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I believe you have an L take with the "Those CEOs are out of touch and don't know how specific fields work so let me tell you what they specifically should do as CEOs..."
11:53 it doesn't beg the question. Begging the question doesn't mean to pose or raise a question... It is a logical fallacy involving circular logic in which the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion without proving it.
That is what happens when you spend 20 years flogging the dog with your flagship IP, never really doing anything of value, then proceed to crater every single major IP and game that you make for the next 10 years. Even the successes are from phoenix ashes after they spent far too much time languishing with their game design, refusing to just give the players a quality, completed, Blizzard Polished game. That stopped when Activision took over. Now we are getting justice.
We've been in a crash since after the Wii 360 and PS3 era the difference is gaming is so massive now that most people aren't realizing it's happening and it's really just Atari shock all over again.
def heading for a crash , many many companies are bleeding atm , we finally got tired of it , people who don't agree are the cod kids and don't really play good games so they would never notice , also heading doesn't mean right now , we have league of legends losing players fast , wow is also , concord failed in 2 weeks , skull and bones and now star wars outlaws didn't do anything much . that's all just this year that I can think of , also cod black ops 6 isn't looking well atm I mean it will sell but I don't think it will break any records nor assasins creed as its got alot of hate too . so I do think its heading there quite fast. that's all happened in 9 months and the smaller games have destroyed AAA this year and its gaining traction and DEI is dying .
@@DoesNotInhale You realize they did that for performative activism to impress the... investors. LOL. Remember, Stay at home wives of big hedge fund investors who sit around and watch and talk about the View all day pull those purse strings as well.
The games industry killed itself. These companies forget where their real long-term profits come from, in favour of short-term shareholder cash boosts. Seemingly not realising that long-term you'll be bleeding to keep paying back parasite investors and cutting costs, delivering less to your customers to make up for it. All the big studios are in the death spiral at this point. It won't be fast, but it will be ugly.
@@TheAlison1456 gaming is better then ever what are you smoking just stop living a bubble only looking at the same kind of games, we have had crap games since the dawn of games but now nearly anyone with the desire to can make their own games and there is so many smaller studios putting out amazing games every year
@@jtowensbyiii6018 that's the entire playbook in the first place....every kenneth lay of the world saw the potential of predatory corporate practices in gaming and bought in
@@jordankelly4684 good businesses stick around to make money in the long term by offering a quality product or service and caring about their customers and employees. Businesses looking to make a quick return on investment or quarterly profit to satiate their shareholders tend to lose focus on the product or service their business offered in the first place, and in the long term, lose money.
That's literally their only function. But the problem isn't the goal of turning profit. With a publicly traded company - turning a profit is not enough, you need continued growth, and that is where the math stops mathing.
@@jordankelly4684 Sort of, but there are a lot of nuances. To stay in business it is completely and entirely unnecessary to grow profits. Staying in the black is all that's required. But that's not what is happening. The shareholders expect infintely growing profits and that is simply impossible.
In this case both the workers and figure-heads are equally worthless. It's not all the execs fault, it literally can't be. They aren't the ones in the studios or in the unions, or programming, or in the case of concord making really bland and annoying art. They're the ones checking off on it, quality control is basically on them. They are there to ensure everyone else can work, but when the actual workers aren't very good or have very conflicting visions or are more interested in soap boxes then making art, there aint much you can do there outside get rid of them.
@@Vaniity_Velvet Most of the actual work is done by a few. Most of the problems are caused by the rest who do almost none of the work. I do blame the bloat on the tolerant execs who got tricked into thinking priorities other than profits were worth wasting so much money and time on, but now that everyone's being forced to tighten their belts, and competition continues to get more and more fierce from indies, at least execs at some of the companies are starting to prioritize the right things again. People think it's a bad thing when game companies make a profit, but the fact is they can only do that if the games are worth buying. Gamers should be celebrating.
@CaptainSkuzzy nah, don’t think that is true. Wotlk was loved by most of the community I would say. Whereas Cata I felt the shift onto the other side pretty dramatically.
@@Taiwanesedave Maybe most. I'd disagree with the other guy and say no one in vanilla really hated TBC. I think people missed things about TBC, but it was the first expansion and people were still pretty happy with the game. WOTLK was a big dividing line among the vanilla vs. newer players in my personal anecdotal experience. Lots of us hated what happened to balance and PVP... but people still liked it overall. It was half and half. You could see the end coming though. It's hilarious to me when people talk about the "decline" of WoW like 10 years after WOTLK. It was back when WOTLK was coming out that Kaplan himself said they ALREADY had more former players than current players. So from Blizzard's perspective they were already at their peak then.
Nah, I've worked in games industry, big studios. Marketing and product people always make games lose their souls, I know it because I was in the concept art team, and voices from product and marketing would always be more important than the words from the ART DIRECTOR, REGARDING ART! Yes, and usually marketing and product people are the farthest people can be from gamers. Leave the people that like to play games making games.
and we all saw this coming what, 15+ years ago, when Activision acquired them. The writing was on the wall. It took a while, but here we are. Many years of Blizzard founders / big names slowly leaving the company as it was creating crap products and losing its identity. Warcraft 3 had a huge focus on custom games with a map editor. Overwatch had zero map editor, zero community servers. The company is a zombie
I haven't gave them a single cent after disaster that was Diablo 3, and Overwatch that was fun for a while but haven't made me to want to spend money on it or future titles of Blizzard.
I mean my last straw with Blizzard is when they demanded my WoW character be a war criminal to simp up to their goth-mommy warchief. Of course this was the final event in a long series of disappointments over their various games. It just so happened that being asked to play a game where I’m “only following orders” was my own bridge too far. It’s amusing that since then.. what.. 6 years ago now? They’ve only gotten worse.
Support staff exist for a reason. And they're not really optional. Or expendable. Make no mistake. The workload will not change. And other employees will need to do the work that these support staffers did.
Tell me one example at blizzard of a job well done in the past let's say ten years. you can't. Those layoffs aren't just justified, they've been overdue for years.
I quit working for ABK a few months before the merger was going to happen. Quit for a lot of reasons, the main one because I wanted to work on my own game (RoadHouse Manager) and they had a legally-suspect non-compete clause that didn't allow me to do so, but one of the other reasons was that ya, I figured they'd make many in my department redundant and possibly release me. That's part of the reason why the merger happened: it makes $ sense to reduce staff because you'll have a lot of overlap in the positions, and you basically can get one centralized person to do the job of many others that were previously spread out across different studios (for some positions, particularly infrastructure, IT and support).
I think most Triple A entertainment studios, regardless of the medium outside probably Music, is just bloated. In Video-Games specifically bloated to a cartoonish degree. There's far too many cooks and I'd imagine many are doing what is basically busy work the entire time or literally nothing and saw this coming a mile away.
@@Vaniity_Velvet in the past 30 people were working on game, you don't need 4 thousand to work on assassin creed game or diablo xd really bad management
@@kurrwa This. You literally don't need 4000 people. It's all nonsense. 30 people made some of the best games ever. At most a studio needs 100-200 people. Not thousands that they currently have. People are just mad that they're losing their free, zero effort ride.
It's more like Highlander. In the end there can be only one. The less there are, the less choice we as consumers have, and the more the remaining can charge for lesser quality goods.
Because people making decisions don't care and are actually rewarder for this exact thing. Extract value, burn to the ground buy new IP, give out bonuses. That is the CEO way.
Mass layoffs have been standard in the game industry for decades. Years ago Satoru Iwata made headlines for taking a pay cut so that staff wouldn’t get their own pay docked or fired during a slump. 99.9% of CEOs do not care in that manner.
@@zephyr8072 Satoru Iwata took a pay cut because that is the expectation in Japan. He didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart, like many people seem to think.
King made more money than Activision and Blizzard combined. Call of Duty made more money than all of Blizzard. They wanted King, Sony had a heart attack over Call of Duty. But the rest? I don't think they cared about the rest.
Some of us warned this would happen the entire time. I said it then and I'll it again: "If the question is tens of billions of dollars of industry consolidation is a good thing or a bad thing, you don't need to look at the details. It's always going to be a bad thing." The fact that people got on board with the idea shows nothing more than the fact that a lot of people who think that they're very canny are actually very susceptible to being manipulated by massive corporations.
Oh, let's be honest... Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development Team" has needed firing for at least a decade now. They kinda got what was coming to them.
This. People pretending nobody should ever get fired are the lazy people who should be fired. Most people in these tech companies produce little to no value, yet take up just as many resources (or more) then those doing the work. They deserve to be laid off.
