One of the dominant stories in both 2023 and 2024 within the gaming industry is the layoffs that continue to happen in companies both big and small. It seems like we can’t go a full month, or even a couple of weeks, without having some serious layoffs happen that could affect the industry as a whole. Yesterday was another case of that, as Xbox revealed that they were laying off 650 workers, who, according to Phil Spencer, were “redundant positions” that “wouldn’t affect projects or game development.” Regardless of “spin,” many weren’t happy with this, including the Blizzard Workers Union, who called out this latest set of layoffs.
As revealed by The Gamer, Samuel Cooper, a longtime Blizzard employee and one of the people who helped organize a massive workers union at the company after all the terrible times that happened in recent years, made a statement saying that other dev teams need to get unionized. More specifically, they need to “protect each other” from what’s consistently happening to those who do the most work, yet are left holding the bag when things go wrong:
“Every worker deserves a voice on the job and a say over the impact of job cuts. While we would hope that a company like Microsoft with $88 billion in profits last year could achieve ‘long term success’ without destroying the livelihoods of 650 of our colleagues, heartless layoffs like these have become all too common. We stand in solidarity with everyone who lost their job today and encourage all video game workers to join with us and form unions so we can protect each other.”
If anyone knows what can happen when “people at the top run wild,” it’s Cooper and the others at Blizzard. Let’s not forget that the company’s former CEO ran roughshod over many people, especially female employees, and allowed all kinds of terrible behavior that went unchecked until a massive lawsuit was brought against him and the company. Even then, the CEO got off easy and got a MASSIVE paycheck due to the Microsoft merger.
As we said before, Phil Spencer tried to “lessen the blow” of these layoffs by saying that they won’t “affect games or studios,” but that doesn’t stop the layoffs from costing people their jobs, income and security. 650 people is a LOT of people in one shot to layoff, and remember, Microsoft laid off 1900 people earlier in the year. Hopefully, people will listen to Cooper’s message and try to stop this from happening again.
