Today alone, we've reported on the news that Destroy All Humans! developer Black Forest Games and Outriders creator People Can Fly have been met with layoffs, with almost 100 jobs across those two companies being axed. This also came after Riot Games announced sweeping layoffs, with over 500 employees and around 11% of its total workforce affected by the change. Even though over 600 jobs have been axed this week alone (and it's only Thursday), Microsoft has just announced an earth-shattering round of layoffs too.
The enormous corporation, which is back to being the most valuable company in the world with a valuation over $3 trillion, has announced that its Microsoft Gaming division is seeing huge job cuts. 1,900 employees are being laid off across the entire division, with the majority being from the Activision Blizzard family, although there is mention of layoffs affecting Xbox and ZeniMax employees too.
The Verge has reported on an internal statement sent around by Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who states that the layoffs come as Microsoft looks to further integrate Activision Blizzard into the Xbox family. The memo also adds that anyone who has been affected will be supported with severance benefits informed by local employment laws. No doubt this will only be a marginal comfort to the 8% of the entire Microsoft Gaming staff that have been laid off.
It seems that this massive change is also having sweeping impacts across different parts of Blizzard too, as Mike Ybarra has announced that he is leaving the company once again, meaning the Californian developer will be looking to bring in a new president, with supposedly more information about coming next week.
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Blizzard is also losing its chief design officer and one of its co-founders, Allen Adham, and likewise it's noted that the previously announced survival game that has seemingly been in development since 2017 has been cancelled, with some of the employees attached to this game moved onto other projects at Blizzard.
As for how else these layoffs have affected Activision, Xbox Game Studios developers, and ZeniMax developers is unclear as of the time of writing.