Another week, another round of people in the games industry losing their jobs. In what is worryingly becoming all too familiar, Microsoft have announced another round of layoffs, attributed to the purchase of Activision Blizzard.

This announcement comes off the back of a rough year for job losses in general, but particularly from Microsoft with nearly 2,000 people losing their jobs previously, as well as the closure of notable studios, including Arkane Austin and Hi-Fi Rush developer, Tango Gameworks (though we know that resolved better than initially anticipated).

Reporting on this at The Verge, the news comes off of the back of an internal memo that Xbox Head, Phil Spencer, sent to employees. He emphasised that no work on current games, devices (interesting), or experiences will be cancelled due to these layoffs. Although that might be the case, I assume there will be a resource / capacity implication, I expect you can’t lose 650 people without impacting your productivity.

Microsoft confirmed that the majority of layoffs would be coming from “corporate and supporting functions”. I always feel a little uneasy with this type of wording, as it feels like saying “it’s ok, it’s isn’t the important people”, though I may be reading too much into this.

You can read the full memo from Phil Spencer below:

“For the past year, our goal has been to minimize disruption while welcoming new teams and enabling them to do their best work. As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we have made the decision to eliminate approximately 650 roles across Microsoft Gaming "” mostly corporate and supporting functions "” to organize our business for long term success.

I know that this is difficult news to hear. We are deeply grateful for the contributions of our colleagues who are learning they are impacted. In the US, we're supporting them with exit packages that include severance, extended healthcare, and outplacement services to help with their transition; outside the US packages will differ according to location. 

With these changes, our corporate and supporting teams and resources are aligned for sustainable future growth, and can better support our studio teams and business units with programs and resources that can scale to meet their needs. Separately, as part of running the business, there are some impacts to other teams as they adapt to shifting priorities and manage the lifecycle and performance of games. No games, devices or experiences are being cancelled and no studios are being closed as part of these adjustments today.

Throughout our team's history, we have had great moments, and we have had challenging ones. Today is one of the challenging days. I know that going through more changes like this is hard, but even in the most trying times, this team has been able to come together and show one another care and kindness as we work to continue delivering for our players. We appreciate your support as we navigate these changes and we thank you for your compassion and respect for each other.

Phil”

From a business perspective, it makes sense that you might have a lot of folks who could be ‘surplus to requirement’ after buying a company as big as Activision Blizzard, particularly after you have reviewed what you need, and Microsoft is ultimately a business focussed on profit. But, that doesn’t detract from the real impact this has on people trying to get by in a difficult world, and a trillion-dollar company like Microsoft could probably afford to keep people around, or redeploy them so there wouldn’t be such a terrible impact on them.

We hope those affected can land on their feet and find other opportunities quickly, and are supported to do so.