Riot and Microsoft layoffs the same, but different | This Week in Business

The League of Legends maker's accountability falls on people not at fault, while Microsoft celebrates the Activision Blizzard acquisition by disposing of devs.

[Christopher]

Jadeja: "I made tons of mistakes, so instead of firing me we have to let go of these other people. Also, we're doing this 'for the gamers' and totally not for our shareholders!"

Spencer: "The less we say the better, heck I didn't even notify everyone impacted. But we're just trying to sustain our now $3T company and while we obviously have more money to pay people than other companies, we think these 2,000 should go elsewhere for jobs so our shareholders feel better."

[Sciurus_vulgaris]

The layoffs across MS’s gaming division were probably planned months ago by the company’s higher up. MS gained roughly 17,000 employees when it acquired Activision. So positions were unfortunately going to be cut after the ABK deal closed. I think game devs need to fight for more employee [or at least job] protections. Game companies like to mass contract and layoff workers with a sometimes frightening frequency.

[just_looken]

As much as i hate it the layoffs like you said were no doubt planned but i think its a AI push micorsoft has alot of money/time/resources in the ai space right now even there own online version of chatgbt.

So i can see microsoft using there ai tech to make games layoff more humans in the future.

[ThinkThink]

They definitely will. Once ai qa becomes a thing, Ms will dissolve 90% of the qa testing team. Those qa testers probably have about 18 months before they need to worry, but it's coming.