Your insane if you think anyone who worked at blizzard had any faith in that company what so ever since it first sold itself to activision.

None of this affects me I play hots, sorry I don't even pay for fan and I must have watched 10k hours of content 🤑🤑🤑 I understand you probably don't know but hots patches ? Why

Ybarra probably had a golden parachute of some sort; he'll be okay.

Soft layoffs are voluntary buyouts. Axing remote workers that refuse to return to the office aren't soft layoffs.

This is not a down sizing. This is removing the toxic culture out of the company, just like a doctor doing surgery. That Bill Gates 💊

My ticket for hacked account is already ignored for 2 days now. No answer, no nothing.

I remember being stuck in Stratholme back in TBC, trying to solo it with my Rogue for the mount from Baron Rivendare. I went through the door in stealth and it closed. I wrote a ticket and after a while a Gamemaster replied. He appeared next to me and ran against the closed door with 500% movement speed not able to open it. He teleported me at the beginning of the big place before the door and the mobs that were outside suddenly ran at me. I used all my cooldowns and health potion to survive while he was standing next to me and cheering me up, knowing that it would be unfair to help. I managed to win the fight and he wished me a happy day. One of the best interactions ever, only followed by Markus from Customer Support who replaced my Elite Furious Gladiator Sword with the Axe, because the Sword texture got lost during the Cataclysm Patch. True Chad!

i remember when they would even sometimes teleport to you visibly to see the issue if it was like a mob bug or something.

dude during wotr days, i got stuck in the lavas by black rock spires, could not move or tele out, the blizzard staff responded to my message half away through their lunch break and 'flew' me out of the place and took me 'swimming' across the sky.......those were the good old days

@@nikolajpopovs3844 there is no support anymore, so good luck with that

But here's the thing. No one cares.

Adios

@drakkenmensch from what I understand they are moving to AI for a lot of customer support roles, with some staff staying on to help.

@@Iselas181 That is laughably absurd. It's hard enough for a real person to do this work, but having to teach a MACHINE to do it is a plan only a greedy corporate exec with no real tech understanding could possibly come up with.

Don’t quit. let them fire you so you can collect unemployment.

This is exactly how it goes. your employer will lie right to your face to get what they want, then throw you out in the street.

@@snoogans3849 exactly what happened

I was there as well. It was a confusing and precarious time.

I was at Blizzard during the merger and I don’t think the leads even survived. As I recall Activision kept only about 10 former Vivendi employees.

@@johnh8292 the best part of it was when we went to work, people removed all the letters from Vivdendi Games to spell End Me. It was the first thing anyone saw when coming up the elevators.

Welcome to corporate capitalism. They genuinely do not give a shit about any employee who doesn't have a seat in the boardroom.

Especially Ubisoft and Bethesda's Pete Hines. Yes, all gaming executives are liars, but the sheer degree to which Pete Hines and any Ubisoft mouthpiece is going to spew easily-disprovable tripe is just... staggeringly more blatant than most other game companies.

CEOs are selected by the board of directors. Directors are elected by stock holders. Have you ever met a stock holder who cared about anything other than their stock price increasing? If you have a 401K do you care about whether the employees of your company are being treated well or do you just want your investment to gain value?

Executives, period.

They are corporate politicians, they care about the shareholder. Only way to get their attention is to be more than a gamer.

Sad but true.

I wish the corpse of blizzard would stop floating back up.

Yup, the moment they all sold out.

Tell that to the CEO & investors swimming in money.

Unfortunately, yes. I used to blind buy their games.

i wonder if they didn't have such safety nets if they wouldn't be so carefree when it comes to running companies in the ground, What do they have to lose? They are always smiling n talking all positive too. Nothing can be done, if workers attempt to give themselves more power they'll just outsource to a 3rd world nation that is more than happy to suffer for pennies. gotta love globalists.

And would you look at that? My Microsoft stock is up.

Record profits is easier during high inflation, more money going around.

@@ReturnOfHeresy If your understanding of economics is bigger number better, maybe. Every dollar is worth less. The numbers get bigger because the dollar is weaker. You understand that's why a loaf of bread is $7 instead of $5, right? They have to charge the $7 to get the same monetary leverage that the $5 bought before the economy went in the trash because of inflation.