@@FullContactCoder These sycophant types care nothing about the health of the industry as a whole. Their delusion, excuses and love of the brand trumps all.
@@XMAlekiirc, the majority of the non-mobile COD market comes from PS, so removing it from PS wouldn't be helpful to the game (although it could be an overall strategic console wars move since ~65% of PS players have played COD)
@@todesziege If it wasn’t sustainable they wouldn’t keep pushing gamepass they would just revert back to a non subscription model like Sony what I’m saying is it would have tanked by now
Gaming will be saved by the talented people who are being fired. They will create Indy companies that make all our new favorite games. Big budgets don't make great games, talented people do.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot of the people being fired never should have been working at blizzard in the first place. Have you seen the quality of their games lately
@@moonasha sure of course your correct but some people they are talented. Plus it's about more then Blizzard I'm thinking about the entire industry being taken over by smaller game makers.
Gaming will continue in the same direction it currently is. 2 years ago. How many did Microsoft have working for it? What about 5 years ago? 10? Every year we cover the same companies and scream about how they are firing so many people. If that was all they did, these companies would literally have 0 employees. But most of them, have in fact grown. Layoffs suck, but they happen. It happens in every industry. But for some reason we only make a big stink out it when the gaming industry does it. How many do you think other industries lay off? Walmart for instance? Tens of thousands yearly? And don't give me the BS its different. Many of them depend on that check just as much as a developer does.
@@Dregomz02 what's different now? Isn't there a world changing technology exploding exponentially across our planet? Oh yeah, artificial intelligence. Huh, I wonder if anyone will use AI to make incredible games that require a fraction of the resources? Gee it's almost like technology (like RUclips) comes along and suddenly nearly anyone can create content, make money and have millions of fans. A new era in entertainment is coming.
this is what happens when a company gets run by penny pinchers and spreadsheets by people that know nothing about developing or maintaining a game let alone continuity for a game as long running as wow
This is a problem in literally EVERY industry nowadays, not just gaming. They're all being run more and more by corporate-ass MBAs who have no idea what the employees in their companies do and the only thing they do is delegate their under-managers to just tell the workers to make number go up no matter how much that affects their products. Only need to look at the clown show that is Boeing as an example.
Sales do go back. It's a start. And tbh, it feels great to look at Ubisofts stock price, and see their well deserved downfall. Sad for the working people. But if you deliver nothing, nothing at all of worth, than nobody needs that corporation. Period.
Shareholders are *_never_* happy with turning a profit. They need *_infinite growth,_* or they start growing elsewhere... aka firing people, and cancelling potentially successful products.
WoW is nowhere as popular as it once was and Overwatch 2 completely pissed off its core playerbase. Kinda surprising Blizzard wasn't hit with layoffs sooner.
Wrong. WoW is MASSIVE right now between China going insane for Wrath of the Lich King, and War Within/Season of Discovery. It is making more money than ever before.
WoW is 20 years old game, people get old and younger generation prefer other games simply you never will have peak of WoW again. won't happen, now you have too many options to pick
@@Joe-ti7qd I'm pretty sure the war within does not even do the numbers of Shadowlands at launch. Wow is dying and need a coffin and a successor that can bring younger audience and bring back people that leaved. The people that leaved because of shadowlands did not come back for the war within.
I'm over gaming period. I noticed the downturn last generation and they've turned up the 💩 🚿. Shareholders and boards ruined gaming much like they ruin every other company. Retro for me.
Retro gaming is still gaming at the end of the day so your statement "I'm over gaming period." is nonsensical besides that, try out some indie or aa games, there are still so many new and fun games out there that you shouldn't write off just because aaa gaming sucks (to put it mildly)
Black Myth Wukong shocked me tbh. One of my main "takeaways" from the game was just how much of an embarrassment it is in comparison to AAA western developers products. Game Science , a completely NEW company released this title that is AT LEAST a 9.5/10 game, yet western devs repeatedly release flop after flop costing millions if not billions! No wonder the game freaked people out over here!
What's the surprise? It's a big Chinese game project based on a huge Chinese mythology story, which sold mostly to the Chinese in China and did receive some state funding for it. Just to be honest it's no 9.5 and it's more so a 7 in context. It would be like saying 300 is almost as good as the Godfather or Godfather Part 2.
I feel bad for the devs. I do not feel bad for Activision/Blizzard. The company needs to go to hell where it belongs. Been playing Blizzard games since WarCraft Orcs and Humans, and Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 were my breaking point. All done! Never again.
Blizzard devs are just as much to blame as management and execs for the state their games are in stop acting like devs are innocent rays of sunshine when in reality most shouldn't even have a job at a game developer in the first place because of how utterly unqualified, creatively bankrupt and unjustifiably narcissistic they are.
Funny how within 3 months of me sending a hot email about why I was quitting SoD and wanted a refund for TWW, they're doing exactly what I said they should do in said email lmao
"Microsoft is a giga-corp that does not care about you. Act accordingly." I did. After the Xbox 360, I dropped them and stopped supporting their bad business decisions, lack of industry knowledge, and took my money elsewhere. For anyone who hasn't yet, it's not too late. Gaming is still fun in other places.
Leneovo actually makes much better hardware then Steam and have a reasonable business model thus ensuring they don't do things at a glacial pace, but the sentiment is something I agree with. None of the consoles are worth buying anymore. Nintendo is still up in the air to me, if they keep pushing out gimped hardware that even their software wizards struggle to work with, then they'll be an out for me as well. I don't want to play a game made specifically for their hardware that runs at 720P and struggles to maintain at least 30 fps.
@@Vaniity_Velvet agreed. The dollar bills I had matched more with the steam deck :) but yeah, I was getting tired of them picking which games I can have, and also allowing games that don't work to be purchased, and not refunded if you are over your yearly limit. That was my last straw. Plus game pass changing all the time and the constant advertising was getting annoying. I like that I can play the old games I want to, and the Indies I want to.
Why is anyone at all surprised this was done? Microsoft didn't want Activision Blizzard staff. They wanted Activision Blizzard IP. Nothing more. Anyone that was even paying a fraction of attention to this acquisition knew this was coming long ago.
You've seen the slop Blizzard has put out for the last decade. Do you have any doubt that Blizzard has too many superfluous employees? MS doesn't need to micromanage the company to fix this problem. They only need to tell them that they have to become profitable.
@@devinaschenbrenner2683 It's both but for different reasons. 100% absolutely the people designing AAA games today suck at their job and deserve to be fired. Upper management is to blame for hiring people who suck at making videogames.
@@budthecyborg4575 again you do realize that Upper management has way more control over the actual design process. It's not that devs can't make good games. There are not allowed.
Take overwatch for example. Overwatch is the perfect example of a game getting ruined by a CEO who kept changing things late into development or just outbright canceling it. PVE is the victim of this and the main reason why we dint have it.
Don't know why anyone had positive expectations for MS buying Acti-Blizz. Blizzard had an executive/corporate problem ever since Activision bought them so getting assimilated into an even larger corporation was basically just doubling down. There's a long consistent track record of how these mergers play out and it doesn't go well for the smaller company.
Can the FTC just sue microsoft already since they've blatantly lied about everything they said they would do to make the merger go forward? Like "We'll never raise Xbox gamepass prices", that was another lie.
The problem is that the FTC are half the reason why this is happening. ABK nearly doubled their workforce DURING the court hearings. They hired at least 8000 people in those 18 months.
I havent played a blizzard game since quitting ow2, but hearing all of these lay off news is so depressing. Hopefully people affected by these will get better opportunity somewhere else.
Bro these are the same devs that should've never been hired in the first place. I bet you most of the layoffs are all DEI hires. These people shouldn't be allowed to serve us burgers let alone make creative decisions. Cope and seethe more
If they stay in Entertainment, most likely not. That entire field seems *WAAAAAAAY* too bloated for it to really even be lucrative right now. But, if they pivot over to factories chances are most of them would make out like bandits. I can't tell you how many times I've worked in factories and half the machines would be down because the computers were having software related issues and there was only like one or two people that actually had programming experience. That being said, chances are most of these people aren't going to do that. If that had that degree of foresight, they would have went straight to factories to begin with. Chances are most of them will either end up taking pay-cuts and jobs they are "technically" overqualified for (Careers that don't make any use of their computer sciences.) or go right back into the gamble and try to get hired on at a different huge studio.
