After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.
It should be no surprise. Xbox, and Microsoft as a whole, are businesses whose only goal is profit at any cost. It’s capitalism at any stage. And as long as there are people willing to spend money on their services (myself included), they will continue doing what they do.
Still, it bears reiterating lest some start believing in the marketing they spin. No company or division of a company can be a friend to anyone. Even PC darling Valve isn’t ! (and I say that having spent thousands of euros on Valve’s products and services)
And even bearing that in mind, Microsoft has time and again openly shown anti consumer behavior, so they shouldn’t be awarded even the slightest amount of trust. Allowing them to continue existing in their current form is already too much.
Nobody is surprised, though the workers may be shocked.
Yeah no shit. I don’t even need to click this link to agree.
MS is a $3tn company and has one of the worst track records on earth for anti-competitive practices.
Shit, in the Xbox FTC leaks, Phil Spencer was openly saying he didn’t just want Bethesda and Activision, his dream is to do hostile takeovers of Nintendo and Valve.
And yet I still see people online acting like they’re on our side. Utterly laughable.
Why would you ever think any company is “on your side”? They’re on their own side. If they make products you like and operate in a way you like, I recommend supporting them, but that still doesn’t mean they’re “on your side.”
Promote products, not companies. A company can change overnight, whereas a product that you own won’t.
Why would you ever think any company is “on your side”?
ABK employees, apparently. See this from almost exactly one year ago: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2022/01/activision-blizzard-employees-react-to-xbox-acquisition/
Idk, that doesn’t mean MS is “on their side,” just not as bad as Activision Blizzard.
just not as bad as Activision Blizzard.
2000 people may disagree.
Are you sure? Would those 2000 people apply at Activision Blizzard if MS hadn’t bought them? If they had the same offer in hand to work at Xbox vs Activision Blizzard, which would they choose?
I’m guessing they still prefer Xbox, though they’re probably not happy about being laid-off.
Are you sure?
No. That’s why I used the word “may”. Look it up.
He won’t buy Nintendo nor Valve anytime soon. Valve is pushing Linux distro for a reason.
Valve is a private company. How do you do a hostile takeover of a private company? what a clown.
Phil : Sell us Valve Now!
Gabe : No
Phil : …
To paint picture Gabe is sitting on a hord of gold like a dragon and says No very quietly.
How do you do a hostile takeover of a private company?
The Mafia does that all the time. Not sure Microsoft would risk that, but there’s an option.
Also, if Gabe doesn’t have 51% of the shares, Microsoft could buy those shares from the other shareholders just like with a publicly traded company, it’s just more difficult because there isn’t an open market for it. If Microsoft gets a 51% stake, they legally own the company at that point.
Valve doesn’t have stock. That’s what “private” means.
All s-corp and c-corp corporations have stock. Valve is almost certainly an s-corp, because managing an LLC with that many employees just doesn’t make sense, he’d want the structure of an s-corp. Watch The difference between a private and public corporation isn’t whether they have shares, it’s whether those shares are traded on public stock markets. Microsoft wouldn’t be able to buy shares through a brokerage, they’d need to approach the share holders individually and make an offer to buy out their stake.
That’s one reason why working for shares at a startup is so risky, it’s really hard to sell private shares. If the company does an IPO (Initial Public Offering of shares, as in they’re making some of the private shares available for public purchase), then you can cash out big, but until then, you have mostly worthless stock. Most of the shares are either retained by the owner, or by investing groups.
Watch Shark Tank sometime, when they say X% ownership in the company, they mean share ownership. The sharks want to get the company to be bought out or go public so they can cash out, otherwise they’d probably prefer a percentage of net income.
yeah I see your point but at that point it’s not hostile since I’m pretty sure that Valve has 51% between board members based on their culture and hierarchy.
The definition of “hostile takeover” is getting 51% w/o a formal agreement. So if MS approached everyone independently and got 51%, it’s a hostile takeover. And they don’t need 51% control through their own entity, they can pay independent people to do so.
I think that’s unlikely to happen, but it’s possible.
I’ve never encountered the ridiculous idea that Xbox was “community-first.” 100% of everybody has always known that Xbox and Microsoft are rapacious and exploitative hawkers. Nothing has been shattered here, except the financial stability of thousands of tech workers. Which is a normal part of the alienation of capitalist society.
“made redundant” is such a terrible euphemism. They were fired. Say it like it is.
It’s not a euphemism; redundancy is legally different from being fired, with different protections, compensation, etc.
