A new round of layoffs at Microsoft has apparently begun, and employees at studios like Candy Crush Saga developer King and Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax are losing their jobs, with up to 9,000 company-wide employees reportedly in the firing line.
According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, 200 staffers at King will lose their jobs, which represents around 10% of the company's total headcount. We don't yet know the number of layoffs at ZeniMax's European location.
Bloomberg says these cuts are part of a wider layoff wave at Microsoft, in which "about 9,000 workers" will be caught up. A spokesperson told the publication that the layoffs will represent less than 4% of the company's workforce, but that the cuts are - say it with me - part of "best position[ing] the company...for success in a dynamic marketplace". Yuck.
It's highly unlikely that King and ZeniMax are the only Xbox studios affected by this latest wave of Microsoft layoffs, so we'll almost certainly hear about other studio closures and job losses as this story develops.
This is the start of the layoff wave predicted by Bloomberg last week, and it's also not the first time Microsoft has laid off a large number of employees in the last eighteen months or so.
The company's most recent layoff round came in May, when Microsoft reportedly let go of around 3% of its workforce "across all levels, teams, and geographies" (according to news platform CNBC).
Prior to that, another wave of layoffs took place in January, although a smaller number of employees were apparently affected by those layoffs than in subsequent job shearing efforts.
I could go on, but the point is that Microsoft has laid off a lot of employees in recent months, and the company is showing no signs of stopping on that front.
Of course, none of these layoffs stopped CEO Satya Nadella scoring himself an eye-wateringly high payrise back in October, and given recent CEO payrise trends, I'd be extremely surprised if that doesn't happen again this year. Stay tuned for more on this as it develops.