I thought cheaters/botters were bottom of the barrel filth. We found another layer at the very very bottom.

Maths wise it would be easier to not get paid double digits of Millions per year just to be part owner of some Corp but hey that would not be fair, everyone deserves the chance to become a CEO :))

"How do you think they paid for the jet?" 🤣

So true now seeing the recent studio closures.

Same here. I will not play any of their games ever again. And I read who is behind the companies I buy my games from, and if I find any of these vultures being part of the dev team, it is an automatic no.

Yes. American publicly traded IPOs for game companies is their fault. It’s not possibly to be creative AND have a guaranteed upward curve on shares. Greed killed gaming

@@iRemainNameless So True.

I don't mean to be negative with this in Nintendo's case but the problem is that Iwata was the main corporate executive at Nintendo who actually "led from the front" so to speak. He prioritized the video game experience and players first while trying to maintain high profits (which turns out that's the ultimate winning strategy if you're willing to pay the "pound of flesh" in the short term for that long term quality and success. My main bit of proof is compared Gen 6 Pokemon to Pokemon post Iwata's passing). Nintendo doesn't have a guy like Iwata running the company anymore unfortunately. Nintendo's still doing a little better than the rest of the AAA gaming industry at the moment but you can see the "decay" in quality with Pokemon after Sword and Shield. Scarlet and Violet is still an absolute mess with how much lag it has even in singleplayer at 30fps and how many bugs it still has. And when people called out GameFreak and The Pokemon Company out on Scarlet and Violet's (still) awful technical performance, GameFreak and TPC just kind of ignored it. You can see this pretty easily with the recent DLC for Scarlet and Violent having pretty bad optimization and performance. The actual care is gone because "Too Big to Fail Syndrome" has taken over. Edit: I know there's still people who "lead from the front" like Miyamoto (if he's still there) and a few others but my point was there's no "higher-ups" who have that same mentality that people like Iwata and Miyamoto had/have.

@@Doomweapon66 Good insight. Yeah, and the higher-up types tend to be ambitious business people who start to get blinded by bonuses and promotions. I've ran consumer analytics for them and sometimes they completely disregard the results and just do what they want. They have that kind of mentality. It's illogical. Then the company suffers because they didn't do what their fans/customers wanted. For any creative-based industry, and gaming is one of them, there should be a creative person who can also do business at the top. Not just a business person. Disney is having this problem now as well. And yeah, Scarlet and Violet looks like a Game Cube game or a bad mobile game. Lot's of disappointment there and obvious lack of quality. They shouldn't push Pokemon games out like how Activision pushes out Call of Duty games. The quality starts to suffer. Spend a bit more time and make them good games.

Company loyalty stopped being a legitimate thing you should bother with in like 2012. 2 years. If by 1.5 years you are not approached for promotion or a raise; prepare your resume. Most companies have already been on a 2-year-tenure-trajectory for most employees, since 2015-ish. At your next job interview, tell them you work on an "up or out in 2 years or less" policy. "As someone with a specialized skillset and advanced expertise in this field, I have no intention of remaining in the same role or at the same rate for longer than 2 years on average. If there are opportunities here for me that match my pace of progression, I fully intend to commit long-term, and be as loyal to the company as is reflected in my compensation growth and in the elevation of my responsibility tier" Something to that effect will scare away everyone who wants to wring you dry on minimum wage. You will get LOTS of rejections. The MOST important thing is to say it with confidence. Almost with nonchalance; A passing, necessary pleasantry. Coming off as if you don't think it's an issue but you're "required to say it for policy reasons." If you get called back, you already have the job.... it's just a matter of not disqualifying yourself. Avoid multi-rounds, office tours, and ANY conversation with HR (as best you can; ESPECIALLY smalltalk), etc. If it's not an immediate "no" but they haven't offered the job, then they're hoping you will keep your life on hold while they use your pending application/offer as leverage to offer under-pay to the guy who's 80% as good as you but will take 50% of the pay if we tell him "we have other candidates and we need a response soon". Which is a tactic you can spit right back at them at your FIRST interview. Your objective is to get THEM to say yes RIGHT NOW, on YOUR terms.

