Tumgik
#Layoffs
dduane · 4 months
Text
And to think I wrote for these folks, back in the day. Never again.
14K notes · View notes
readontheinternet · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
It was only temporary, but still...
22K notes · View notes
mckitterick · 4 months
Text
Hasbro, owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, lays off 1,100 workers
Tumblr media
The corporate owner of Wizards of the Coast (maker of D&D and Magic) announced it will lay off 1100 employees just two weeks before Christmas. Hasbro had already fired 800 workers in January of this year.
At the time, CEO Cocks trumpeted the new corporate plan: focus on fewer and larger brands, increase digital development, and invest in direct-to-consumer and licensed deals like Baldur's Gate 3, demonstrating his disconnect with customers.
Cocks first became Hasbro CEO in February 2022, and now gets an annual salary of $1.5 million. While the company's income dropped and 800 workers went jobless, this one executive received $9.4 million in total compensation last year, an amount that could have saved many creative jobs if even slightly trimmed. Instead, 1100 more actual workers will go.
No reduction in executive salary, bonuses, or additional compensation was announced.
874 notes · View notes
cardboard-crack · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media
786 notes · View notes
devsgames · 29 days
Text
I'm sorry but for people who cheer on mass game industry layoffs because they think it's some kind of upheaval that is going to "topple the AAA industry" or "teach them a lesson": I hate to break it to you but AAA studios have a metric shitload of money and despite what their press releases say, they really aren't hurting as much as they'd have you think right now. Thousands of jobs lost is a temporary setback to them; if it was actually a last resort move they wouldn't have all simultaneously put themselves in a position where they had to do it in the first place. These studios have been around for decades and will continue to be around, and they will continue to operate just as they have for the last thirty years because they have huge vaults and no morals. They aren't learning a lesson from this because most of them saw it coming but would never admit that.
Know who is being permanently impacted by games layoffs?
It's the indie studio making sick ass games you'll never get to play because they laid everyone off when a publisher tried to save money by pulling all their funding. The hundreds of workers who woke up one morning and found out they suddenly have no job to put food on the table for their children. The international workers who were let go from the job that supplies their visa that helps them stay in the country. The thousands of students who now have to compete over a pool of a dozen job openings, who will work in studios where all the senior staff and leadership who would normally be there to help mentor them into their roles were fired. The disabled workers who now no longer have health or insurance coverage for their survival. The workers who didn't get laid off but survived to see all their friends and coworkers lose their livelihoods for completely arbitrary reasons and whose morale has all but been completely obliterated. The workers in the Global South working for outsourcing companies who were relying on cancelled projects from AAA studios to put food on their tables.
So whenever you're inclined to assume that the suffering of workers is somehow teaching rich people a lesson, remember that no, it doesn't actually and almost never will. All it does is teach thousands of talented workers in the video game industry that games were never - and will never - be worth it.
561 notes · View notes
iww-gnv · 2 months
Text
The entire game industry is still reeling from yesterday's bombshell announcement that Microsoft—hot on the heels of its $69 billion acquisition of Activision—would be laying off 1,900 employees across Activision-Blizzard and Xbox. Inevitably, Twitter is awash with reactions highlighting the human cost, both from dazed devs waking up in a world in which they no longer have jobs, and from others wondering what this all means for the months and years ahead. The posts by former Blizzard devs are too many to count. "After years of applying," wrote former QA learning specialist Cole McElwain in a much-retweeted post, "I finally secure a job at Blizzard. I move to California and am welcomed with an incredible team. I couldn't be more excited to start… "Four months into the job, I'm laid off. What the hell, Microsoft?"
644 notes · View notes
ohnoitstbskyen · 2 months
Note
So, considering what's going on with Riot right now, do you think Arcane Season 2 got caught up in all of this restructuring?
Yes and no. Arcane season 2 is part of the reason for the restructuring.
As I understand it, internally at Riot, after Arcane was a huge (and more importantly: prestigious!) success, the decision was made to basically hand the entirety of the game's lore and story over to the Entertainment division within Riot. These are the people in large part responsible for projects like Arcane, K/DA, Heartsteel, that animated series China got, all that sort of thing.
The writers at Riot were basically told to flat out stop producing new content and lore for the game - that's why there's BEEN no new story content for League for over a year - because everything was going to be consolidated under the Entertainment division from now on. This is why Riot started talking about "One Runeterra" and "Arcane is going to be canon" and so on.
