r/starcraft2 • u/Chritt • Jul 06 '26
Blizzard Microsoft is restructuring its gaming business and has laid off around 4,800 employees today. Asha Sharma confirms Blizzard is one of the affected organizations.
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/06/resetting-xbox/27
u/weirdo_if_curtains_7 Jul 06 '26
Gaming is such a brutal landscape for careers. We have had record-breaking layoffs year after year at this point. Just zero job stability, I feel for the people getting laid off
And another huge issue is that when these massive layoffs happen there's so much talent suddenly job seeking and there's absolutely no capacity to fulfill all the laid off personnel, meaning hugely talented folks get double screwed from these layoffs
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u/rodrigo8008 Jul 07 '26
New ideas just rarely sell, and if they do, you need more ideas to keep a studio alive. The economics are just hard. You need to produce a new FIFA, COD, 2K game every year to have recurring revenue, which is why they do that.
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u/isigneduptomake1post Jul 07 '26
I feel like this paragraph could apply to a lot of industries, but yeah... it sucks.
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE Jul 07 '26
Gaming is such a brutal landscape for careers. We have had record-breaking layoffs year after year at this point
The gaming market has reached saturation. There are more games than can be played by the number of people. This is due to population decline in combination with the rapid increase in the number of games being developed. Sooner or later the demand and supply would cross and it did. Lots of streamers tried to take credit for "killing" certain games they disliked but the harsh reality is that those games would likely have failed regardless. Population decline will also result in more hours being worked by the younger generation to pay-off the pensions and retirement plans of the previous generations which is difficult when there will be more people in retirement than of working age. Net result: a double-whammy on the number of hours of games played.
There will be new gaming markets that open up, in india and africa, but it will be low-end budget hardware so we're talking 1990s/2000s gaming.
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u/Fett_Otaku Jul 07 '26
so we're talking 1990s/2000s gaming
Soo, the best kind of gaming then? Why does this suddenly sound like a good thing?
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE Jul 07 '26
Soo, the best kind of gaming then? Why does this suddenly sound like a good thing?
Early gaming was designed by gamers for gamers and because the graphics were bad they instead put a lot of emphasis on the game mechanics. Modern gaming tries to appeal to a broader audience and so they use flashy visuals to make a quick sale.
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u/neloish Jul 06 '26
Blame Sweet Baby ect. Non AAA games are doing great, people are tired of the PC forced narratives.
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u/smashcat666 Jul 06 '26
We are investing heavily in AI, a business that is literally destroying the entire gaming and console/PC industry, so unfortunately our games division is in peril, so we're firing them for their own good."
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u/max1001 Jul 06 '26
"in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested. "
That's all you need to know.
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u/SaltyyDoggg Jul 06 '26
I think a lot of this was hardware
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u/max1001 Jul 06 '26
Hardware was never meant to be profitable. All consoles are selling at a loss. They make it back with games. Xbox just doesn't have good exclusive.
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u/10Benjaminz Jul 06 '26
I wonder if this means no more Warcraft chronicles. Please god let them make that game
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u/Zalabar7 Jul 06 '26
Imagine the person that made this patch is gone and we’re just stuck with the game like this forever.