Typical corporate America. They only care about momentary savings to look good for their investors. And layoffs is the single best way to achieve that.
@@Krytern Yeah, i was one of those. They only cared about Call Of Duty and removing it from Playstation by putting it day - X on Gamepass. They did not cared about blizzard, yes Diablo 4 was around the corner and it "could" have give them more money. It did not.
Im getting *REALLY* tired and a bit angry people keep saying "we're heading for a crash" completely ignoring the massive numbers gaming still pulls and tons of records broken this year
@@Toastcat890 but it's still selling, yeah there's failures but that's not new, there's so much games that have massive success, a crash implies EVERYTHING is failing and that's clearly not happenings, most people are finally getting tired of supporting trash
We are definitely in a downsizing consolidating era though. I do agree gaming won’t crash but companies cannot throw out turds these days and expect people to buy it. Maybe gamers are more informed these days? Still way too many preorder.
@Arcademan09 The issue isn't that the games are not selling, the issue is the way it's going no amount of game sales will be able to recoup what the C suite expects from a game. At some point the bubble that is AAA games will burst and it will cause a huge ripple effect, but as others have said the smaller indie studios that are not relying on corporate money infusions will be what keeps gaming going. But there will be plenty of medium sized studios that are only on the fringe of corporate support that will lose the entire studio.
@@Arcademan09 Short, simple sentences are easier for some people to understand. Once you introduce nuance and exceptions, stretching the topic by a few extra words, they struggle to grasp and run back to the comfort of summaries.
To be fair, gaming studios have gotten way too big. Too much bloat in certain departments, straight up useless positions is some cases, overpaid bosses, etc. There's no other way of fixing this than by laying off the bloat.
firing people to do a stock buyback and dividend increase... gotta love accounting departments. Why tf do companies care more about stock prices than their products?
Where else you going to get all their IP. They have no real competition. There plan is to buy out anyone, or poach the staff out of anyone gets close to competing in their market, and they have a cult following that will fight tooth and nail for them. So why not fire everyone and take the money, is what they say. I remind you at this point any logic has been kicked out of the room. It's all yes men now.
Because that's how capitalism works. Growth at any cost. Once you run out of room to grow, you have to start cutting corners. Once the customers get fed up and start to leave, the executives jump out with golden parachutes before the collapse and move on to the next company to repeat the process.
And remember, these aren't even high paying jobs. Entry level game dev jobs (which are the vast majority because companies do purges like this all the time) pay around $10/hr. I make almost twice that and I work in a freakin' deli.
@@BlizzardofOze QA might make minimum wage (which is $16.00/hr in California) but no dev is making that little at a corporate giant. If they were this wouldnt even be bad news because they'd be getting a massive pay rise by going to mcdonalds
_"We get rid of employees to make sure we can grow."_ So growth doesn't mean more people make more products/services for more profits, but less people have to do more work for more products/profits. Or it _looks_ like growth if people are rehired for less wage.
I honestly believe investors have become the cancer of the current gaming industry When it all comes to firing people constantly, its always connected to Investors What would bring the next Game Industry Crash will be mostly Investors fault due to them making it common to fire tons of people rather than giving a reason to keep those employees and get more people to do good content
Research the following: Yuri Bezmenov, Four Steps for Ideological Subversion Hegelian Dialectic (Problem, Reaction, Solution) Reverse Psychology US Public Law One Zero Two dash One Four The Seven Laws of Noah Project 2025 A very abbreviated summary: Most of these Corporations are promoting "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" while cutting staff and overcharging for their products. This creates social division and economic stability, a problem in need of a solution. The Liberals in charge of these corporations will be removed by Conservatives after a revolutionary change of power, using the Seven Laws of Noah as guidelines by which they will "drain the swamp" and make drastic changes to corporations/industry to bring social and economic justice to the people affected by Liberal policies and practices.
If you didn’t know this was coming you don’t know or watch business. There was always going to be cut staff and lay offs. First you have cooling industry , eliminating redundancy and streamlining. It’s not cool for the employees but no one is promised life let alone a job to last forever. It sucks jt happens to us all but it does. No rage bait here , just corporations doing what they do.
They used to be illegal, along with market speculators. You can thank deregulation and getting rid of red tape as politicians like to say in the name of "helping companies grow"
@@sarahorton9223and everybody forgets most of that red tape was put in place to stop another great depression from happening. When most the people who lived through that died off they forgot how bad it was and the regulations started disappearing.
Artificial Intelligence + talented people + demand = old gaming dead. Bloated, slow and boring mega corporations will be flooded with the competitors they fired who are now making great games on tiny budgets and eating their lunch. Its coming.
@mitchelcline9759 I firmly believe that it's a good opportunity to cut down on games and look at them as what they were intended to be: a break from time to time, not a way of life.
The problem is Business Schools are teaching people how to run a corporation into the ground, by only focusing on CEO and Shareholder pay and Stock Buybacks. They used to teach about Profit Margins, Losses, Expenses and everything else, but now all they're hyperfocused on, is "How much money can we get our shareholders and how much of our stock can we buy back"?
Overwatch 1 was already a decaying shell of it's former glory by the time they shut it down. They'd need to rewind the game aaaall the way back to it's golden years: 2016-17, before the devs went full "fun police" on players and ruined the game with a combination of power-creep & horribly unfun hero reworks. And even _then,_ they'd STILL need to roll out remedial balance patches due to some of the OG heroes having hella overtuned numbers. Most of Overwatch 1's powercreep can actually be traced back to the devs flat-out refusing to bite the bullet and directly nerf overtuned heroes... they instead balanced the entire game _around_ those outliers; & raised everyone _else's_ numbers to match.
One thing to note. Although the PR for the increase in dividends and stock buybacks is it benefits shareholders. But it’s mainly to benefit executives. Look at MSFT stock price, there’s no reason for a stock buyback or increase dividends. It not like the price tanked. Executive are primarily compensated by stock. Increasing the stock price and dividends is an avenue to easily take money out of the company and into their pockets.
Just the way it is, they all want the same profits and profit increases but wars, refugees, lay outs all over (not just gaming industry), everything more expensive after covid, like 30% and it keeps on going. More unemployed but they still want their profits. They increase prices to 70 dollars soon 80, and lay outs even more. AI support bots because you are secondary = money is primary. WW3 and it will be better. I once thought it would be possible to stop this, if we started taking care of the people and decrease gaps but I think that train has passed. Better just await WW3.
I think the game industry would be in a better place if publishers could not own studios and the studios where broken up to be smaller. Stock buybacks should also go back to being illegal.
@@louiepikmin3184LOL no. Talent doesn't work at Blizzard. If you have serious skill, would you settle for slave labor/wages and abuse?! Only thing left at Blizzard is just trash.
Lets imagine an scenario where a company lays off staff because they are passionless and the costumers complained of their products. How would that scenario be perceived by the general public?
Its only going to get worse. I feel bad for the people, losing your job is a terrible feeling and a devastating thing to deal with. But at the same time, look at what your companies are putting out, charging, and how they have been treating their long term fan / supporter base.
I just cancelled my subscription and uninstalled wow a couple of days ago. It isn't the same game anymore. The player base is different now too then when I started playing during Burning Crusade. It's time to move on to newer games.
So as a business, their (Blizzard, Xbox, etc. ) job is not to employ people, it’s to employ enough people to do the job. I work in the automotive industry and this also holds true. Layoff’s happen all the time and no one cares when it comes to that but by god mess with someone’s idea of games and how money should be distributed and man….blizz and Microsoft is evil. Seriously, this is ho business is handled. Stop being Divas all the time, seriously Mr drama queen, they’re fine.
If you didnt see this coming to Blizzard-Activism i dont know what to tell you, but once you're done shedding crocodile tears for people you dont know or care about youll realize their games are still terrible, before or after layoffs. Stop acting like anyone with braincells gives a rip.
when they are obviously not giving a shit about money but pushing politics. It doesn't take a master mind to do market research on the gaming industry. They ignored the market research to push an agenda.
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 hmm, seems you don't see the OP as flame bait? But I do, ignoring that while it might be a symptom of shit creatives. The CEO's are actively greenlighting terrible art and expecting it to sell. The first lesson in any art, if figure out who your audience is. And if that is female girls, that are activists. the games will primarily only attract those people. We are in an age where past products are still fun, and we WILL play the old shit, before buying new shit. If their goal is to ya' know, sell the game, they need to sell it to a good potential audience. You can't create art for yourself and expect it to sell, or art for your own group of company.
