After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.
No console is your friend. Only PC can be friend.
Yeah! With my Micorsoft Wintendo
linux is my only friend
Exactly.
Moral of the story: build your friends.
*own them
What if I’m renting them?
Bad. You either own something or you are a looser.
Renting means playing on the timeline of capitalism. You should buy it as cheap as possible so you can enjoy it when you want, not when they want you to.
I mean, I’d be buying new laptop pretty often anyway, because I’m using it for work, so in this specific case it’s actually cheaper to rent. Though it remains to be seen whether they’ll lend me a new one once I return this one because they’ll be the ones losing money here.
Companies are not your friends.
except mabye privacy ones
Are you sure?
of couse not that’s why i said the word mabye
Yeah you’re right. Still, companies gonna company, we should make people are friends instead.
Xbox hasn’t been Xbox since 2011.
the tone around the (Microsoft-Actiblizzard) merger was largely dominated by vocally supportive Xbox players and commentators
Excuse me, what? I guess my social bubble is thick as fuck, because I didn’t see a single person supporting that megacorp scale merger.
These two concurrent pushes (of marketing good vibes image) resulted in a landscape that was, at best, reluctant to discuss the potential harm of its acquisitions and, at worst, actively rejected it because Xbox’s “good guy” image and messaging had so thoroughly seeped into the foundations of shared community spaces and broader gaming consciousness
Feels like a load of bullshit, then again I don’t even know where the cool kids hang out, so it could be me.
The superficial artifice of Xbox’s brand permeates every corner of video game marketing. It’s an endless parade of phrases that don’t quite mean anything and campaigns designed to romanticise and humanise the company’s seemingly bottomless appetite for growth at all costs.
I guess this is why I didn’t buy into the previous paragraphs, I just assumed people were “too smart” to fall for so much corporate bullshit.
Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history.
3 trillion with roughly 20k employees now. I wonder how much of that value is assigned to its workforce, like “of the 3 trillion our company’s worth, our workers are worth 100 billion” or something.
I’ve never encountered the ridiculous idea that Xbox was “community-first.” 100% of everybody has always known that Xbox and Microsoft are rapacious and exploitative hawkers. Nothing has been shattered here, except the financial stability of thousands of tech workers. Which is a normal part of the alienation of capitalist society.
“made redundant” is such a terrible euphemism. They were fired. Say it like it is.
It also shows they have no idea what they’re doing. Redundancies are good for tech.
It’s not good in tech to have 2000 people employed who have nothing to do.
I agree with that. So the contracts made beforehand should reflect this and expire naturally rather than actively laying employees off.
Or is the title clickbait?If you need to fire a large number of employees then someone in management failed to manage.
You’re forgetting there was a merger. Jobs that were necessary when there were 2 separate companies are now not necessary when there is only 1 merged company.
Also it seems a large number of layoffs were for:
- blizzards survival game that was reportedly in development hell after 6 years of development
- the physical games department because Xbox is going all digital
Depends on the ratio to total employed. A team of 3000 with 2000 with nothing to do, for sure! 20,000 with 2000 as backups/currently learning the ropes? A bit more reasonable.
You don’t employ people as backups. What you do is you share knowledge across the existing people so there is no single point of failure.
Will there is a distinction between the two though right? When you get fired, that’s it. You just stop working there. Being made redundant you also get given X amount of extra pay depending on their policies and the laws of where they are to make up for the time that they may be unemployed between jobs.
Thanks for the insight! I look at it from a European/German perspective and here that distinction doesn’t really exist or doesn’t really make a difference. TIL!
It’s also worth noting when companies combine there are many positions that are redundant as things are shuffled around, that is literally different then just laying off people because of company performance or w/e
I’d go even further: “They were fired so rich executives and shareholders could become more rich.”
“Those freeloaders were eating from my profit pie!”