Thanks for the insight! I look at it from a European/German perspective and here that distinction doesn’t really exist or doesn’t really make a difference. TIL!
I don’t know exactly how it works in the US (probably it varies by state), but to give an idea, in Canada employment can end typically in one of three ways: quitting, being fired, or being laid off. (Some other less common cases exist of course like long term injuries or medical issues etc.)
Generally being fired means it was somehow the employee’s fault (anything from not being good enough at the job to being caught doing something actively wrong), while being laid off is due to lack of available work (when a business has to scale down, or dies completely). Laid-off workers can start collecting employment insurance almost immediately, and have certain rights to getting their job back if the company suddenly has work available again, among other things (i.e. it’s not meant to be possible for employers to use layoffs as a way of getting rid of employees they can’t or don’t want to fire).
A fired employee can’t get employment insurance as immediately since they’re seen as at fault for their own job loss from a legal perspective, but if the firing was wrongful, then they might have legal recourse against their employer.
The US is again probably very different in details but the basic difference of employee-at-fault job loss vs the work no longer existing is essentially the same, I think.
It’s pretty similar, but it does vary a lot by state.
For example, my state is an “at-will” employment state, which means employers can fire employees for pretty much any reason at any time, and employees can leave for any reason at any time, and the only restriction is if the reason is because of a protected characteristic (race, religion, etc). As long as the reason isn’t provably due to a protected characteristic, an employer can end the agreement at any time. Other states require severance pay, notice, etc for anything that’s not a breach of company policy, but my state does not, and those states could force the company to retain the employee if they violate some part of that agreement (though they don’t have to allow the employee on company property).
But at least in my area, it’s pretty similar to yours:
- layoff/downsizing/redundancy - you get unemployment, no expectation of rehire if financial situation at the company changes (you could apply again though)
- fired - no unemployment if you were fired for violation of company policy - social worker will verify w/ company
- quit - no unemployment - you’d basically need to sue the company to prove you left under duress or something
Well there is a distinction between the two though right? When you get fired, that’s it. You just stop working there. Being made redundant you also get given X amount of extra pay depending on their policies and the laws of where they are to make up for the time that they may be unemployed between jobs.
Thanks for the insight! I look at it from a European/German perspective and here that distinction doesn’t really exist or doesn’t really make a difference. TIL!
It’s also worth noting when companies combine there are many positions that are redundant as things are shuffled around, that is literally different then just laying off people because of company performance or w/e
I’d go even further: “They were fired so rich executives and shareholders could become more rich.”
“Those freeloaders were eating from my profit pie!”
It’s a crock of shit platitude too if you look at the statements from workers that are affected
It also shows they have no idea what they’re doing. Redundancies are good for tech.
It’s not good in tech to have 2000 people employed who have nothing to do.
I agree with that. So the contracts made beforehand should reflect this and expire naturally rather than actively laying employees off.
Or is the title clickbait?If you need to fire a large number of employees then someone in management failed to manage.
You’re forgetting there was a merger. Jobs that were necessary when there were 2 separate companies are now not necessary when there is only 1 merged company.
Also it seems a large number of layoffs were for:
- blizzards survival game that was reportedly in development hell after 6 years of development
- the physical games department because Xbox is going all digital
Depends on the ratio to total employed. A team of 3000 with 2000 with nothing to do, for sure! 20,000 with 2000 as backups/currently learning the ropes? A bit more reasonable.
You don’t employ people as backups. What you do is you share knowledge across the existing people so there is no single point of failure.
Companies are not your friends.
except mabye privacy ones
Are you sure?
of couse not that’s why i said the word mabye
Yeah you’re right. Still, companies gonna company, we should make people are friends instead.
No console is your friend. Only PC can be friend.
Moral of the story: build your friends.
*own them
Replace their parts… Like uh, like friends do.
I mean a good friend helps you when you need new eyes…
What if I’m renting them?
Renting means playing on the timeline of capitalism. You should buy it as cheap as possible so you can enjoy it when you want, not when they want you to.
I mean, I’d be buying new laptop pretty often anyway, because I’m using it for work, so in this specific case it’s actually cheaper to rent. Though it remains to be seen whether they’ll lend me a new one once I return this one because they’ll be the ones losing money here.
I’m confused, what are you renting, for how long, and for how much? And what do you need it to do? I’m wondering because renting is almost always a worse deal.
Bad. You either own something or you are a looser.
linux is my only friend
Exactly.
