Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands; Xbox Chief Says Gaming Division Cuts Will Remove ‘Layers of Management’
Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands; Xbox Chief Says Gaming Division Cuts Will Remove ‘Layers of Management’
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Microsoft’s Modus Operandi:
Buy other companies, mismanage them, fire the people, and eventually shut them down.
They did that with PC software, and now the same with gaming.
Meanwhile, management will get richer, and the people without a job don’t know what to do
Running out of ways to turn profits. So, in order to look good in front of investors, they are buying congress people for reduced taxes and firing people.
The wealthy are everything wrong with the world.
**Microsoft confirmed that it’s laying off as many as 9,100 employees,** or about four percent of its workforce, in yet another round of cuts this year, reports the Seattle. Employees in Microsoft’s Xbox division, known as Microsoft Gaming, are being hit hard by these layoffs, although exact numbers and divisions are not yet known.
Xbox leader Phil Spencer said in a message to the team that **“To position Gaming for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas, we will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness.”**
my brain fucking hurts from the amount of boiler plate buzzwords in that joke of a letter
“dynamic” “agility”
just say the people at the top made terrible decisions and now the people actually doing the work will pay the price.
Phil Spencer: *I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before. Our platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger.*
What a great thing to say as you lay off thousands of employees who got you here.
No more assistant TO the regional managers.
Getting really fucking tired of that corpo lango. Between that and the Subnautica 2 announcement execs got me very peeved this morning.
They made billions from gaming, now they cutting people. That’s cold
Encouraging employees who were let go to re-apply to different positions in Microsoft seems like a bafflingly shitty thing to publicly say.
While layoffs always suck no matter what because people are losing jobs, a lot of companies are doing this “removing layers of management” tactic that I honestly think is for the best. My company just did the same. There are too many executives at companies that do next to nothing and get paid double or triple what people under them do. To join a few meetings online, say nothing more than “sounds good”, and then go play golf. Or they are so far removed from the people actually doing the work that there’s a huge disconnect between what the workers need and want vs what turns profit.
This is a huge problem in the gaming industry at the AAA studios. I think less “layers of management” will be beneficial.
Just sucks that people lost their jobs, but I feel like people in those positions are more generic business degree management type people that could get a great job pretty much anywhere.
So sick of the corpo speak….
i wonder how Phil burn down Xbox this badly and still got a job?
Xbox 360 was great with neck and neck sales against PS3 in sales (84 mil vs 87 mil)
then it crash down with Xbox One which did so badly to nearly 1:2 with PS4 sales (58 mil vs 117 mil)
and now with all glorious golden child gamepass, Xbox Series S/X went a bit below 1:2 in sales against PS5 sales (32 mil vs 74 mil)
—
I mean Phil seems have great PR capability but xbox is burning down now.
“but xbox is pivoting to software now”, its a pivot that cost 80 billion that paid by daddy microsoft. its not mark of success, mate.
Removing of “layers of management” never starts at the top even though that would be beneficial in some cases.
That is almost 10,000 people across the whole Microsoft company. Obviously not all in gaming, but thats still a ton of people.
They also laid off 10k+ last year.
Motorsport series is over.
You know what this means? The price of Gamepass is going up!
The old saying goes that anytime you have layoffs it’s a failure of management.
We need some of those top managers and executives laid off.
Xbox is dead.
I get this is a very shitty move but Reddit always complains about middle management and now they Microsoft is apparently getting rid of quite a bit of middle management and now it’s bad?
He’s absolute scum.
They are probably just utilizing AI a lot more and they are coming up with excuses to keep trimming what they consider fat. They will continue to lose what is left of the companies soul and then complain and not understand when people jump ship to options that does not kill games and dev teams.
This is why I cannot support Game Pass and rather buy the game and pay the devs as much as I can. Despite not having Gamepass, my back log is long enough to not need them. Fuck corporate greed, ai or not.
Are they actually removing personnel from management? Or are they removing so many devs they need to restructure management and thus “remove” layers of management.
yeah im cancelling my gamepass.
Meanwhile steam is doing better than ever
Xbox has management?
Not surprised, Xbox has been going downhill since they introduced GamePass imo.
Maybe one day gamers and gaming media will realize Phil is the soulless corporate stooge and deep idiot he’s always been. Dude is running a buzz-saw through the talent he’s purchased using Daddy Nadella’s money over the years because he failed to grow Microsoft’s gaming business internally and had to buy his way to big franchises after overseeing another poor Halo release and another poor hardware launch.
That bitchin leather jacket has done so much work for his brand/image.
Phil Spencer ain’t gonna lose a dime
Special shout-out to all the gamers and games media that were way more interested in how ‘cool’ it would get Bethesda games on Game Pass than the huge negative effect those massive acquisitions would almost certainly have on the industry.
Yes, MS is to ultimately to blame, but there’s been a LOT of people cheerleading some anti-competitive mega corporation consolidation bullshit for years. I’m not talking about regular Joe who just happens to like playing Xbox, nothing wrong with that. I’m talking about the people who should know better and actively root for this stuff.
This really sucks, bit it’s unfortunately not very surprising.
I am boycotting them. I fully suggest others do as well. Gaming products, at LEAST.
And then they just put in for thousands of H1-B workers.
Makes sense, actually.
Is anyone bloody left at Microsoft? I swear they have laid off at least 500,000 in the past 3 years.
All this complaining and people will still support them, just like the switch 2 complaining😂
The tech industry has been getting fucked hard every year since covid ended.. tech is not the place to be
That Activision purchase was a bad decision. Not paying off.
remember when reddit said all these shitty games that microsoft published were huge successes lmao
Removing layers of management by closing entire studios and cancelling games…
Perfect dark by The Initiative was just shutdown. I got to play the perfect dark game a year ago and it was fairly far along from the bit I was able to play. I would hav expected it to be ~1 year out from completion as of today.
Everwild also cancelled developed by Rare.
I think it’s argueable to say both those games were in a bit of development hell but still surprising.
Remove layers of management? Yeah, perhaps they should start from the top by getting rid of him. Typical manglement.
this is why you dont sell your studio to any publisher
Totally disgusting and completely avoidable. Why even buy these studios? It’s sick, really.