The success of Arcane convinced executives that what League of Legends needs is a singular cohesive brand with its most successful public property leading the charge, Arcane is going to be the gateway drug, the hook on the end of the line that brings new players and new paying customers into the exciting world of the League of Legends multimedia IP universe!
Nevermind that Arcane's story and worldbuilding is fundamentally incompatible with >checks notes< the overwhelming majority of Runeterra as it exists and enormous compromises would have to be made to either the world of Runeterra or Arcane itself to make it work. Arcane is the big shiny prestigious mainstream Emmy-award winning project that every executive wants to put their name next to, and like companies Pivoting To Video in 2015 because Facebook showed them inflated viewership stats, Riot Games is Pivoting To Arcane. It's better than them pivoting to crypto and NFTs, at least, although I know for a fact that high ranking people at Riot tried to make that happen too.
Now, the primary cause for all of these games industry layoffs is that interest rates aren't zero anymore. Borrowing money isn't free, the curve of constant growth has ever so slightly slowed, taking on debt is becoming a little tiny bit more risky than it was previously, and corporations are responding to this with massive rounds of layoffs and constriction to show "financial responsibility" and prove to shareholders that they are prioritizing core growth strategies and blah blah blah etc. They're also trying to kneecap the growing labor movement in the games industry and exert downwards pressure on wages, but the interest rates seem to have been the main thing.
In Riot's particular case, a secondary reason is they want to pivot the focus of the company to support their One Runeterra pipe dream, so a lot of the people who got fired at Riot are writers, artists, creative leads and sometimes extremely senior and successful staff who are now surplus to requirements. This is also why Riot shut down Riot Forge in the same round of layoffs - can't have a bunch of talented indie devs going off making video games that don't adhere to the new One Runeterra policy. What if someone played Mageseeker and got confused how there can be mages all over Demacia but somehow there are no mages in Arcane's Piltover and Zaun. That's a plot hole! People write snarky articles about that sort of thing. It turns off new consumers! What if Cinema Sins makes a video making fun of it?!?
So yeah. A bunch of cocaine-addled fame hungry executive vultures at Riot are absolutely gagging on their own d*cks to put their name next to Arcane related projects, and since they were going to be screwing hundreds of people out of their careers, healthcare, and in some cases their fucking visa status anyway, it seems to have presented a nice opportunity to clear the board for their latest Visionary Scheme for the company IP.
That is as I understand the situation, anyway. I'm a bitter old man and most of what I hear is second hand and anonymous gossip through my social networks, take what I say with a grain of salt, but I've followed this company for (oh god) twelve years now and I have developed a tragically keen understanding of how its executive class operates.
489 notes · View notes
reasonsforhope · 2 months
Text
Btw, if you really just Need A Job (tm)
I'd really recommend looking into care work
Care work here is specifically being a home care aid, a care aid or assistant at any kind of residential home.
This for usually for elderly or disabled adults - and those are the ones that tend to be most entry level, from what I've seen, but also for mental health, addiction recovery etc. (With the obvious caveat that some of these jobs will be more emotionally intense than others)
I'm so serious about this guys. I was applying to jobs in care work for just three weeks, starting a couple days before Christmas, and in that time I got three interviews, two jobs offers, and five additional interview requests
Care work needs people CONSTANTLY
because it's a huge sector but very hard for them to keep staff long-term. Partly because it can be high burn-out, and there's definitely toxic places out there you should watch out for. And partly because a lot of people think care work is beneath them
AND they ACTUALLY MEAN IT when they say they're entry level. Because it's so hard for them to get staff that a lot of them will advertise super aggressively that they will train you themselves. A lot of them will straight up pay for your CPR and First Aid certifications, once they hire you, too (and you can get a leg up on applications by getting a CPR/First Aid certification for like. $30 to $80, at least in the US). They also accept experience taking care of elderly/disabled/etc. family members as real experience
Like, obviously don't do it if you hate taking care of people, but if you're open to it, it's probably by far your best shot of getting hired rn, statistically
(eta: Genuinely disclaimer that it can be super taxing emotionally and large portions of the industry are indeed fucked, and def don't take a job in this field if you're gonna be an asshole to the people you're caring for, but sometimes you just need whatever job you can get.)
Seriously, though, the first time I applied for a care work job (in October 2023, yes short timeline, like I said there's some toxic workplaces etc. out there), I applied to like ten or fifteen jobs over the course of a week or so. Within three weeks, I was working.
