Stunned devs left scrambling for livelihoods in wake of yesterday's layoff bloodbath: 'In the end the contributions didn't matter'
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?"
Other devs have been left in even more precarious situations. Chiro Fujita, former senior character artist working on Blizzard's now-cancelled survival game, wrote that «Blizzard was my dream company, but sadly today I got laid off with other incredibly talented people,» adding that he needed «time to process» events, but had «no time because I'm on work visa.»
Bafflingly, the devs who learnt they were laid-off relatively early are the lucky ones. Per a tweet from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, some devs found themselves reaching out to him, an unaffiliated reporter, to find out if they had kept their jobs or not amidst the chaos.
Even more devs have reflected on the sheer years of experience that have gone to waste as the layoffs cut people loose. Olivia Burk, who works at Obsidian and was not part of the Blizzard layoffs but worked at the company previously, wrote that «the projects I gave four years of my life to while working at Blizzard were cancelled, with essentially the whole team getting laid off…
»The industry really sucks sometimes. I know more people that lost jobs today than kept them."
Another laid-off dev, former principle sound designer Chris
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