@@TheGoreforceoh yea definitely an issue with “politics”. If you ignore the games that have the same “politics” and are massively successful. People don’t buy new stuff? According to you?
Rumble was a ton of fun; I played it a lot. What was the deal breaker for me and I haven't come back was the uncapped PvP. Once you hit 3,000 points on a hero they entered the "uncapped" level. Where your unit levels are based on your actual levels instead of being hard locked at 5 and 3 like previous. In short, once you hit that level you're not facing off against other players and their strategies; you're facing off against other players and their wallet.
@@ragnajonsdotter8333 it’s not their fault. If your boss came to you and said “make me a game that can make loads of money” and you are a company who knows nothing about live service games. The result is a bad game.
I can stand behind demonizing suits but at some point we have to talk about how incompetent key game devs can be. They should never had to hire a gargantuan amount of staff in the first place, such an unnecessary bloat. Upper management should have learn at this point that relatively medium sized studios with a clear and realistic goal were the winners of 2024 so far.
The fact it took D4 to show anyone anything is sad by its self. Writing has been plastered on every wall since WoW was released. WoW was the beginning of the end.
@@TheGoreforce It took 4 seasons to get Diablo 4 in a spot that was fun to play. The campaign was lackluster, nothing stood out on it, their seasonal play was mid until Season 4. They need to stop the "no fun allowed" when someone finds builds and ways to boost their build. It's strictly a PvE game and the amount of nerfing is downright ridiculous on things. Let people enjoy the game without ruining whole classes.
Buying assets to strip out the most profitable bits, cost cut by firing all the support talent, and leave the rest to die… sounds about right for modern post GE & Boeing business management.
Pretty much everyone acknowledges the gaming industry (especially AAA) is bloated. That means people logically need to lose their jobs to re-size. I honestly miss when the industry was half the size, stigmatized by normies, and a niche hobby.
This reminds me I experienced something for the first time in years the other week. Someone said to me the classic "aren't you too old to play games?". I had forgotten how gaming used to be stigmatised.
![Kodak Black - Catch Fire [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A4ch-olIuZo/mqdefault.jpg)
![ATEEZ(에이티즈) - [GOLDEN HOUR : Part.2] Preview](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/X4PfgRPBUVo/mqdefault.jpg)
► Enjoy games, without the bs: bellular.games
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I was finally able to get The Pale Beyond! Can't wait to dig into it this weekend. :D
I believe you have an L take with the
"Those CEOs are out of touch and don't know how specific fields work so let me tell you what they specifically should do as CEOs..."
11:53 it doesn't beg the question. Begging the question doesn't mean to pose or raise a question... It is a logical fallacy involving circular logic in which the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion without proving it.
That is what happens when you spend 20 years flogging the dog with your flagship IP, never really doing anything of value, then proceed to crater every single major IP and game that you make for the next 10 years.
Even the successes are from phoenix ashes after they spent far too much time languishing with their game design, refusing to just give the players a quality, completed, Blizzard Polished game.
That stopped when Activision took over. Now we are getting justice.
Women, lay off calories. Men, get gains. That is all
It's why AAA gaming is heading for a sorely needed crash, no passion just profit.
Nah, it's too diversified to crash big
We've been in a crash since after the Wii 360 and PS3 era the difference is gaming is so massive now that most people aren't realizing it's happening and it's really just Atari shock all over again.
@game-sheriff No the crash isn't happening. Not sure what gives you that idea.
@@Krytern The voices in bro's head
def heading for a crash , many many companies are bleeding atm , we finally got tired of it , people who don't agree are the cod kids and don't really play good games so they would never notice , also heading doesn't mean right now , we have league of legends losing players fast , wow is also , concord failed in 2 weeks , skull and bones and now star wars outlaws didn't do anything much . that's all just this year that I can think of , also cod black ops 6 isn't looking well atm I mean it will sell but I don't think it will break any records nor assasins creed as its got alot of hate too . so I do think its heading there quite fast. that's all happened in 9 months and the smaller games have destroyed AAA this year and its gaining traction and DEI is dying .
Shareholders ruin gaming.
Shareholders ruin every industry. Just look at the current state of Boeing.
Blizzard ruined gaming.
wym? Everything is run by shareholders, you signed up for this when you accepted Neoliberal Capitalism
DEI hires ruined gaming far worse than all the corporate intrigue ever did
@@DoesNotInhale You realize they did that for performative activism to impress the... investors. LOL. Remember, Stay at home wives of big hedge fund investors who sit around and watch and talk about the View all day pull those purse strings as well.
The games industry killed itself. These companies forget where their real long-term profits come from, in favour of short-term shareholder cash boosts. Seemingly not realising that long-term you'll be bleeding to keep paying back parasite investors and cutting costs, delivering less to your customers to make up for it. All the big studios are in the death spiral at this point.
It won't be fast, but it will be ugly.
Going Public Trade is entering a Death Spiral very few actually benefit from it.
@@Blisterdude123 doesn't matter if you're rich and jump ship, fuck over the poor then leave the shit for those who are left is their strategy
It's over!! Gaming is in shambles!
@@TheAlison1456 gaming is better then ever what are you smoking just stop living a bubble only looking at the same kind of games, we have had crap games since the dawn of games but now nearly anyone with the desire to can make their own games and there is so many smaller studios putting out amazing games every year
@@jtowensbyiii6018 that's the entire playbook in the first place....every kenneth lay of the world saw the potential of predatory corporate practices in gaming and bought in
99% of corporations don't care about anything but turning profits.
@@medio7570 the shareholders are boomers that think this stuff is actually customer sentiment when it isn’t.
@@Hoigwai that is how businesses stay... in business, by making money.
@@jordankelly4684 good businesses stick around to make money in the long term by offering a quality product or service and caring about their customers and employees. Businesses looking to make a quick return on investment or quarterly profit to satiate their shareholders tend to lose focus on the product or service their business offered in the first place, and in the long term, lose money.
That's literally their only function. But the problem isn't the goal of turning profit. With a publicly traded company - turning a profit is not enough, you need continued growth, and that is where the math stops mathing.
@@jordankelly4684 Sort of, but there are a lot of nuances. To stay in business it is completely and entirely unnecessary to grow profits. Staying in the black is all that's required.
But that's not what is happening. The shareholders expect infintely growing profits and that is simply impossible.
A huge corporation obfuscating the truth and prioritizing profits for shareholders? I'm shocked! SHOCKED! 🙄
You know you can (and likely are if you have a retirement account) be a shareholder too 🙄 Shocking, I know.
@@sam805236 you know exactly what they're saying, quit being a tool.
@@nebula0024 *surprise Pikachu face*
i mean... that's the corporation's job. To make money. What did you expect?
@@moonasha and it's the consumers job to hold them to a standard, otherwise you just get shit.
All my homies hate AAA studios.
all my homies love them. time to find new homies
Real homies don't let homies play AAA.
All my homies play indie games 99% of the time.
AAA?
I thought it was AAAA now
@libervitaexaltis4551 nah its just "AaaaaAaAaagh!" These days. The sound you make when they announce a new game
These gaming companies nowadays are too top-heavy financially but keep axing too many of the actual workers & not the figure-heads enough.
In this case both the workers and figure-heads are equally worthless. It's not all the execs fault, it literally can't be. They aren't the ones in the studios or in the unions, or programming, or in the case of concord making really bland and annoying art. They're the ones checking off on it, quality control is basically on them. They are there to ensure everyone else can work, but when the actual workers aren't very good or have very conflicting visions or are more interested in soap boxes then making art, there aint much you can do there outside get rid of them.
@@Vaniity_Velvet how does the boot taste?
@@Vaniity_Velvet Most of the actual work is done by a few. Most of the problems are caused by the rest who do almost none of the work. I do blame the bloat on the tolerant execs who got tricked into thinking priorities other than profits were worth wasting so much money and time on, but now that everyone's being forced to tighten their belts, and competition continues to get more and more fierce from indies, at least execs at some of the companies are starting to prioritize the right things again. People think it's a bad thing when game companies make a profit, but the fact is they can only do that if the games are worth buying. Gamers should be celebrating.
Blizzard died long ago.
@@JoeMama-xu8fs Yeah, so who knows, sometimes smaller is better for creativity
What was last universally loved WoW expansion? Wrath Of The Lich King? Probably right after that one.
@@TheCouchCommandonah, wotlk is overrated.
@CaptainSkuzzy nah, don’t think that is true. Wotlk was loved by most of the community I would say. Whereas Cata I felt the shift onto the other side pretty dramatically.
