Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
Learn to blow.

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According the article "The company’s self-named app, which allows players to make and share games, virtual goods, and other experiences with one another, hit new heights during the COVID lockdown in 2020 as a substitute for face-to-face interaction." So it's some metaverse shit. Company should have laid off everyone.
 
So it's some metaverse shit. Company should have laid off everyone.
VR Sandbox, closer to a less sex-RP version of VR Chat than a proper 'metaverse', which it significantly predates. Apparently it wasn't terrible, but it was like three niches deep in the gaming world. A perfectly sustainable product, but not for almost four hundred fucking staff. If it was sanely staffed at 25 or so developers and artists, it'd be more than fine. Look at those screenshots and tell me you can see the labors of three hundred people in that.
 
Learn to blow.

View attachment 7061377
According the article "The company’s self-named app, which allows players to make and share games, virtual goods, and other experiences with one another, hit new heights during the COVID lockdown in 2020 as a substitute for face-to-face interaction." So it's some metaverse shit. Company should have laid off everyone.
At this point, these game studios sound like money laundering fronts.

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It bears repeating - Teams is basically micromanagement spyware.


Along with the rest of Microsoft products.

"-Uhmm wagie, since you don't want to come to the cagie office, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and install Teams for communication..."
 
It bears repeating - Teams is basically micromanagement spyware.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rhoVo6Kkb8s
Along with the rest of Microsoft products.

"-Uhmm wagie, since you don't want to come to the cagie office, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and install Teams for communication..."
Wow, I never would have guessed Microsoft Teams can track the messages you're sending on Microsoft Teams, absolutely mindblowing. Should have put these in a list instead of making me watch your clickbait video so I'd know your shitty video wasn't worth watching.
 
Wow, I never would have guessed Microsoft Teams can track the messages you're sending on Microsoft Teams, absolutely mindblowing. Should have put these in a list instead of making me watch your clickbait video so I'd know your shitty video wasn't worth watching.
If you keep a twitch stream or YouTube video running then Teams will think you’re online.

Me being a turbo-autist means I can do a full days worth of work in the morning and appear online all afternoon whilst I’m gaming, watching videos, or taking a nap if I’ve hit the gym hard that morning.

I thought everyone knew that the reason Teams existed was so your manager could contact you during the hours you are paid to work for him?
 
If you keep a twitch stream or YouTube video running then Teams will think you’re online.

Me being a turbo-autist means I can do a full days worth of work in the morning and appear online all afternoon whilst I’m gaming, watching videos, or taking a nap if I’ve hit the gym hard that morning.

I thought everyone knew that the reason Teams existed was so your manager could contact you during the hours you are paid to work for him?

Lol… If one of you fags is a programmer or knows how to write scripts, I think there’s good money in making a productivity sim.

You run it, and it’ll pretend to work for you. Open documents, messages, scroll it in a rough approximation of reading speed, make appointments in Outlook, move them around and delete them.

Pay extra for the gold version, that’ll use Chat GPT to write emails and messages along the lines of: “Hey, just going over the latest report. There a few things I want to go over. Could you let me know when you’d be available for a Teams call?”
 
If you keep a twitch stream or YouTube video running then Teams will think you’re online.

Me being a turbo-autist means I can do a full days worth of work in the morning and appear online all afternoon whilst I’m gaming, watching videos, or taking a nap if I’ve hit the gym hard that morning.

I thought everyone knew that the reason Teams existed was so your manager could contact you during the hours you are paid to work for him?
I just explained to my boss that I keep my work laptop on the side and use my personal equipment on my personal machine (SaaS shop, just through a browser is my job ftmp) so they're used to my teams being idle 80% of the time. They asked about putting software on my personal machine, hard no. They asked about providing corporate equipment of similar capability and I quoted them the most expensive equivalents I could find, and they were suddenly ok with me just using my own.

For most places, just play the game in the corporate terms, they're not supergeniuses or raging dicks 90% of the time. Just gotta know how the penny pinchers think, and hit them in the quantifiable numbers instead of the theoretical ones. Helps to also consistently be ahead of your deliverables too.
 
It's happening
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Ubisoft Shareholder Claims Company Failed To Disclose Meetings With EA and Microsoft About IP Acquisition
An Ubisoft shareholder is planning a protest outside the company’s Paris offices after it claims the studio failed to disclose meetings regarding a potential acquisition.


First reported by IGN, AJ Investments, a firm with less than a 1% stake in Ubisoft, says that studio is “horribly mismanaged by current management”. In addition, the firm’s CEO Juraj Krúpa says that the company failed to disclose reported meetings with EA and Microsoft, among other interested parties, regarding potential acquisition of Ubisoft IPs.

Krúpa says that the company didn’t “appropriately” communicate its plans or talks with shareholders. Because of that, he is calling those “who are frustrated with the prolonged stagnation in Ubisoft’s stock performance and the lack of decisive action from the management team” to join them in protest in May.

