Reports: Microsoft plans further wave of layoffs
According to US media reports, extensive job cuts are scheduled for June. In the games sector, this is the umpteenth in recent times.
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Microsoft is set to announce extensive job cuts in the coming days. According to the report, a company-wide reorganization with numerous redundancies is planned at the gaming subsidiary Xbox. Bloomberg is referring to unnamed insiders in its report.
Last week, the same news service predicted thousands of job cuts in Microsoft's sales structure. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft often takes such measures towards the end of the financial year, which ends on June 30. With Xbox, however, Microsoft is not necessarily sticking to this timetable: Last year, there were three waves of layoffs at the gaming company.
At the beginning of 2024, 1,900 of around 22,000 Xbox colleagues left. In May of that year, Microsoft closed several game studios, all of them subsidiaries of ZeniMax Media (including Bethesda), with an unknown number of jobs being cut. Microsoft acquired ZeniMax Media in 2021 for a price of 7.5 billion dollars. Also in May 2024, the data company cut three percent of all jobs worldwide, with Xbox and LinkedIn being particularly affected. In September, a further 650 jobs were lost at Xbox.
Money for AI is more important
And this May, Microsoft laid off 6,000 people “at all levels, in all teams and in all regions”. So this will also have impacted the games division. Now the sparrows are whistling the next cuts from the network nodes. heise online has asked Microsoft for comment. Microsoft is currently the most valuable listed company, measured by market capitalization of more than 3.6 quadrillion dollars.
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The background to this is that Microsoft is spending a lot of money on artificial intelligence (AI). Management is therefore looking for potential savings elsewhere. On the other hand, Xbox has to cope with the takeover of competitor Activision Blizzard. Microsoft spent around USD 69 billion on the acquisition of the computer games company in 2023 – the largest takeover in the history of the video games industry. Legal resistance from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was ultimately unable to prevent the merger of Xbox with Activision Blizzard.
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