@@Taiwanesedave Maybe most. I'd disagree with the other guy and say no one in vanilla really hated TBC. I think people missed things about TBC, but it was the first expansion and people were still pretty happy with the game. WOTLK was a big dividing line among the vanilla vs. newer players in my personal anecdotal experience. Lots of us hated what happened to balance and PVP... but people still liked it overall. It was half and half. You could see the end coming though. It's hilarious to me when people talk about the "decline" of WoW like 10 years after WOTLK. It was back when WOTLK was coming out that Kaplan himself said they ALREADY had more former players than current players. So from Blizzard's perspective they were already at their peak then.
Nah, I've worked in games industry, big studios. Marketing and product people always make games lose their souls, I know it because I was in the concept art team, and voices from product and marketing would always be more important than the words from the ART DIRECTOR, REGARDING ART!
Yes, and usually marketing and product people are the farthest people can be from gamers. Leave the people that like to play games making games.
Amin brother
Corpos should be scared away and banned forever from the gaming industry. But the ones that are true gamers (which is merely 10% of them).
Yep, can vouch for this from China as well.
Entire reason why I’ve gone indie, but that’s not an option for all developers and a substantial gamble.
Im over Blizzard. It’s not the Blizzard it once was.
it hasn't been the same blizzard for over a decade, high time for people to finally figure out
It’s just a for profit company. Why you glazing
Blizzard been over since Activision bought them
Hasn't been since the decision to turn warcraft into an MMO
Only just now?
Blizzard has been gone for years, they just took the remaining husk out back behind the shed. Good riddance.
and we all saw this coming what, 15+ years ago, when Activision acquired them. The writing was on the wall. It took a while, but here we are. Many years of Blizzard founders / big names slowly leaving the company as it was creating crap products and losing its identity. Warcraft 3 had a huge focus on custom games with a map editor. Overwatch had zero map editor, zero community servers. The company is a zombie
I haven't gave them a single cent after disaster that was Diablo 3, and Overwatch that was fun for a while but haven't made me to want to spend money on it or future titles of Blizzard.
@@doltBmB true. It's ActiBlizz
Frfr. As if blizzard is currently anything to care for
I mean my last straw with Blizzard is when they demanded my WoW character be a war criminal to simp up to their goth-mommy warchief.
Of course this was the final event in a long series of disappointments over their various games. It just so happened that being asked to play a game where I’m “only following orders” was my own bridge too far.
It’s amusing that since then.. what.. 6 years ago now? They’ve only gotten worse.
Stock buybacks used to be considered stock manipulation and illegal for a reason.
Good ol' Reagan
“AAA” gaming. The imaginary standard that amounted to greed and destruction of the industry.
Support staff exist for a reason.
And they're not really optional. Or expendable.
Make no mistake. The workload will not change. And other employees will need to do the work that these support staffers did.
Tell me one example at blizzard of a job well done in the past let's say ten years.
you
can't.
Those layoffs aren't just justified, they've been overdue for years.
@@BigPeeve2 Spoken like someone who actually played wow for more than 2 months lol
@BigPeeve2 idk, legion and tww are pretty cool
@@BigPeeve2 You're just yapping.
I quit working for ABK a few months before the merger was going to happen. Quit for a lot of reasons, the main one because I wanted to work on my own game (RoadHouse Manager) and they had a legally-suspect non-compete clause that didn't allow me to do so, but one of the other reasons was that ya, I figured they'd make many in my department redundant and possibly release me. That's part of the reason why the merger happened: it makes $ sense to reduce staff because you'll have a lot of overlap in the positions, and you basically can get one centralized person to do the job of many others that were previously spread out across different studios (for some positions, particularly infrastructure, IT and support).
I think most Triple A entertainment studios, regardless of the medium outside probably Music, is just bloated. In Video-Games specifically bloated to a cartoonish degree. There's far too many cooks and I'd imagine many are doing what is basically busy work the entire time or literally nothing and saw this coming a mile away.
@@Vaniity_Velvet in the past 30 people were working on game, you don't need 4 thousand to work on assassin creed game or diablo xd really bad management
@@kurrwa This. You literally don't need 4000 people. It's all nonsense. 30 people made some of the best games ever. At most a studio needs 100-200 people. Not thousands that they currently have. People are just mad that they're losing their free, zero effort ride.
90% of the games i buy are indie or AA. Let the market sort this out.
These companies are eating themselves from the inside out, slowly cutting their own throats in the process.
It's more like Highlander. In the end there can be only one. The less there are, the less choice we as consumers have, and the more the remaining can charge for lesser quality goods.
its by design.
Because people making decisions don't care and are actually rewarder for this exact thing. Extract value, burn to the ground buy new IP, give out bonuses. That is the CEO way.
Mass layoffs have been standard in the game industry for decades.
Years ago Satoru Iwata made headlines for taking a pay cut so that staff wouldn’t get their own pay docked or fired during a slump.
99.9% of CEOs do not care in that manner.
@@zephyr8072 Satoru Iwata took a pay cut because that is the expectation in Japan. He didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart, like many people seem to think.
King made more money than Activision and Blizzard combined. Call of Duty made more money than all of Blizzard. They wanted King, Sony had a heart attack over Call of Duty. But the rest? I don't think they cared about the rest.
Remember when people thought them buying Activision Blizzard would be a good thing? Well... here we go.
Some people will still think this is a good thing because they hate A.B.K.
I mean, at the end it changes nothing, activlizzard and Bobby was doing this anyways
@@SamuraiMotoko We never left Bobby's World, it was all part of Bobby's Plan.
Some of us warned this would happen the entire time. I said it then and I'll it again: "If the question is tens of billions of dollars of industry consolidation is a good thing or a bad thing, you don't need to look at the details. It's always going to be a bad thing." The fact that people got on board with the idea shows nothing more than the fact that a lot of people who think that they're very canny are actually very susceptible to being manipulated by massive corporations.
As someone who thought this would be good, I'm still eating my words after what happened to Tango and Arkane Austin back in May.
Oh, let's be honest... Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development Team" has needed firing for at least a decade now. They kinda got what was coming to them.
This. People pretending nobody should ever get fired are the lazy people who should be fired. Most people in these tech companies produce little to no value, yet take up just as many resources (or more) then those doing the work. They deserve to be laid off.
100% agreed tbh I feel like Blizz has been overdue for a mass cleanout for years now
Microsoft really only bought the IP. They don't need duplicate staff, so there would be no need to keep most of the ABK staff
Yep - they clearly have enough developers - hence their never ending release of new titles. :-/
@@FullContactCoder These sycophant types care nothing about the health of the industry as a whole. Their delusion, excuses and love of the brand trumps all.
Mikro$oft only bought Call Of Duty so they could remove it from playstation. They didn't care about Blizzard.
@@XMAlek I believe in order to get approval for the merger they had to agree to keep Call of Duty multi platform for 10 years.
@@XMAlekiirc, the majority of the non-mobile COD market comes from PS, so removing it from PS wouldn't be helpful to the game (although it could be an overall strategic console wars move since ~65% of PS players have played COD)
“The best deal in gaming”, Gamepass must be failing.
I love gamepass saves me so much money
@@flipyapd2321 That doesn't mean it's a sustainable business --- might even make it the opposite.
@@todesziege If it wasn’t sustainable they wouldn’t keep pushing gamepass they would just revert back to a non subscription model like Sony what I’m saying is it would have tanked by now
It was never making profit they need to spend too much on licenses.
@@Dregomz02 Looks like they are making profit otherwise they wouldn’t do it Sony Pony
Gaming will be saved by the talented people who are being fired. They will create Indy companies that make all our new favorite games. Big budgets don't make great games, talented people do.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot of the people being fired never should have been working at blizzard in the first place. Have you seen the quality of their games lately
@@moonasha sure of course your correct but some people they are talented. Plus it's about more then Blizzard I'm thinking about the entire industry being taken over by smaller game makers.
Just like hundreds of vet devs that got kicked out by investors and DEI and haven't made anything good or new in past 5-10 years? Yeah sure...
Gaming will continue in the same direction it currently is. 2 years ago. How many did Microsoft have working for it? What about 5 years ago? 10? Every year we cover the same companies and scream about how they are firing so many people. If that was all they did, these companies would literally have 0 employees. But most of them, have in fact grown.