Krúpa added that AJ Investments is ready to sue Ubisoft for “misleading investors”. He did add, however, that they are aware of Ubisoft management having a financial review of various strategic options that is being advised by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan

In a statement given to IGN, Ubisoft restated its past messaging that reviews of strategic and capitalistic options is ongoing at the company.

“The Board has established an ad-hoc independent Committee to oversee this formal and competitive process, so as to extract the best value from Ubisoft’s assets and franchises for all stakeholders,” the company said. “Ubisoft will inform the market in accordance with applicable regulations if and once a transaction materialises.”
 
If that’s true it’s a crank. Real money people go to lawyers, they don’t protest outside a company like a bunch of lefties.
Most like protest is smokescreen for first offers to major players.
Still funny with the NO faith in Assasin creed shadow.
Funny about cashout ip but, rip bozo won't be missed hope for best.
 


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Major Update
Posted
Wed, March 12
Letter To Spectre Fans
A message from our CEO about the future of Spectre Divide and Mountaintop Studios.

Dear Spectre Fans,

It’s been two weeks since we launched Spectre Divide Season 1: Flashpoint. We’re incredibly grateful for the positivity and support that you’ve shown over that short time.

Unfortunately, the Season 1 launch hasn’t achieved the level of success we needed to sustain the game and keep Mountaintop afloat.

We were optimistic about the first week. We’ve had ~400,000 players play, with a peak concurrent player count of ~10,000 across all platforms. But as time has gone on, we haven’t seen enough active players and incoming revenue to cover the day-to-day costs of Spectre and the studio.

Since the PC launch, we stretched our remaining capital as far as we could, but at this point, we're out of funding to support the game. This means Mountaintop will be closing its doors at the end of this week.

We expect to take Spectre offline within the next 30 days, but we plan on disabling new purchases and refunding money spent since Season 1 launch via the platforms. We’ll be following up with more information on this soon.

We pursued every avenue to keep going, including finding a publisher, additional investment, and/or an acquisition. In the end, we weren’t able to make it work. The industry is in a tough spot right now.

This is a painful update to share. We love Spectre, and we’re incredibly proud of what we built with this community.

From the entire team at Mountaintop, I want to thank the Spectre community for all your support these past few years. We’ve loved every minute, and we’re sincerely going to miss you. Special thanks to our incredible investors too, without which Spectre wouldn’t have been possible.

This has always been a passion project for us, born out of love for this genre. An indie team of insanely talented individuals who came together from around the world to build a game we believed in.

We wanted to deliver something innovative and original in a crowded genre that would bring friends together around unforgettable moments. We shook up the format, created a fresh art style and universe, and partnered with some of our heroes. All of us knew from the beginning that the odds were against us, but that's what we signed up for. It was never a surefire bet. We did it anyway.

We had a few tough stumbles out of the gate when we launched in Sept. But this team rallied and poured everything into tackling your critical feedback for Season 1. We made major changes and improvements to virtually every area of the game and brought the game to consoles. Even though it wasn’t enough to achieve financial success, this team fought tooth and nail and went down swinging.

Game development is full of twists, turns, and surprises, and the industry has changed dramatically since we started the project in 2020. Even though we missed the mark this time, we wouldn’t trade the journey for anything.

That’s all from us. See you out there.

– Nate & the Mountaintop team

and nothing of value was lost
 
and nothing of value was lost
Yup. It took that team four years and tens of millions of dollars, to make this:
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Who's entire gimmick was awkwardly trying to control two characters at the same time, while otherwise being a completely unremarkable CS knockoff. This entire project should have never made it past the greybox stage of gameplay testing, its fundamental premise is flawed. The art direction should have never made it off the drawing table, as a cosmetics driven microtransaction live service model is not compatible with an art style that looks like "I hired junior CG grads from a state college and paired them with a senior with a background in corporate training visuals".

Its bland, uninspired, and desperately trying to copy the success of other games while never asking why people would want to play this instead. Everyone involved deserves to get fucked. The investors funded a completely braindead project with no understanding of the space, the studio leadership failed to push even a single part of their project to excel, and the individual developers and artists produced the most bog standard shit imaginable.
 
Once again, nothing of value was lost. Payday 3 was a sequel that was objectively worse in just about every gameplay metric that mattered, attempting to restart a fairly aggressive monetization cycle that Payday 2 put into place. Because of them pumping out huge amounts of content into that game, Payday 3 was comparably a desert to it, and suffered greatly on that perceptual front. Who in their right mind would stick around to play an inferior version of the prior gameplay, on less maps and with less progression incentive?
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Answer is, not the payday audience, at the least. And that's when it was even working, thing was broken as shit at launch. Game removed player hosting of matches, went to matchmaker only, and then it died instantly. I actually still have a meme for that shit.


A well deserved get fucked for all the devs involved.
 
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