This is terrible news.... that Ion is not on this list. How come?
Hope they not cut the WoW dev team or this could have a really negative impact on the ongoing content and released road map and the work on the 3 xpacks... Microsoft destroys company's and games they don't care about...
While this really sucks, it's not surprising in the slightest. They've cancelled a survival game Blizzard was developing which probably had a good number of the layoffs. I really don't think this will effect WoW because it's a cash cow.
Not Mike Ybarra. :( He saved WoW.
Dude this looks like an inside job lol. He leaves microsoft, joins blizz, hypes up a merge with his previous company, and leaves as soon as it goes through. I wonder how much he got paid lol
I haven't played WoW since Aberrus. Something about the constant layoffs and HR scandals kinda messed me up, especially as a queer woman. You get used to being the butt of the joke in the workplace, the person who needs to work the hardest without any recognition, who gets moved around and mistreated - but you shouldn't. This just...feels like confirmation that it's continued. Quality of life isn't improving, nor is anyone's job security. Things are just headin downhill. Hoping those folks have a place to go. Losing your job like that - likely without a severance package - it can permanently destroy your life.
Consider that the 1900 employees lost counts for the whole Microsoft Gaming organization, including Activision Blizzard, Bethesda and XBox Gaming. It would be good to know how they break these numbers down to the individual divisions.
All this comments section tells me is: Thank christ you chuckle*!@#s aren't in charge.
It sucks that people are losing their jobs but this always happens during mergers. Often the purpose of merging (or acquiring) is to reduce overheads across departments and through management positions. There’s no way that they were going to acquire and retain the same number of positions, it really just doesn’t make financial sense. And while people will call them soulless (which may be true, who knows), they’re a company that’s responsible to their shareholders. So it sucks, yes and it was pretty clear that this was going to happen as soon as the acquisition was announced. Hope all the people that were impacted fall on their feet and find something else very soon.
People losing their jobs is never a good thing, hope they'll land on theri feet.I do like people saying Ybarra was "one of us" and how sad it is that hes leaving when hes been advocating people buying boosts instead of playing the game.. Cant say im too sorry to see someone like him go.How about a person in power that looks at boosting and wonders why. And yes boosting is just one of the many issues that plagues the game.
good, have y'all played a blizzard game lately? they've been sub par at best and terrible at worst for almost a decade, OW is argueably their last classic "blizard" feeling game and even that was infected with loot boxes. this actually gives me hope that these lay offs may have extracted the brain rotted devs at blizzard and now just slightly I feel a bit more hope for Metzen being able to turn the story back into what it should be. if this removed the toxic chronically online chronically political devs that is.
While the livelihood for those affected is always sad, let's not all pretend like cutting the fat is a bad thing.