General Gaming News and Discussion

I grew up really close to Blizzard in Irvine, see employees for them all over. A couple years ago I meet a lady who worked at Blizzard as a full time recruiter. And she didnt recruit for any technical or art jobs at the company, just for random administrative roles. It blew my mind Blizzard had full time employees to do this. They have so many people useless people working at that company not even involved it making games.

Man. Blizzard was up there with Nintendo to me growing up and as a young adult. Now they feel like a soulless husk pushing the worst anti-consumer shit.

22000 employees across xbox division
~1000 at bethesda
12000 at activision/blizzard
~5000 at blizzard (the other 10k are at COD, King [mobile], etc)


mergers almost always cut around 20% of staff since you cut marketing, sales, IT, procurement, HR, etc since you already have groups for that and usually G&A is ~20% of headcount. 20% of 12000 is 2400 employees so actually fewer cuts than anyone should have expected.

I think the bigger issue is that xbox is flailing pretty hard, with gamepass sub growth flattening after having spent so much money on big games, and hardware sales (consoles) abysmal. It looks like a hardware refresh this year will add some QoL (2TB drive, smaller form factor, bluetooth) but no power improvements which is gonna look bad when PS5 Pro and Switch 2 come out.

I could see xbox slowly wind down its gaming division in 5 years or less sadly, when it becomes clear to Microsoft that they will never be #1 in the space. As someone with like 6 years of gamepass codes that'll be a bummer, but not really a shock - they have literally not had a must-play game come out in 10 years.

kinadin said:

I don't know why anyone would want to work for Microsoft. The money isn't worth the constant office politics.

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The good news is most of us can't because we aren't the right demographics.

No but the constant refrain today is about underqualified white men. I hear it from strong women where I work. Yet some of those same women are equally as underqualified.

Mist said:

Very similar books were written about GE, AT&T, and a bunch of banks. Some even became movies. There are definitely entire graduate school lectures about Jack Welch at GE. Writing books about big targets is good for sales.

But your point also brings up the fact that Microsoft had all these problems long before the big DEI push.

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And DEI has done what to address these problems?

Mist said:

Yeah, totally, because nobody has ever worked at a tech company or office job where 40% of the white dudes were pointless wastes of chairs.

Incompetence is truly colorblind.

Very similar books were written about GE, AT&T, and a bunch of banks. Some even became movies. There are definitely entire graduate school lectures about Jack Welch at GE. Writing books about big targets is good for sales.

But your point also brings up the fact that Microsoft had all these problems long before the big DEI push.

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At times, I think you're just a dude pretending to be a chick. But then you write in how much of a waste of space you think white males are, specifically in this thread, and that makes me think you might just be a woman. The incel equivalent of a woman, but still... a woman. Probably white, too.

kinadin said:

I don't know why anyone would want to work for Microsoft. The money isn't worth the constant office politics.

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This is any large company, it took me a long time to realize that smaller companies are where it's at. You may get paid 20% less but it's about 70% less bullshit you have to deal with.

kinadin said:

I don't know why anyone would want to work for Microsoft. The money isn't worth the constant office politics.

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its a lot of money thanks to stock options. like millions in a few years if you get in at the right time and advance quickly, which it used to be easy to do (dunno anymore) and big tech companies pay way more than anyone realizes for specific jobs. like high end software architect/devs who don't need to manage people can easily pull $700-900k annual salaries plus millions in stock option bonuses

its VERY few positions like that, basically in the windows/AI/office/etc teams so not chad boner who wants to work on games or anything else not a cash cow but it applies to google, facebook, apple, microsoft, netflix, amazon, etc

easiest job in the world if you are an extrovert man is sales in software/consulting/business, for a woman its biotech sales, and for shy/introverts its high end software development. of course you need to have good coding skills and instincts for code elegance which rules out 90% of people.