Yup, don’t tell my wife.
Only PC can be friend.
Not if it’s running Windows.
Btw, they’re using “Xbox” synonymous with the Microsoft video games division because that’s how Microsoft is using the term as well. If you think using the same term for two completely different things is dumb, please remember that’s the same company that thought that naming the third Xbox console generation “Xbox One” is an amazing idea and then releasing “Xbox Series S” and “Xbox Series X” after “Xbox One S” and “Xbox One X” were already around.
Windows isn’t a operating system, its a virus that wants to make you believe its a OS.
Yeah! With my Micorsoft Wintendo
Meh, I saved literally thousands of dollars a year playing the shit that doesn’t need eye candy on Xbox/PS5. The OS is far less of a pain to maintain as well.
Fuck valve and them destroying discs.
Thats some serious BS right here.
I’ve rented 40 or so games last year retailing well over $2000. Sorry!
Sounds like a you problem.
No. It sounds like you are having a hard time coping, upon learning how I save thousands of dollars a year playing low eye candy games on consoles.
Oh it’s this fucking clown car again! Hey clown, hows the circus?
I know, math is hard. Still following me around I see 🤷♂️.
On the flipside, I’ve saved even more on PC. I regularly buy games for <$5, and those typically go for $20+ on any console. I also get a bunch of free, high-quality games from EGS, GOG, and some other stores. The games I want to play all work well, are incredibly cheap (especially w/ bundles on Fanatical or Humble Bundle), and still work when I upgrade my hardware. I regularly play games from the 90s, try that on your console.
The main downside is no physical media, but I’m way too lazy to actually sell my old games, and for the cost I pay, I’m really not worried about it. My OS is incredibly easy to maintain, I literally run updates and that’s it. Oh, and I use Linux, so I don’t even need to pay for the OS either.
Consoles absolutely have their place (I have a Switch as well), but for budget gaming, you really can’t beat PC.
the tone around the (Microsoft-Actiblizzard) merger was largely dominated by vocally supportive Xbox players and commentators
Excuse me, what? I guess my social bubble is thick as fuck, because I didn’t see a single person supporting that megacorp scale merger.
These two concurrent pushes (of marketing good vibes image) resulted in a landscape that was, at best, reluctant to discuss the potential harm of its acquisitions and, at worst, actively rejected it because Xbox’s “good guy” image and messaging had so thoroughly seeped into the foundations of shared community spaces and broader gaming consciousness
Feels like a load of bullshit, then again I don’t even know where the cool kids hang out, so it could be me.
The superficial artifice of Xbox’s brand permeates every corner of video game marketing. It’s an endless parade of phrases that don’t quite mean anything and campaigns designed to romanticise and humanise the company’s seemingly bottomless appetite for growth at all costs.
I guess this is why I didn’t buy into the previous paragraphs, I just assumed people were “too smart” to fall for so much corporate bullshit.
Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history.
3 trillion with roughly 20k employees now. I wonder how much of that value is assigned to its workforce, like “of the 3 trillion our company’s worth, our workers are worth 100 billion” or something.
The support I saw around the merger was from blizzard fans who were excited that maybe Microsoft would mismanage blizzard slightly less than Activision did
Basically this.
I don’t like mergers but holy fuck Activision/Blizzard had to go. That that POS Kotick got away with a golden parachute while pulling every dirty trick that unluckier cronies have pulled once and gotten cancelled, is a travesty.
Getting acquired is just about the only way something that big “dies”. Activision swore many times they’d change, but it was never gonna happen. Too many wore rose tinted glasses and forgave them because of what Blizzard once was, dismissing what it had become.
Microsoft has been good to its subsidiary studios in recent years, but eventually it too will have to be dealt with in some form. My preferred method would be hitting it with the “monopoly-break-up-stick” again.
Exactly, it’s not so much cheering for how great it will be, moreso that it can’t really get any worse, and while xbox and Microsoft aren’t great, Actiblizzard completely destroyed themselves from a public perception.
20k is just the gaming division. From what I can tell by looking online they have over 200k employees
There was definitely a lot of support for this merger - people see it as ABK’s “redemption arc”, and there was a lot of excitement around ABK games coming to GamePass / other platforms like Steam because of this.
Ultimately this is how people think: What is in the merger for them? And they don’t think macro, but just simple things like “now I can finally get this game on [platform]”
Xbox hasn’t been Xbox since 2011.
<company> is not a friend.