(And they did provide all of the training, fwiw)
If you need a job and no one is hiring, seriously consider looking into it
534 notes · View notes
dinchenix · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
Hey Tumblr, the layoff wave has reached me as well… So, from now on I am looking for a new project to join. Any pointers to who may be looking for a Pixel Artist are greatly appreciated!💙 My portfolio can be found here (in the progress of updating): artstation.com/dinchenix
Additionally, I am also looking for Social Media positions for indie game projects - again - any pointers welcome!
I am based in Germany, and comfortable in English or German-speaking teams. DMs and mail are open for further information!
181 notes · View notes
askagamedev · 7 months
Note
a lot of people are probably asking you this, but if they aren't... do you have any clue what's going on with bioware? first moving swtor to another studio, which seems like it can be both a good or a bad thing, and now they're laying off 50 more people? studio veterans included?
this just seems like a very weird move to me, if not outright shitty. i want to believe in bioware, i love their games, no matter how flawed they are, but in the three years i've been familiar with them, things seem to be getting worse and worse. i know that DAD is in alpha so probably this layoff won't affect its quality too much, but again, that looks like a terrible move towards the employees themselves and the studio's more distant future.
Bioware is basically following the publisher mandate. In March of this year, EA declared that they were going to cut roughly 6% of their workforce (~800 layoffs) to lower costs, likely because they (like many tech companies) over-hired during the pandemic and need to correct the burn rate to appease their shareholders. These 50 devs being cut are Bioware's unfortunate sacrifice to the layoff declaration. As to whom and why, I suspect it is a combination of things.
Tumblr media
Bioware probably had some kind of incubation team working on a secret new project that wasn't a sequel to an existing current franchise. I know that they would often have one or two such teams going at any given time - Anthem was one such project, as was the short-lived Shadow Realms project. New projects like that are much riskier than franchise sequels, so it is likely that the publisher decided that the risk moving forward was too high and they cancelled the experimental projects in favor of focusing on their established brands (Mass Effect and Dragon Age).
Tumblr media
It is also likely that some of the long-term veterans are quite expensive to keep - they have high salaries and have been around long enough to collect on many of the big benefits EA offers, like sabbatical leave and the like. There's also the real possibility that there could be some bad blood or major creative differences between the current studio leadership and some of those veterans that were let go.
Tumblr media
My heart goes out to those affected and I really do hope they land on their feet. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that employers never deserve any more loyalty than they're willing to give their employees. The employer will never choose an employee over its own survival, so we as workers should expect to do the same for ourselves. I never consider long tenure at an employer to be worth much when it comes to the business decisions, because I know how little it is worth when all is said and done. Business gonna business.
[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]
Got a burning question you want answered?
Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
Frequent Questions: The FAQ
259 notes · View notes
animentality · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
85 notes · View notes
destielmemenews · 4 months
Text
Tumblr media
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek sent a memo to staff that blamed a slowing economy and said that too many people were hired in 2020 and 2021 when capital was cheaper.
source 1
source 2
source 3
97 notes · View notes
Text
The New Democratic Party and a group of labour unions are calling on the federal government to change Canada’s employment insurance rules so that new parents, especially new mothers, are not denied regular EI benefits if they get laid off. In a letter sent Thursday to Randy Boissonault, Canada’s employment minister, and NDP MP Daniel Blaikie, along with the Canadian Labour Congress, Unifor and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, are demanding an end to “gender discrimination” in the program. A copy of the letter shared with Global News stated: “Under the current EI Act, special and regular benefits can be combined up to a 50-week maximum. Using qualifying hours for regular benefits reduces what you can claim in maternity and parental benefits, and vice-versa. “This means that women who have a baby and access maternity benefits lose their protection in the event of a lay-off,” the letter to Boissonnault reads.
Continue Reading
Tagging @politicsofcanada
83 notes · View notes
Text
Mass tech worker layoffs and the soft landing
Tumblr media
As tech giants reach terminal enshittification, hollowed out to the point where they are barely able to keep their end-users or business customers locked in, the capital classes are ready for the final rug-pull, where all the value is transfered from people who make things for a living to people who own things for a living.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/tech-workers/#sharpen-your-blades-boys
“Activist investors” have triggered massive waves of tech layoffs, firing so many tech workers so quickly that it’s hard to even come up with an accurate count. The total is somewhere around 280,000 workers:
https://layoffs.fyi/
These layoffs have nothing to do with “trimming the fat” or correcting the hiring excesses of the lockdown. They’re a project to transfer value from workers, customers and users to shareholders. Google’s layoff of 12,000 workers followed fast on the heels of gargantuan stock buyback where the company pissed away enough money to pay those 12,000 salaries…for the next 27 years.