Wow, even die-hard whales and shills have limits? This is genuinely surprising

@@CBRN-115 Even they prefer to be fleeced without feeling they are being fleeced - once that illusion is shattered enough, they do leave.

@@CBRN-115 Shills will never quit as they live rose colored goggles on their face but you can lose whales if your product is absolute shit which blizzards games have been for many many years.

They withheld fun from the games and kept them hidden behinds paywalls and RNG

@@CBRN-115 thing is they want normal players to play. when they feel like rate of whales is too high they stop feeling special and quit.

I think it's becoming more cumulative as time goes on. There are still plenty of people who love games, and would love to make games, and would love to make games for a big developer... but they are being given more and more reasons to consider: is this studio worth moving to X Y or Z for, can I actually live decently there, is this salary right for me, should I risk taking this low position with hope I'll move up within the company or will they lay me off before that happens? And, there's one question where the answer is clear: will this company care about me as a person, and the answer is NO.

Indeed, look at what happened in the Aerospace and Defence industries, with Boeing being a case in point.

IDK people keeping becoming teachers for some rason

People will always develop games as a career they are just quickly learning which companies to stay far away from if they want job security,

There's no job security for people who draw paintings, make music, and so on and so forth. Creative jobs have always been inherently unstable. This will change nothing, and the video games industry is always gonna remain big as long as it remains profitable.

Yup he was basically fired and thats obvious. He was given an option on how to deal with it because of his position and public image

Seems a bit naive. I bet he took over as president specifically to prepare for this merger and the layoffs. He was always going to leave.

You have a good point but something we need to remember is that people on Ybarra’s position are accountable to shareholders not to their workers. This sort of message is what shareholders of other companies he might apply to in the future are going to be looking for

But then EVEN MORE SO, he’s already fired, what’s up with the ass licking from all sides all the time. You got fired - say it out loud IF you disagree with it. Nothing they can do to you

Just AAA

Next to the flyblown carcass of the comic book industry, and the Weekend at Bernie's that is the film industry.

Exactly.

Indie games have been more enjoyable over these so called AAA games.

Healing? How?

@@josephteller9715indie games and other gaming industry that LISTEN to players

@@josephteller9715working for a triple A studio, one of the contracts that you tend to need to sign is that any game you make is owned by the company. With all of the industry professionals that are cut loose it’s the hope that some of these people will start indie and double A studios and start to build better games in the future.

Translation: 'Bad things are happening to the companies I don't like.' Nintendo is doing fine. Sony is fine. Remedy's Alan Wake 2 is the most expensive game from Finland to date with an estimated 70 mil euro budget, great game. CDPR shaped up their entry into AAA. EA is certainly still trucking along, and the list goes on. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good narrative I guess.

“The purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID)

just another thing blizzard with their billions of dollars apparently couldn't accomplish which a literal indie studio did with a staff of like 6 UNPAID guys in a basement (Valheim) could pull off really successfully.

Yeah. Same with OW2 story. And Titan the mmo replacement for wow. And D4's new season. Reality is Blizzard scraps tens of millions of dollars in labor hours. On OW2 alone they scrapped almost 300k labor and development hours. Imagine the amazing games they could have made if their teams were capable. It's an asinine amount of time wasted.

Yea innovation dies in poorly managed large businesses.

yeah they can barely make mobile games at this point

It's pretty much par for the course, we're discussing Blizzard after all.

Less people buying? Means they just have to turn the prices even more up!

@@bok4822 Yeah, I kept telling people that capitalist trends... just repeat themselves.

Heh, I don't buy full price games. I just wait until they're 70%+ off, even if it takes years. I have a great backlog of games as a result; all the quality of life patches are implemented to fix the terrible stability issues they normally have on launch, and I save a good bit of money and it goes farther enjoying the games I have!

