive. In a single year they jumped from 11K to 17K employees. MS and others did similar.
I’m not supporting what we are seeing and it’s clear consolidation plays a portion of the layoffs here.

But likely there is a solid chance that even without the merger, there would have been layoffs. You can’t staff up that quick and not make the money to meet the expansion and not cut back.

Looks like There are probably full departments being removed here.



Hmm can’t seem the get the tweet to show.
 
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The devil is in the details with these sorts of things. The media will make a big stink about it, but 8% redundancy is not all that unexpected.

There are companies that regularly lay off the worst 10% of their employees annually as statistically even an average new hire will be better than your worst 10%.
 
Johnny Awesome said:
The devil is in the details with these sorts of things. The media will make a big stink about it, but 8% redundancy is not all that unexpected.

There are companies that regularly lay off the worst 10% of their employees annually as statistically even an average new hire will be better than your worst 10%.
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It’s certainly bad. IMO, some of the workers that lost their jobs were likely to lose them whether the merger occurred or not.

Ie the overwatch 2 team
 
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