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Blizzard President Mike Ybarra out as well.
Ybarra gone is great news. Its sad that 9% of the 22k employees at Activision-Blizzard-King have their roles eliminated because they overlap, but smaller teams tend to be easier to focus during development.
Ideally, anyone in leadership that was put there under Kotick should be investigated and eliminated if needed as well, since nothing Kotick did is trustworthy. And hopefully many of the 1900 employees laid off are.
Where are all the platitudes about how this merger would be good for the videogame industry now?
Regulators all over the world really bungled this by allowing it to happen. Only gonna get worse from here.
I am not in a position to judge if this merger will be good for the industry, but this round of layoffs says nothing about that either.
On an individual level it is terrible for the people involved. But on the business level this is a perfectly normal and healthy thing to do and says absolutely nothing about the state of the games industry.
Their reputation for quality is long gone now anyways. At this point it might even be better if Blizzard gradually fades away entirely.
Having less employees might actually help improve quality assuming a good leadership is in place.
These layoffs really aren't a sign of anything and wouldn't be something regulators would care about in the first place. Layoffs happen after just about every company merger or acquisition. There will be redundancies, structure changes, budget changes. Some people get their positions shuffled, others just don't have a good fit in the new scheme. Nothing to do with the health of the business or the competition impact on the industry. It definitely sucks for those impacted, and I hope they land on their feet soon.
That absolutely impacts the competition in the industry. Competition isn't just about protecting consumers. Consolidation hurts the competition among employers, vendors/partners, lenders/creditors, pretty much every single possible relationship a business can have.
And yes, layoffs happen with pretty much every merger and acquisition. That's a huge part of why those are bad, and why most developed countries have regulatory agencies responsible for preventing that, most of which have suffered from regulatory capture.
How much did Microsoft pay you to post here?
Oh cmon, it's pretty silly to throw the "paid shill" thing out just because I don't think these particular layoffs are a regulatory issue. If expected layoffs were a regulatory issue, mergers would almost never occur. Maybe that's your preference, and that's fine. But that's not the current stance of most regulatory agencies.
It's a regulatory issue that the servers are occurring lol.
In the US we have laws against this, that have been either ignored by the FTC or overruled by corrupt judges for decades
Can you please cite any law that could be interpreted to consider a layoff of ~1000 employees as anti competitive? I'm just not seeing it. Not a shill, not a hidden astroturfer, and I've even been impacted by post-acquisition layoffs twice in my career. I just don't think this is a legal issue or a valid reason to kill the acquisition.
Assuming you're in the US, you should have learned about the Sherman Antitrust Act in school, so that would be a good place for you to start looking if you're interested.
Section 1:
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.
Section 2:
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor [. . . ]
Nowhere does it mention that "competition" is only related to consumer prices. It's covers all transactional relationships. There have been further anti-trust laws passed in the US, but this is basically where it all started.
The FTC and DOJ have also partnered in recent years on other labor-related monopoly issues. For example, the FTC is expected to vote this year on banning non-compete clauses from employment agreements.
I know what the Sherman Antitrust Act is. I'm asking you to cite anything at all, a section of the law, an application in a case, anything, where this law or any other could be interpreted as prohibiting these layoffs. I'm sorry, but if the argument is that ~1000 layoffs is somehow impacting competition in the industry, that's just not convincing to me. And again, you want to argue that other impacts of this acquisition impact competition, that's entirely reasonable, but if you're hinging all of this on the idea that a couple thousand layoffs violate the basic text of the Sherman Antitrust Act, I do not believe your interpretation of that act is correct.
I literally cited the law dude, you're just engaging in conservative bot troll rhetoric now.
You haven't cited anything that actually applies here? Like, at all? If you think the two small snippets from Sherman make your argument for you, I don't think I'm the one with a legal understanding gap. And per your other message, I agree with you. I don't usually ask for something like that, unless somebody is making a really strong claim that needs backed up, which is the case here.
Fwiw, I really don't care about you proving yourself right or not, so feel free not to. The merger is already through, and the regulators obviously agree with my interpretation of the laws. If you have something stronger to cite though, I'd be happy to hear out your argument. Otherwise, we can just call it good and agree to disagree.
Seriously, asking someone on Lemmy to cite case studies. Ridiculous. Companies have staffs of people they pay millions of dollars for to do legal research and you expect to get that for free on Lemmy? Go pay tuition for law school if you want more info
At least Bobby is still gone. That ghoul would also be laying people off right now with the way the industry has been flinging hatchets.
CEO's are going to CEO. That's a poor excuse for a merger.
Yeah it probably won’t be great
Get ready for all the xbox fanboy bootlicking downvotes
Lemmy isn’t exactly full of corporate simps
Except when exclaiming what a fantastic value YouTube premium is
I'm sure this will make their games better.
I mean… how could it make them worse?
It is a small indi company afterall
I worked at ABK for a while and I honestly can’t think of that many people in my department that could be let go without major repercussions.