@@bok4822 Exactly, that's how stock companies operate. If your target is a 20% margin, the top management will be rewarded more for killing all the products/services not getting at least 2/3 of the expected profits than keeping it and trying to make things work. It's crazy in the long term, but works wonders for the actual owners aka shareholders and their interest in the short term. So whenever two large market players merge? Expect heads to roll, and most of those will be the frontline staff. And should income drop as a consequence? Increase the prices or implement a more agressive monetization strategy. At this point, with the internet being a thing and knowledge for the taking as long as people want it? This should not be a surprise to anyone, and the people at the helm at Microsoft know damn well what will happen and they're ready for the worst scenarios. Gotta keep them investors happy during the next margin call, will worry about the rest in 6 to 12 months from that 😉

@@jakeholmannf I don’t pay full price either. I did buy D4, and have been getting my money’s worth, but prior to that the last full price game I bought was Fallout 4.

Let's hope they don't infect other good studios, maybe just go work McDonald's. They surely can't fuck that up more than it already is

Unfortunately, they probably won't find new positions.

Stormgate

Yeah they don't get it and don't want too but well said none the less.

And here's the kicker, even if they hire new devs that are fresh graduates. They won't have the same caliber as the staff of old and it's not like replacing someone at an office.

Yup, promises are less worth than the air required to speak them. Unless something's written in an official signed document, it means nothing.

And never ... ever... trust ... Microsoft. If Satya's lips are moving, he's lying.

@@mrvwbug4423 developers developers developers

A client I worked for got bought by a corporation and no one was laid off. I actually got a higher paying job to work for the company that bought the client because I was so valuable to the client. It goes both ways and your attitude. You may think you have a good attitude but if you go post on reddit/youtube comments about how you hate your job or it was awful. You probably subconsciously showing that without even realizing it.

@@tonic316 I speak from past experience. My experience is that what you describe either doesn't happen or extremely rare. Besides your hearsay, I haven't actually heard of any of such interaction. When overwhelming majority of cases are like that, corporate lies, mistreat employees, trample through lives without a thought.. Just because you saw 1 example of that not happening (yet) does that make it any better? From where I'm standing it just sounds a bit desperation to prove me wrong. Not sure how you pulled the line between my personal job satisfaction, that you know nothing about and provable facts you can see in the news every day. I do programming, automation, and business continuity. It's better than what 85% of the jobs out there and I do it fully from home. I couldn't be happier with it. That doesn't change the fact that I have to fight with the company for every penny of increase, I have to threaten them with quitting just to they follow the inflation so I don't have to sleep on the street next month.. Every single time I had to achieve something at a corporation it was a struggle. My ex worked at corporate HR. They had mandates to rate people lower regardless of performance, just so the management can say next quarter that they "improved" people. It never mattered to them that by ranking people lower loose benefits, cannot get bonus, cannot be advanced for years etc. And that's just how things work. I haven't even mentioned that my direct manager gets 2x my salary. And there are 6 other levels of management above him. A few levels above him people get such an obscene amount of money, they literally get more than the people actually working got in a year. extreme inequality. And every time you raise these up all you get is that "this is corporate culture. 🤷‍♂" I stand by any day to that statement that corporate culture is the bane of humanity. People knowing perpetuate it, since above a certain paygrade, you get enough money to not care for others. If you want to see sad statistics just check how many people have been fired from the game industry just this year. And it's not even the end of January yet. It would be informative to see how many of those were managers and how many were ground floor people. It would provide a great inside to the nature of what I wrote earlier. Anyway. What I wrote, I did so because of my personal experience with corporations. I'm happy that your experience might be somewhat different. Doesn't change the big picture. I won't even say that it's a trend and things get better. They won't get better ever. Life sucks, and at the end you die, as they say.

@@SolearGnG how many were fired that were hired during covid when tech companies over hired. 🤔🤔🤔

You have a chip on your shoulder big time. Your experience doesn't represent everyone, you can't even claim it represents the majority. But a simple situation is this: you hate corporations so much? Don't work for one ever again.

