Phil Spencer Blames Capitalism for Many Layoffs in the Gaming Industry

In recent months, there has been quite a lot of controversy regarding the layoffs that occurred in the gaming industry. Most of the parent companies of the game studios forwarded their reasoning to be the excessive hiring they had during the pandemic. According to those companies, now is the time to flex things a bit by having major layoffs or letting go of members to invest more into the company.

A few months ago, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer decided to acquire one of the game giants, Activision Blizzard at a whopping $69 million dollars. This is no small money, as you would understand, and according to him, this purchase was made with the intent of investing. There is no doubt that, despite their failures and falls, Activision Blizzard is a highly profitable business with lots of active games and a properly working crew. While most of us, the people who purchase games and support developers for their hard work, Phil Spencer was taking a different look at the acquiring business.

 

A few months ago, Microsoft had to let go of 1900 workers in Activision Blizzard in one sweep, which sounds quite saddening as some of the other companies kept their spree relatively small. Phil Spencer blames the huge wave of layoffs on capitalism, as he would rather want companies to be profitable rather than dwindling themselves into the bottom of the barrel where they won’t be profitable anymore. Stakeholders and shareholders of the company, such as ones that do own Microsoft, would want changes to be made to ease up the profit margin, therefore cuts need to be made- of course, this arrives as major layoffs.

While as a consumer, you might find it to be unfortunate for people who work for the company and make a living. Being fired just because the shareholders need to profit sounds rather dumb, and Phil Spencer is aware of the situation as well. Only thing he mentions is that, one we must blame is the capitalism as he states the companies need to grow rather than downsizing their profit margin. Some admit that it is the right way to clash with unwanted loss in the investment, but considering that Microsoft is already making huge sums of money in every season showcases that there is some greediness might be spilling to the higher-ups without us noticing.

Nevertheless, this is the capitalism we all have seen and experienced before. There is certainly no stopping unless someone decides to have those developers and artists in their own studio and giving them a spare job to work on. Working in a top-notch office like Acvitision Blizzard, Nintendo or Sony is now seems impossible that the gaming market has shifted to pleasing stakeholders rather than pleasing the consumer to have a better look for themselves.

Atilla Turan (@burningarrow)
Editor, NoobFeed