A year after the Xbox and Activision Blizzard buyout, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse for the Diablo and COD developers. Following the acquisition, around 1,900 employees were immediately laid off. Then, 400 employees, primarily workers in California and the mobile division, were axed in September 2024. However, this effort, the so-called effort to eliminate redundancies and streamline operations, seems to have yielded no results.
Instead, there was a ‘big exodus’ of studio founders and talents. Blizzard’s president, Mike Ybarra, and chief design officer, Allen Adham, left the company after the acquisition. It also led to the cancellation of Tony Hawk’s COD and a survival game that was in development for 6 long years.
“Nobody really knows what
“They’re at a point of real crisis, and we’ve reported at Bloomberg, and a lot of people have kind of seen the obvious,” said Schreier.
In October 2023, Microsoft and
“Ironically, as a result of making this purchase, of Activision Blizzard,
If asked a year ago, Schreier admits that he, and many others in Activision Blizzard, were extremely optimistic about the
“Phil Spencer was flying around, and he came to Blizzard’s campus, and people were lining up to say hi to him and take selfies with him,” reminisced Schreier in the interview. Then what sealed the deal for the developers was Spencer’s excitement about the projects– games that they were working on.
“[…] He came in and people had prepared, like, these PowerPoint presentations to show to him. And he was like, ‘No. I wanna see the games. I wanna play the games,'” Schreier adds. “[He] seemed, like, this, like, benevolent leader who was coming in to, like, save them from Bobby Kotick and his regime.”
During his 32-year-long tenure, former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick was always seen as a cold, ruthless capitalist. Many players felt that Kotick’s focus on monetization and profit negatively impacted the quality of games. From the developers’ side, they felt unionization efforts were made difficult and a gender-discriminating culture was fostered. Being freed from his shackles was liberating, to say the least.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for Spencer to face reality and do it in the worst way possible.
“And then 3 months after that, Phil Spencer sent out an email that sounded like a Bobby Kotick email. Sounded like any corporate, like, executive email saying, ‘because of market realities, we have to reshift’ […] and essentially cut the jobs of 1,900 people, including many at Blizzard, and it was just devastating for people,” said Schreier. “[…] So it feels like […] this savior in Microsoft has turned out to just be another, like, frigging unstable corporate parent.”
But Activision Blizzard’s misery might not stop there as
“I think even at the top of