@@eternalsun13 Wow what a deep life advice. What if, instead of abandoning the problem I try to raise awareness of it and try to make it better? I can't even put into words how stupid this is, really. nearly every work opportunity is for a corporation in one for or another. There's no work out there that is not tied to a corporation and pays enough for a decent living. Yes I do hate corporations, but you and everybody else is a bit behind in showing me any alternative to that. So instead of not working for a corporations I advocate for ethical work and highlight problems with it wherever I can. Sometimes you don't have the option to work on things you love doing. Sometimes you need to maintain yourself alone with no help from anyone. It's easy to say don't work for corporations if you have something better lined up, or you don't need money or you have a family to support you etc. Working for a corporation and criticizing corporate lifestyle are hand in hand. I'd argue, since I lived it all my life I have more right to do so, and better knowledge to do so than anyone not lived a similar life. When I say corporations are shit, that's coming from decades of experience working for them.

Agree - many of examples of many of my US friends tell me going wrong in US economy; Nasa, Boe ing, Am azon etc and UK just as bad; BT, Post Office and its scandalous IT Horizon project; firms now run by bean counters and little knowledge / care of their product or their customers

bruh you may actually be right lmao

"If you think we make money of the wow token, you are greatly confused" Mikeyboy Ybarra 2023

Same applies in Japan as well

Just take it as a job, basically. If it helps your resume, good. If not, then that's that.

@@akaneki7234 eh? is there something besides layoffs they have to worry about, or does it have to with often dying on the job

Wonder how much DEI bloat contribute to this?

@@eclipsesoluna3453 well the dying on the Job thing ain’t great either. But on the topic of lay-offs, Japan’s “labour protection” policy sounds good on paper and in isolation, but all it leads to is companies barely hiring employees and instead hiring “independent” contractors, who are definitely not protected by that policy.

I work with a lot of executives in gaming, primarily marketers and CROs. The phrasing is purely ego stroking for the shareholders and partners (not employees) of Blizz. Mike needs to make nice and seem like this is peak capitalism (it is), as in, he led to a huge milestone in the gaming world and wants to replicate that success. Don't let the buzzwords spook you. This is to make nice and not get blackballed.

@@Direwarlord213 thank you for the insight, that does make a lot of sense.

Yeah, 100% man was asked to leave and that's a face saving post.

Mikes from California. He doesn't have a work ethic. He certainly didn't when wod hit. He didn't when devs worked from home and produced one patch. He didn't when they made overwatch 1.5 to monetize it

Either Ybarra got forced out overtly or giving him a sh*tpile of unpalatable things to do (like layoffs) or he was the enemy within all the time. See what happened with Nokia.

Difference is Blizzard hasn't been customer focused in over a decade, and the 'blues of old' are just a nice memory. Customer service in Blizzard has been dead for years, they just never held a funeral.

RN here. I'm curious to know what your position is in healthcare 😊

@@naka861 I work for an IPA. Non-clinical. I assist with contracting providers and managing a network of providers.

​@@NoSlow78administrative is a lot better than being in the trenches. For the regular worker it's crap pay, crap hours, and physically and psychologically taxing. Fifteen years of it until I was asked to lie to a state regulator to protect the company. I quit. Went to manufacturing and make triple what I did then.

The best jobs you can hope to get are ones you're paid according to your actual worth, but also massively overqualified for the job. The only thing is that you will always have to have "maximum effort" in your back pocket because eventually they will hire someone who can fire you, who actually knows the RoI on you is unbalanced. But that generally takes quite a while. If you're hired in the first place, their ability to get someone like that outside of dumb luck is slim.

I’m considering it as a AAA dev, hardly worth it anymore unless we get a union soon that is.

AAA games are not what they were used to be these days.

Same. Todd and Emil both can be canned it would only breathe creative life into the company. Instead of a tacky ass jacket wearing ego with a God complex - they could possibly create games actual gamers want to play F Emil. F Todd.

@@iRemainNameless For both of these dregs I'm hoping for a harassment lawsuit or a humorous gaffe that leads to cancellation. come on 2024!

Do you think the fact that the people being laid off work in the areas that the customers are complaining the most is purely coincidence?? No boss lays off an employee that is delivering...