The equation is simple: the more companies invest in maintenance, research, development, moderation, anti-fraud, customer service and all the other essential functions of the business, the less money there is to remit to people who do nothing and own everything.
The tech sector has grown and grown since the first days of the PC — which were also the first days of neoliberalism (literally: the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail). But despite a long-run tight labor market for tech workers, there have been two other periods of mass layoffs — the 2001 dotcom collapse and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
Both of those were mass extinction events for startups and the workers who depended on them. The mass dislocations of those times were traumatic, and each one had its own aftermath. The dotcom collapse freed up tons of workers, servers, offices and furniture, and a massive surge in useful, user-centric technologies. The Great Financial Crisis created the gig economy and a series of exploitative, scammy “bro” startups, from cryptocurrency grifts to services like Airbnb, bent on converting the world’s housing stock into unlicensed hotel rooms filled with hidden cameras.
Likewise, the post-lockdown layoffs have their own character: as Eira May writes on StackOverflow, many in the vast cohort of laid-off tech workers is finding it relatively easy to find new tech jobs, outside of the tech sector:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/03/19/whats-different-about-these-layoffs/
May cites a Ziprecruiter analysis that claims that 80% of laid-off tech workers found tech jobs within 3 months, and that there are 375,000 open tech roles in American firms today (and that figure is growing):
https://www.ziprecruiter.com/blog/laid-off-tech-workers/
There are plenty of tech jobs — just not in tech companies. They’re in “energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more” — firms with intensely technical needs and no technical staff. Historically, many of these firms would have outsourced their technological back-ends to the Big Tech firms that just destroyed so many jobs to further enrich the richest people on Earth. Now, those companies are hiring ex-Big Tech employees to run their own services.
The Big Tech firms are locked in a race to see who can eat their seed corn the fastest. Spreading tech expertise out of the tech firms is a good thing, on balance. Big Tech’s vast profits come from smaller businesses in the real economy who couldn’t outbid the tech giants for tech talent — until now.
These mass layoff speak volumes about the ethos of Silicon Valley. The same investors who rent their garments demanding a bailout for Silicon Valley Bank to “help the everyday workers” are also the loudest voices for mass layoffs and transfers to shareholders. The self-styled “angel investor” who spent the weekend of SVB’s collapse all-caps tweeting dire warnings about the impact on “the middle class” and “Main Street” also gleefully DM’ed Elon Musk in the runup to his takeover of Twitter:
Day zero
Sharpen your blades boys 🔪
2 day a week Office requirement = 20% voluntary departures.
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma
For many technologists, the allure of digital tools is the possibility of emancipation, a world where we can collaborate to make things without bosses or masters. But for the bosses and masters, automation’s allure is the possibility of getting rid of workers, shattering their power, and replacing them with meeker, cheaper, more easily replaced labor.
That means that workers who go from tech firms to firms in the real economy might be getting lucky — escaping the grasp of bosses who dream of a world where technology lets them pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom on wages, benefits and working conditions, to employers who are glad to have them as partners in their drive to escape Big Tech’s grasp.
Tomorrow (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.
Image: University of North Texas Libraries (modified) https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth586821/
[Image ID: A group of firefighters holding a safety net under a building from which a man is falling; he is supine and has his hands behind his head. The sky has a faint, greyscale version of the 'Matrix Waterfall' effect. The building bears a Google logo.]
290 notes · View notes
saywhat-politics · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
615 notes · View notes
iww-gnv · 2 months
Text
Esports Illustrated: "Activision Blizzard Reportedly let go of 83% of Esports Staff"
On Sunday, January 28, the Call of Duty League Boston Breach Major I tournament concluded. It was an incredible event, with Toronto Ultra coming out victorious in a 4-1 victory over Atlanta FaZe. However, just two days later, Activision Blizzard have reportedly let go of 60 out of the 72 staff in their esports division, leaving just 12 employees. This is a cut of 83%, and sees some of the most talented members of the esports community without work.
Read the rest here.
156 notes · View notes