Layoffs suck, but they happen. It happens in every industry. But for some reason we only make a big stink out it when the gaming industry does it. How many do you think other industries lay off? Walmart for instance? Tens of thousands yearly? And don't give me the BS its different. Many of them depend on that check just as much as a developer does.
@@Dregomz02 what's different now? Isn't there a world changing technology exploding exponentially across our planet? Oh yeah, artificial intelligence. Huh, I wonder if anyone will use AI to make incredible games that require a fraction of the resources? Gee it's almost like technology (like RUclips) comes along and suddenly nearly anyone can create content, make money and have millions of fans. A new era in entertainment is coming.
This is the same crap that Boeing was doing with stock buyback... they lowered the quality but maintained their value of their stock.
this is what happens when a company gets run by penny pinchers and spreadsheets by people that know nothing about developing or maintaining a game let alone continuity for a game as long running as wow
This is a problem in literally EVERY industry nowadays, not just gaming. They're all being run more and more by corporate-ass MBAs who have no idea what the employees in their companies do and the only thing they do is delegate their under-managers to just tell the workers to make number go up no matter how much that affects their products. Only need to look at the clown show that is Boeing as an example.
The games industry, like most industries these days, don't make products they make profits for shareholders.
If you really think this is a problem, just stop buying games made by corporate studios.
Sales do go back. It's a start.
And tbh, it feels great to look at Ubisofts stock price, and see their well deserved downfall.
Sad for the working people. But if you deliver nothing, nothing at all of worth, than nobody needs that corporation. Period.
@@Thundawich Hey good idea. Now point me to a competitive fps game made by indie devs that's able to maintain a consistent player base
@@ForGnargnia Or you could just not play those sorts of games for a while.
Phil Spencer transforming into Bobby Kotick more every day. He's even starting to look like him
No Bobby was just slowly morphing into his natural goblin form. So is Phil.
If something is anti-consumer, it's anti-business. When will they realize this?
Shareholders are *_never_* happy with turning a profit. They need *_infinite growth,_* or they start growing elsewhere... aka firing people, and cancelling potentially successful products.
And not just infinite growth and profit. ALL of the profit and ALL of the infinite growth! Immediately! And then again! And then again again! FOREVER!
AAA side of the gaming industry is a clown show.
In all fairness, Blizzard cut itself before Microsoft did
As someone who’s been on the receiving end of recent AB BS i can easily say no matter how many ppl they laid off, it’s not enough
WoW is nowhere as popular as it once was and Overwatch 2 completely pissed off its core playerbase.
Kinda surprising Blizzard wasn't hit with layoffs sooner.
Wrong. WoW is MASSIVE right now between China going insane for Wrath of the Lich King, and War Within/Season of Discovery. It is making more money than ever before.
@@FAMIBtww fading fast tbh
@@FAMIB Wow china got shut down years ago. There is no chinese money anymore.
WoW is 20 years old game, people get old and younger generation prefer other games simply you never will have peak of WoW again. won't happen, now you have too many options to pick
@@Joe-ti7qd I'm pretty sure the war within does not even do the numbers of Shadowlands at launch.
Wow is dying and need a coffin and a successor that can bring younger audience and bring back people that leaved.
The people that leaved because of shadowlands did not come back for the war within.
13 minute video and no mention that ABK hired over 8000 people during 18 month purchase process.
I'm over gaming period. I noticed the downturn last generation and they've turned up the 💩 🚿. Shareholders and boards ruined gaming much like they ruin every other company. Retro for me.
Retro gaming is still gaming at the end of the day
so your statement "I'm over gaming period." is nonsensical
besides that, try out some indie or aa games, there are still so many new and fun games out there that you shouldn't write off just because aaa gaming sucks (to put it mildly)
Still a lot of good games coming out even in the AAA space, people like you are way too dramatic
Black Myth Wukong shocked me tbh. One of my main "takeaways" from the game was just how much of an embarrassment it is in comparison to AAA western developers products.
Game Science , a completely NEW company released this title that is AT LEAST a 9.5/10 game, yet western devs repeatedly release flop after flop costing millions if not billions!
No wonder the game freaked people out over here!
2023 was just filled with multiple goty contenders, chill with the hyperbole 😭
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 like?
What's the surprise? It's a big Chinese game project based on a huge Chinese mythology story, which sold mostly to the Chinese in China and did receive some state funding for it. Just to be honest it's no 9.5 and it's more so a 7 in context. It would be like saying 300 is almost as good as the Godfather or Godfather Part 2.
Oh another “western dev bad, eastern dev good” post.
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 Lmao 200IQ comment bro, every year is filled with "goty contenders" literally by definition lol.
I feel bad for the devs. I do not feel bad for Activision/Blizzard. The company needs to go to hell where it belongs. Been playing Blizzard games since WarCraft Orcs and Humans, and Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 were my breaking point. All done! Never again.
Don't feel bad for the devs either. Wish more were fired, getting real tired of californians making games
Blizzard devs are just as much to blame as management and execs for the state their games are in
stop acting like devs are innocent rays of sunshine when in reality most shouldn't even have a job at a game developer in the first place because of how utterly unqualified, creatively bankrupt and unjustifiably narcissistic they are.
Funny how within 3 months of me sending a hot email about why I was quitting SoD and wanted a refund for TWW, they're doing exactly what I said they should do in said email lmao
Bigger profits, shittier games. More reason to play indies.
2:29 in other words: The purpose of a system is what it does
"Microsoft is a giga-corp that does not care about you. Act accordingly."
I did. After the Xbox 360, I dropped them and stopped supporting their bad business decisions, lack of industry knowledge, and took my money elsewhere. For anyone who hasn't yet, it's not too late. Gaming is still fun in other places.
360 was my last console (other than the Switch, eventually), and I've never felt better!
Thanks for the update. Sending hugs to everyone at Blizz who is not there. Hoping something better is around the corner.
Steam deck got me away from Xbox!
After the steam deck two is released the only consoles I will be buying are from Nintendo.
congratulations on the escape and newfound freedom. gj
Can't wait to get one and leave all this modern gaming crap behind
Leneovo actually makes much better hardware then Steam and have a reasonable business model thus ensuring they don't do things at a glacial pace, but the sentiment is something I agree with. None of the consoles are worth buying anymore. Nintendo is still up in the air to me, if they keep pushing out gimped hardware that even their software wizards struggle to work with, then they'll be an out for me as well. I don't want to play a game made specifically for their hardware that runs at 720P and struggles to maintain at least 30 fps.
@@Vaniity_Velvet agreed. The dollar bills I had matched more with the steam deck :) but yeah, I was getting tired of them picking which games I can have, and also allowing games that don't work to be purchased, and not refunded if you are over your yearly limit. That was my last straw. Plus game pass changing all the time and the constant advertising was getting annoying.
I like that I can play the old games I want to, and the Indies I want to.
When the corporation is too large for the higher ups to understand what it’s like for the people down the ladder, they are doomed to collapse.
Why is anyone at all surprised this was done? Microsoft didn't want Activision Blizzard staff. They wanted Activision Blizzard IP. Nothing more. Anyone that was even paying a fraction of attention to this acquisition knew this was coming long ago.
You've seen the slop Blizzard has put out for the last decade. Do you have any doubt that Blizzard has too many superfluous employees? MS doesn't need to micromanage the company to fix this problem. They only need to tell them that they have to become profitable.
The smart thing for Phil to do would have been to fire 100% of Blizzard.
High Management, not the devs. All of Blizzards issues come from the top. Devs only do what they are told to do.
@@devinaschenbrenner2683but Microsoft doesn’t need them, they just want the IP they don’t need another shell studio.
@@devinaschenbrenner2683 It's both but for different reasons.
100% absolutely the people designing AAA games today suck at their job and deserve to be fired.
Upper management is to blame for hiring people who suck at making videogames.
@@budthecyborg4575 again you do realize that Upper management has way more control over the actual design process. It's not that devs can't make good games. There are not allowed.
Take overwatch for example. Overwatch is the perfect example of a game getting ruined by a CEO who kept changing things late into development or just outbright canceling it. PVE is the victim of this and the main reason why we dint have it.
When the business you work for is a corporation, every job there is a 'corporate job'. FFS I despise corporate speak.
Don't know why anyone had positive expectations for MS buying Acti-Blizz. Blizzard had an executive/corporate problem ever since Activision bought them so getting assimilated into an even larger corporation was basically just doubling down. There's a long consistent track record of how these mergers play out and it doesn't go well for the smaller company.
Can the FTC just sue microsoft already since they've blatantly lied about everything they said they would do to make the merger go forward? Like "We'll never raise Xbox gamepass prices", that was another lie.