MS is just another Embracer. There were lots of warnings.

For Blizzard, they have a ton of voice actors, since they release the game in multiple languages - 15+, I think?

9% of Total Microsoft Staff not just ABK Staff. ABK felt it the most, but when they're using the 9% stat it's 9% of total Employees of Microsoft & Microsoft is Massive.

@@NostraDavid2 Didn't know Voice Actors were kept on a pay roll. I thought that was mainly contract work

Lmao, 1900 employees, and 19 developers. Microsoft be like: "Explain what you do here. In one sentence or less."

bloat is decidedly not the issue. upper management is the issue. And those ppl always end up keeping their jobs. Look at Bethesda, blaming customers for Starfield's problems. "you don't play the game properly." Their head writer doesn't want to write a story. He also directs game design and doesn't believe in meetings and planning things to keep ppl on track. They have to run everything past Todd Howard who's never around toward the end of development. That's how they're being managed. No one is going to succeed in making the game when management isn't effectively managing. I'm tired of ppl always blaming the coders, programmers, art ppl, qa, etc. when the ones in power who are leading the ship are opting to simply do nothing and just wait around for it to somehow all come together. "It just works" indeed.

Who cares

The games are still shit.

What damage? There are always ups and downs. Now what you're referring to would be MS especially on their handling with Halo.

Yeah they chug down the breast milk.

Dude, flat-out funny! You are not part of the bloat. Cheers!

there is a fan made sc2 mod of that game thats blowing up

Hoping he gets to stay in the shadows longer. That dude recently released a balance patch.

I'm with you. I don't understand how anyone could be surprised. They've killed every IP they have. Have wasted hundreds of thousands of hours of labor time in scrapped projects. They could have made half a dozen good games and fresh IP's with that wasted time. Imagine if a construction company was working on a bridge. After 7 years of development they were barely started and tore it down and gave up. That's essentially what we see time and time again with blizz. It's sad.

😆 🤣 😂

Beatle's "Help!" was about the group's struggle with the fame and music industry.

Obviously, those weren't all devs, but yeah its absurd how bloated they are for how little they produce and how bad those products are. Even if it only 20% were devs that's like a dozen Palworld dev teams worth of people.

Agree. It's crazy how many employees they had and they still repeatedly fumbled projects.

500... I can barely fathom that many people working on the same thing. Does those 500 include the business execs and other people that are otherwise not actually going to even touch the game during development, or is it everyone actually involved? Also, if Microsoft are somewhat nice (something I doubt), they've included all the psychologists in the 1900 layoffs.

A lot of them aren't actual devs is why. They had a bunch of diversity hires too. I know bc an ex friend got a job there and did absolutely nothing. I'm guessing she got let go...

@@NeoSoulCrewIt's part of the issue, really. Too many different people working on different things not communicating with each other appropriately. No one stepping in to keep a unified vision.

Why are you assuming those people who were fired were doing anything useful?

Might wanna go vote. In the US it still counts for something.

You're quite correct. The problem (one amongst many) is that the real-world economy died a while ago and the consequences are just now setting in as governments are correcting. Basically, people were allowed to borrow and accept vast sums of money, which were used by large and inefficient companies to put their smaller competitors out of business. And these large companies got addicted to the idea that they could spend more and more money without returning a profit. Theranos Medical Tech, Credit Suisse, WeWork, Nikola Motors (which literally initially got valued more than freaking Fiat-Chrysler without even delivering a feasible product, something it will never do), and Elon Musk's various ventures all come to mind here. AAA gaming and other entertainment media are all too often the same. It's basically like if you owned one store that generated 100,000 dollars a year selling goods at a decent price, but were immediately undercut by a company setting up dozens of stores around you that sold at massive losses that put them at say -10 million $, but who eventually out-competed you because they kept getting money funneled into them to undercut you. And then, when you've been outcompeted, they buy up your business for cheap and start to run it into the ground with their method. That's the venture capitalist economy and it's currently in its death throes. And you're also very very correct about the need to incentive people who actually do work, not people who tell others to do work. I've considered the feasibility of stuff like a 5X cap on wages (i.e. the top jobs earn up to 5 times the wages of the lowest tier jobs), enough to incentivize people to go into fields that are difficult, dangerous, undesirable, etc. but not enough to create the sort of anti-democratic money-based oligarchies that we have running around. Hard to get that sort of thing through governments though. Also, something needs to be done to dramatically deal with the scam/fraud/theft economy. And that's also a difficult thing to do.

