576
Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
576 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59381 readers
1037 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's worth mentioning thought that Microsoft did step in after they bought Bethesda to get the game to even run at 30fps on their consoles.
However, I very much doubt that they would have tried to compromise the vision of the game after paying premium for the company. Keep in mind that Bethesda had delivered some beloved games in the past.
The mistake was to trust them. A mistake that it looks like they don't want to repeat with Blizzard judging by the huge amount of layoffs.
I don't buy that it was purely trust. If you're going to spend $69 billion you have to do your due diligence. You want to know what you're buying. I can imagine Bethesda not noticing they had a problem, they have been working on it for years and if you're so immersed into the development it can be hard to take a step back and take a good look at what you've made. But Microsoft was looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes. There are only 2 options: Either the Xbox division at Microsoft is completely incompetent or they knew they had a stinker and decided to sell it anyway.
They knew what they were buying - a beloved studio that has churned out tons of "classics" over the past couple decades, which has been able to sell and resell one of those classics (Skyrim) for like half a dozen different consoles.
There's actually a third option: Microsoft knew Starfield would sell, stinker or not, because Bethesda has a very loyal fanbase that will eat up anything they put out. It didn't matter to Microsoft whether the game was good or not, they knew they'd make their money either way.
That’s just option 2 I describes, in more words. Basically, they scammed Bethesda’s loyal fans.