$14.99>$15.99>$16.99... Now $19.99/month.
Still no "family plan" available and the EU "family plan" beta has been discontinued.
This is why they outright lied, because they get away with it. No one is going to follow them up on it.
Buy your gamepass on sites like cdkeys, 3 months for 32$
The problem is that the FTC are half the reason why this is happening. ABK nearly doubled their workforce DURING the court hearings. They hired at least 8000 people in those 18 months.
Honestly, I couldn't care less. They no longer were the talented people able to make great games worth remembering.
Based and true.
I havent played a blizzard game since quitting ow2, but hearing all of these lay off news is so depressing. Hopefully people affected by these will get better opportunity somewhere else.
Bro these are the same devs that should've never been hired in the first place. I bet you most of the layoffs are all DEI hires. These people shouldn't be allowed to serve us burgers let alone make creative decisions. Cope and seethe more
@DoesNotInhale what a bizzare response 😂 are the DEI hires eating the dogs?
@@DoesNotInhaleYou seem more worried for the "dei ppl" than for the ppl who are psychos in there
@@DoesNotInhaleYou need to get off of the internet for a while.
If they stay in Entertainment, most likely not. That entire field seems *WAAAAAAAY* too bloated for it to really even be lucrative right now. But, if they pivot over to factories chances are most of them would make out like bandits. I can't tell you how many times I've worked in factories and half the machines would be down because the computers were having software related issues and there was only like one or two people that actually had programming experience. That being said, chances are most of these people aren't going to do that. If that had that degree of foresight, they would have went straight to factories to begin with. Chances are most of them will either end up taking pay-cuts and jobs they are "technically" overqualified for (Careers that don't make any use of their computer sciences.) or go right back into the gamble and try to get hired on at a different huge studio.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Rip, JEJ. You were one of the greats.
Typical corporate America. They only care about momentary savings to look good for their investors. And layoffs is the single best way to achieve that.
People warning against Microsoft buying Activision/Blizzard were right.
Hardly they were protesting for selfish and idiotic reasons.
And this shit infects ALL usa company, including Sony USA, roblox, EA, and all
@@JinkypigsHardly? What they warned would happen is exactly what's happening.
@@Krytern Yeah, i was one of those. They only cared about Call Of Duty and removing it from Playstation by putting it day - X on Gamepass.
They did not cared about blizzard, yes Diablo 4 was around the corner and it "could" have give them more money. It did not.
@@Jinkypigs "big bad sony fanboys could not handle losing to the underdog Xbox so they were protesting" ok, buddy!
Im getting *REALLY* tired and a bit angry people keep saying "we're heading for a crash" completely ignoring the massive numbers gaming still pulls and tons of records broken this year
AAA gaming will have a crash indie and mobile will be fine.
@@Toastcat890 but it's still selling, yeah there's failures but that's not new, there's so much games that have massive success, a crash implies EVERYTHING is failing and that's clearly not happenings, most people are finally getting tired of supporting trash
We are definitely in a downsizing consolidating era though. I do agree gaming won’t crash but companies cannot throw out turds these days and expect people to buy it. Maybe gamers are more informed these days? Still way too many preorder.
@Arcademan09 The issue isn't that the games are not selling, the issue is the way it's going no amount of game sales will be able to recoup what the C suite expects from a game. At some point the bubble that is AAA games will burst and it will cause a huge ripple effect, but as others have said the smaller indie studios that are not relying on corporate money infusions will be what keeps gaming going. But there will be plenty of medium sized studios that are only on the fringe of corporate support that will lose the entire studio.
@@Arcademan09 Short, simple sentences are easier for some people to understand. Once you introduce nuance and exceptions, stretching the topic by a few extra words, they struggle to grasp and run back to the comfort of summaries.
*Sees title* Oh God, what is it NOW
What an amazing summary and presentation of the situation .
To be fair, gaming studios have gotten way too big. Too much bloat in certain departments, straight up useless positions is some cases, overpaid bosses, etc.
There's no other way of fixing this than by laying off the bloat.
@@Kratos263 They aren't laying off the bloat. The bloat is what lays off everyone else.
Then doing a stock buyback and increasing share holder dividends by 10%, sure buddy they were hurting.
I would have felt bad for the old blizzard but pretty hard to feel anything for current day blizz
I feel sorry for the people laid off but AAA Gaming has gotten so big that it’s starting to cannibalizing itself to survive.
My friend works at blizzard and has been lucky to avoid getting laid off. It feels like it’s only a matter of time though with how things are going
It is astoundingly difficult to produce good entertainment at a publicly traded company.
firing people to do a stock buyback and dividend increase... gotta love accounting departments. Why tf do companies care more about stock prices than their products?
Where else you going to get all their IP. They have no real competition. There plan is to buy out anyone, or poach the staff out of anyone gets close to competing in their market, and they have a cult following that will fight tooth and nail for them. So why not fire everyone and take the money, is what they say. I remind you at this point any logic has been kicked out of the room. It's all yes men now.
It's simple really, exec & board compensation is usually heavily weighted in favor of stock options.
Because that's how capitalism works. Growth at any cost. Once you run out of room to grow, you have to start cutting corners. Once the customers get fed up and start to leave, the executives jump out with golden parachutes before the collapse and move on to the next company to repeat the process.
because stock keeps the product on the shelves
2550 jobs in the gaming industry that no longer exist... Fuck me...
Exec suites are such scum.
@@hawkshot867 bloat
And remember, these aren't even high paying jobs. Entry level game dev jobs (which are the vast majority because companies do purges like this all the time) pay around $10/hr. I make almost twice that and I work in a freakin' deli.
@@BlizzardofOze QA might make minimum wage (which is $16.00/hr in California) but no dev is making that little at a corporate giant. If they were this wouldnt even be bad news because they'd be getting a massive pay rise by going to mcdonalds
do you want to support game development with taxes? lol
get real
@@leoSaundersThe fuck are you talking about?
I'll never understand why companies think QA can be removed and not have a huge negative impact on the games.
Phil Spencer is a weasel, he talks a good game but he's absolutely destroyed the Xbox brand.
lol. sony fanboy much?
@@truth_hearts_1940 People who use the word fanboy usually lack self awareness, case in point.
_"We get rid of employees to make sure we can grow."_ So growth doesn't mean more people make more products/services for more profits, but less people have to do more work for more products/profits. Or it _looks_ like growth if people are rehired for less wage.
I honestly believe investors have become the cancer of the current gaming industry
When it all comes to firing people constantly, its always connected to Investors
What would bring the next Game Industry Crash will be mostly Investors fault due to them making it common to fire tons of people rather than giving a reason to keep those employees and get more people to do good content
Research the following:
Yuri Bezmenov, Four Steps for Ideological Subversion
Hegelian Dialectic (Problem, Reaction, Solution)
Reverse Psychology
US Public Law One Zero Two dash One Four
The Seven Laws of Noah
Project 2025
A very abbreviated summary: Most of these Corporations are promoting "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" while cutting staff and overcharging for their products. This creates social division and economic stability, a problem in need of a solution. The Liberals in charge of these corporations will be removed by Conservatives after a revolutionary change of power, using the Seven Laws of Noah as guidelines by which they will "drain the swamp" and make drastic changes to corporations/industry to bring social and economic justice to the people affected by Liberal policies and practices.
If you didn’t know this was coming you don’t know or watch business. There was always going to be cut staff and lay offs. First you have cooling industry , eliminating redundancy and streamlining.
It’s not cool for the employees but no one is promised life let alone a job to last forever. It sucks jt happens to us all but it does. No rage bait here , just corporations doing what they do.
Stock buybacks should be illegal
They used to be illegal, along with market speculators. You can thank deregulation and getting rid of red tape as politicians like to say in the name of "helping companies grow"
@@sarahorton9223and everybody forgets most of that red tape was put in place to stop another great depression from happening. When most the people who lived through that died off they forgot how bad it was and the regulations started disappearing.
I remember when blizzard said the merger with activation wouldn’t change anything. 🤷♂️
Artificial Intelligence + talented people + demand = old gaming dead. Bloated, slow and boring mega corporations will be flooded with the competitors they fired who are now making great games on tiny budgets and eating their lunch. Its coming.
That's ok, we still have a huge backlog to get through. Let's forget the idea of new new new all the time. One or two good titles per year is plenty.
@@Leonhart_93you are confused, we are seeing the start of a new era of AAA.
