It is remarkable that Microsoft owned Undead Labs for 9 years with 0 game releases and sold them off the year before their game comes out

At this point I don't know what Microsoft has been doing lately that isn't about laying off thousands of people, but at least I'm very happy that all these companies have been spun out of Xbox. Double Fine might not be a 10/10 studio, but it's great that they're indie again and not part of a bipolar company that keeps threatening every company they own with layoffs due to management's bad decisions.

In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.

I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.

Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. [...] We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3.

14 layers of management is insane. Isn't that like a month of going up and down the chain for simple decisions? No wonder they take forever making one game that turns out to be mediocre.

There's a lot of talk about focusing on their bigger projects and being more hands-on with studios, which is worrying. Usually management messing with development makes the game worse.

This might be the first time in a long while studios didn't just straight up closed by M$ but instead gone indie or sold off.

Best possible outcome for those studios at least. Whether all the other changes have any positive impact, I guess we'll see. I'm not too hopeful though.

I suppose letting these studios return to being independent is technically an improvement over Microsoft just shutting them down.

This is all MSFT spin.

The studios mentioned don't all have enough funding to continue to be operational at their current burn rates. Those studios will be doing their own layoffs or may not survive at all.

Those studios account for under 30% of the 1600 jobs that MSFT is removing from their payroll today. As the day goes on there will be news that breaks of other studios under their banner that have layoffs which contribute to the total mentioned. It's likely that their individual stories will be lost under this initial announcement.

What the fuck does 14 layers of management accomplish even

I cannot think of a less successful publisher than Microsoft. A wealth of titles and talent and they squandered entirely, cancelled everything that probably didn’t meet imaginary revenue targets and sent thousands of people to the street. They literally can’t release a fucking game to save their shitty subscription service. And now more get sent out to save money for their bullshit AI nonsense.

They should make mojang indie again

"The next decade of gaming will be larger, more global [...]"

I'm positive this is just austerity measures after folding in activision. They're probably finding more and more ways to offshore american and western european jobs to poorer nations where they can pay the employees less $$$.

Money is the only motivation. It's not about producing better art, just more profits.

Boycott Xbox

Resetting Xbox? Wasn’t that a cool trick in like the Morrowind days, cmon guys, you pedophile defending scumbags need to come up with some new fucking material

Probably needed considering how mediocre they've done this generation, but ouch. Also, I guess this means game pass didn't pan out as a bet