Haha😂 yeah, he is the worst😂

Exactly, it's hard to feel bad after all that's been done. It almost gives me hope actually

Do you work on any Blizzard games right now? How do you know that QA is to blame for bugs? Most of the time bugs are found by QA and marked as not a high enough priority to fix. Every Blizz dev I knew was overworked and underpaid even relative to other game dev studios. If you want less stupid bugs then you should advocate for less features, longer patch cycles or more staff across all development roles including, but not limited to, QA.

@@DaRealPielover1987 they have 22k employees.... what games have they really brought out recently? sorry but 22k employees for a 15 year old games dlc?? just nutty

I was mass reported for "stealing" that stupid quest in the courtyard in SW and had 3 weeks of my game time stolen after being suspended. I will NEVER give blizzard another penny. Automated bans for crap like that is theft imho.

The only Blizzard game I play is Overwatch, but they've never done proper playtesting on that game. I still remember when they decided to add recoil to Soldier's gun (think it was 2019 or 2020) and it was completely broken. If you held down the trigger for more than a second his gun would fly up in the air from the recoil and your screen would shake like crazy, it was genuinely impossible to aim. And it took them three or four days to fix the problem.

Despite it being long before MS bought ABK.

and ironically not what happened. Management was upset with the devs for having nothing to show for the past six years and told them to stop jumping from engine to engine and forced them to use one because they were incapable of producing anything over 6 years.

@@SheepAmongG.O.A.T my point is that MS has done the same thing multiple times.

​@@fandyllic1975What game?

​@fandyllic1975 ummmm not in recent years, no. MS Gaming has allowed their studios to make what they want over a decade now. And they only are more hands on when they need to, while still facilitating a "make what you want" approach

"If you think we make money of the wow token, you are greatly confused" Ybarra 2023

in the US you're not "required" to give any kind of notice unless you signed something in your contract stating otherwise.

not sure if it applies to all provinces@@turtletheorytv

@@majdavlk649 most of the US is "at will" so anybody can be fired or quit on the spot without notice. The "we must give notice" is often just a company policy or gaslighting

@@majdavlk649 afaik if they can fire you without notice then it's "at will" employment, in the states where it's not "at will" there are also notice times for firing.

They can let you go on the spot but usually they have to pay you out that "notice period" i.e. you are paid for doing nothing.

You still pay money for games ..?

Yeah, I did, too😮

These useless devs have absolutely no idea on how to make a new good game. Only remasters and shitty monetized expansions is what we get now.

Long live capitalism.

Both companies were profitable before the merger. There was no risk of either going out of business.

@@Fenrakk101 Yeah but that's not proof they were delivering quality products. It only proves how stupid their customer base is.

@@red5standingby419ain’t that the truth!

@red5standingby419 stupid customers still evidently have money, and the point stands that microsoft-activision-blizzard aren't going away anytime soon

I think they announce the first wave of games coming to game pass soon to change the narrative.

you bought Diablo 4? lmao

@@_Mutto_ no your mother got it for me.

@@JayzBeerz Damn, you're cheap then. You poked that hippo for only $70?

@@JayzBeerz got scammed for those 70 bucks like a real sucker huh xD

I am sure Palworld had a 6 million budget.

AAA games have been a plague on the industry. Almost all of the New ideas have come from the Indie sector. Its not really a dark ages, its a culling of rhe herd.