New names new companies a fresh cycle, few will survive.
@@Leonhart_93 1or 2 a year might work for you but not everyone.
@mitchelcline9759 I firmly believe that it's a good opportunity to cut down on games and look at them as what they were intended to be: a break from time to time, not a way of life.
@@Leonhart_93 that's fine 4u but you're not the entire games market nothing wrong with a lil variety for the rest
The problem is Business Schools are teaching people how to run a corporation into the ground, by only focusing on CEO and Shareholder pay and Stock Buybacks. They used to teach about Profit Margins, Losses, Expenses and everything else, but now all they're hyperfocused on, is "How much money can we get our shareholders and how much of our stock can we buy back"?
Is that more layoffs in the gaming industry i hear?
Wow, actual gaming journalism. Didn't think I'd see the day
They should fire everyone working on Overwatch 2 and rerelease Overwatch 1 the way it was before they shut it down.
@@BFTBGSFTST bro I don't think even the devs wanted to do OW2. I'm pretty sure it was just higher ups who wanted OW2.
Knowing Blizzard, they’ll re-sell it as Overwatch Classic.
Overwatch 1 was already a decaying shell of it's former glory by the time they shut it down. They'd need to rewind the game aaaall the way back to it's golden years: 2016-17, before the devs went full "fun police" on players and ruined the game with a combination of power-creep & horribly unfun hero reworks.
And even _then,_ they'd STILL need to roll out remedial balance patches due to some of the OG heroes having hella overtuned numbers. Most of Overwatch 1's powercreep can actually be traced back to the devs flat-out refusing to bite the bullet and directly nerf overtuned heroes... they instead balanced the entire game _around_ those outliers; & raised everyone _else's_ numbers to match.
OW 1 was left to rot on the vine. It didn’t die so much as it was left at summer camp with no counsellors.
One thing to note. Although the PR for the increase in dividends and stock buybacks is it benefits shareholders. But it’s mainly to benefit executives. Look at MSFT stock price, there’s no reason for a stock buyback or increase dividends. It not like the price tanked.
Executive are primarily compensated by stock. Increasing the stock price and dividends is an avenue to easily take money out of the company and into their pockets.
Microsoft is slowly eating up the entirety of the American AAA industry and purposely killing it
Just the way it is, they all want the same profits and profit increases but wars, refugees, lay outs all over (not just gaming industry), everything more expensive after covid, like 30% and it keeps on going. More unemployed but they still want their profits. They increase prices to 70 dollars soon 80, and lay outs even more. AI support bots because you are secondary = money is primary.
WW3 and it will be better. I once thought it would be possible to stop this, if we started taking care of the people and decrease gaps but I think that train has passed. Better just await WW3.
I think the game industry would be in a better place if publishers could not own studios and the studios where broken up to be smaller. Stock buybacks should also go back to being illegal.
What the actual fuck is the point of spending 70 BILLION on a gaming company if you're just gonna lay off all the talent who made those games?
The talent is already long gone. What they bought are the IPs, physical assets and ongoing games.
@@Kratos263There's absolutely still talent, they've just all been shoved into the CoD coal mines
@@louiepikmin3184 and world of Warcraft is also really good for a modern MMO in 2024. I at least have a lot of fun
@@louiepikmin3184LOL no. Talent doesn't work at Blizzard. If you have serious skill, would you settle for slave labor/wages and abuse?! Only thing left at Blizzard is just trash.
@@louiepikmin3184 'COD coal mines' nice one lol
RIP Happystick, I hope you manage to find a new job my man!
Lets imagine an scenario where a company lays off staff because they are passionless and the costumers complained of their products. How would that scenario be perceived by the general public?
Its only going to get worse. I feel bad for the people, losing your job is a terrible feeling and a devastating thing to deal with.
But at the same time, look at what your companies are putting out, charging, and how they have been treating their long term fan / supporter base.
In at one minute? Nice
Blizzard is doing good by WoW right now. I'm hoping the cuts won't affect that.
I just cancelled my subscription and uninstalled wow a couple of days ago. It isn't the same game anymore. The player base is different now too then when I started playing during Burning Crusade. It's time to move on to newer games.
So as a business, their (Blizzard, Xbox, etc. ) job is not to employ people, it’s to employ enough people to do the job. I work in the automotive industry and this also holds true. Layoff’s happen all the time and no one cares when it comes to that but by god mess with someone’s idea of games and how money should be distributed and man….blizz and Microsoft is evil. Seriously, this is ho business is handled. Stop being Divas all the time, seriously Mr drama queen, they’re fine.
Mainly impacting Blizzard? Nothing of value was lost then.
Microsoft “we expect more games from act/bliz” also Microsoft “you’re all fired”
If you didnt see this coming to Blizzard-Activism i dont know what to tell you, but once you're done shedding crocodile tears for people you dont know or care about youll realize their games are still terrible, before or after layoffs. Stop acting like anyone with braincells gives a rip.
Best daily news channel!
When CEOs and corporations fail to push their market research, we can always count on chuds to blame DEI instead
Works everytime
when they are obviously not giving a shit about money but pushing politics. It doesn't take a master mind to do market research on the gaming industry. They ignored the market research to push an agenda.
@@TheGoreforcedumbest comment by far, there's not knowing f*ck all then there's your comment.
good heavens 😭
@@D4C_LoveTrain1 hmm, seems you don't see the OP as flame bait? But I do, ignoring that while it might be a symptom of shit creatives. The CEO's are actively greenlighting terrible art and expecting it to sell.
The first lesson in any art, if figure out who your audience is. And if that is female girls, that are activists. the games will primarily only attract those people. We are in an age where past products are still fun, and we WILL play the old shit, before buying new shit.
If their goal is to ya' know, sell the game, they need to sell it to a good potential audience. You can't create art for yourself and expect it to sell, or art for your own group of company.
@@TheGoreforce They're not pushing politics. They're using market research instead of creativity.
Market Research is the death of originality
@@TheGoreforceoh yea definitely an issue with “politics”. If you ignore the games that have the same “politics” and are massively successful. People don’t buy new stuff? According to you?
Rumble was a ton of fun; I played it a lot. What was the deal breaker for me and I haven't come back was the uncapped PvP. Once you hit 3,000 points on a hero they entered the "uncapped" level. Where your unit levels are based on your actual levels instead of being hard locked at 5 and 3 like previous. In short, once you hit that level you're not facing off against other players and their strategies; you're facing off against other players and their wallet.
Sure shareholders wreck gaming, but devs are the ones designing horrible games like Warcraft Rumble.
@@ragnajonsdotter8333 it’s not their fault. If your boss came to you and said “make me a game that can make loads of money” and you are a company who knows nothing about live service games. The result is a bad game.
Hey genius, Devs are making games like Warcraft Rumble because they are told to do it, blame the higher ups, not the people working on it
I can stand behind demonizing suits but at some point we have to talk about how incompetent key game devs can be. They should never had to hire a gargantuan amount of staff in the first place, such an unnecessary bloat. Upper management should have learn at this point that relatively medium sized studios with a clear and realistic goal were the winners of 2024 so far.
I believe a lot of us knew ActivLizzard was done for. Especially with Diablo IV.
Yeah Diablo 4 was one of the worst games I've ever been scammed on. Made me completely uninstall their client.
The fact it took D4 to show anyone anything is sad by its self.
Writing has been plastered on every wall since WoW was released.
WoW was the beginning of the end.
Diablo 4 is fine, looks stunning, and is a more complex diablo 3 but less complex than the competition, they've long have targeted mainstream peoples.
@@Pwnopolis I haven't played WoW.
@@TheGoreforce It took 4 seasons to get Diablo 4 in a spot that was fun to play. The campaign was lackluster, nothing stood out on it, their seasonal play was mid until Season 4. They need to stop the "no fun allowed" when someone finds builds and ways to boost their build. It's strictly a PvE game and the amount of nerfing is downright ridiculous on things. Let people enjoy the game without ruining whole classes.
Buying assets to strip out the most profitable bits, cost cut by firing all the support talent, and leave the rest to die… sounds about right for modern post GE & Boeing business management.
Pretty much everyone acknowledges the gaming industry (especially AAA) is bloated. That means people logically need to lose their jobs to re-size. I honestly miss when the industry was half the size, stigmatized by normies, and a niche hobby.
This reminds me I experienced something for the first time in years the other week. Someone said to me the classic "aren't you too old to play games?". I had forgotten how gaming used to be stigmatised.
the online bullying was the best part, you are right