I'd say more of a transition point. I think it has been obvious for a while that AAA hasn't been sustainable, given that each generation has doubled or tripled production cost, but the gamer population hasn't been increasing at anywhere near the same rate. Now, AAA games cost as much as, or even more than, Hollywood blockbusters. Creative bankruptcy and abusive monetization is almost guaranteed with that amount of money on the line. When you are spending $250M developing a game, and at least that much marketing it, everything is *has* to be about the money. You'll very quickly run out of money otherwise. On the other hand, there are signs of alternatives popping up. Nintendo has generally lagged the industry in doing the stuff that drives cost, and really has been showing the industry an alternate path with medium cost and distinct IPs. And more broadly, we are observing that the old gatekeepers are getting bypassed. Getting into Steam and the console stores are now easier than ever before for a tiny team without a publisher. Commercial game engines are highly affordable to indies and can do pretty much anything a proprietary engine would. The rise of game streaming allows for random games to become the flavor of the month without much advertising nor PR (think Among Us, Fall Guys, Lethal Company, and, most likely, Palworld). The big issue really is discovery. There are almost certainly tons of fun and innovative indies, but they are buried under the dozens of other, lower quality, indies that released that same week. If there was a way for the best indies to be found by their target audience, the indies crack the industry wide open. The AAA model has been broken for at least a decade. I'm hopeful though that a solid AA and indie scene can spring up in its place.

Yes and no. The gaming industry keeps growing every year. It's the big companies that are entering a dark age, and deservedly so. I think we are now seeing the consequences of growing too much at the expense of passion. These companies are out of touch and treat games as a means to profit and nothing else. On the other hand, we are seeing small studios and even solo developers cater to what consumers actually want and bringing back creative levels we haven't seen since the 90s and early 2000s. We are simply in a turning point, perhaps we may see games that are not as impressive in terms of quality (graphics, cinematography, mocap animation, etc.) but are instead impressive in terms of creativity, innovation and overall fun. But don't fret, technology keeps advancing at a staggering rate, and now with AI knocking on the door we may see small studios do crazy stuff that only AAA companies were now able to do.

gaming is moving away from the big mega corps. I have had more fun from games created by relatively small dev teams in the last 5 years than I have from mega corp games

Microsoft asked the same question, and found out that 1900 people had a part in it.

California that's why

​@@PrimyFritzellz well not quite Blizzard alone. Zenimax also was in the blast zone

Software development has this funny thing that when you get enough people working on a project, the more you add the less shit done. Plus they lost all the talent. Nobody talented is working there anymore.

So true. People loves using the word "Veteran" or "Senior X" as if that makes the people complete saints and absolute professionals without any issues or removes all type of responsibilities. If these said "Veterans" works on a project for 6 years, and it turns out to be complete dogshit, or hasn't even come anywhere near the original plan, then they're just wasting time and space, space that young and excited people could use instead.@@solarydays

Yeah, senior man. closed the door and got high on their collective butt fumes, losing all sense of reality. Figures.@@solarydays

nah Xbox will let them ruin IPs forever. Microsoft just wants the IP they don't care about the quality.

Very doubtful. They wouldn't buy a dead investment.

@@Patrick_0n Its not really a dead investment though, even if the games go into "maintenance mode" they'll still generate a lot of revenue even with skeleton teams, just look at classic.

Its obvious blizzard is massively bloated and not producing much with the massive amount of people supposedly working there.

Education is important, you can still learn and not look dumb

because you don't have your facts right at all for starters

I'm sure everyone involved in that suit in the plaintiff class is out. And I'm sure Ybarra is fleeing the country before the next lawsuit hits

Diablo 4 has been profitable due to just being released so they let these useless devs keep their jobs. LOL

See you next year when youll probably say the same thing. And the year after.

GTA 6 is coming. Not dying anytime soon.

@@atelierbagur3831 We've never seen so many layoffs like this before, it's not even about what the consumers confidence is in the companies, theyre hemmoraging staff and expected to keep making more money each year and assuming the customer will accept greatly increased prices, which i dont think is the case people are hurting economically rn. The bubble is bursting as we speak dude, itll be a huge shakeup and a couple giants might go as a result. There's no way there wont be downsizing efforts made.

Nah... You need help with a bugged quest? You probably tried doing something funny, dind't ya? Pre-emptive ban from the "ai" that's just a bunch of scripts to save on employees. So don't worry, things will get more efficient than ever before! 😆