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Microsoft will lay off 8% of the workers at its gaming unit

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Microsoft is cutting around 1,900 employees in its gaming unit Activision Blizzard and Xbox this week, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing an internal memo from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer.

The layoffs, which will eliminate around 8% of Microsoft Gaming’s 22,000 staff, are part of a larger “execution plan” that will reduce “areas of overlap,” shortly after the US software giant closed on its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, its largest ever acquisition, the head of the company’s gaming division said.

“It’s been a little over three months since the Activision, Blizzard, and King teams joined Microsoft. As we move forward in 2024, the leadership of Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard is committed to aligning on a strategy and an execution plan with a sustainable cost structure that will support the whole of our growing business,” Spencer wrote in a note.

Microsoft closed its deal for Activision Blizzard, the publisher and developer of several best-selling gaming franchises, in October 2023. The deal boosted the company’s weight in the video-gaming market with popular titles including Call of Duty and Diablo. Experts say the acquisition will help Microsoft compete with industry leader Sony.

Microsoft has recently overtaken Apple as the world’s most valuable company with its market cap surpassing $3 trillion on Thursday.

Image link https://sp-ao.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossless,ret_img,w_1536/https://laotiantimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wirestory_99a965b424adfe60f97a1c42a04d2c0e_16x9-1536x864.jpg Police officers gather outside the Kyoto District Court in Kyoto, western Japan, Thursday, 25 January 2024, ahead of the sentencing hearing for Shinji Aoba, who has confessed to a deadly arson attack in July 2019 on a Kyoto Animation Co. studio. Aoba was convicted of murder and other crimes Thursday for carrying out the shocking arson attack on the anime studio that killed 36 people and drew an outpouring of grief from anime fans worldwide. (Miki Matsuzaki/Kyodo News via AP)

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court sentenced a man to death after finding him guilty of murder and other crimes Thursday for carrying out a shocking arson attack on an anime studio in Kyoto, Japan, that killed 36 people.

The Kyoto District Court said it found the defendant, Shinji Aoba, mentally capable to face punishment for the crimes and announced his capital punishment after a recess in a two-part session on Thursday.

Aoba stormed into Kyoto Animation’s No. 1 studio on 18 July, 2019, and set it on fire. Many of the victims were believed to have died of carbon monoxide poisoning. More than 30 other people were badly burned or injured.

Atomic Heart’s “sublime utopian world” was accused of glorifying the USSR

‘Atomic Heart’, a video game set in an alternate 1950s Soviet Union, topped the charts on the Steam digital sales platform upon its release on Tuesday. The title briefly held the number one spot despite not being available to Russian users of the service.

Developed by the Cyprus-based studio Mundfish, ‘Atomic Heart’ managed to briefly dethrone ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ as the top-selling title on Steam, which is the biggest digital distribution platform for PC gaming. The new release soon slipped to a still-formidable second place in the charts, yielding to the overwhelming popularity of the Harry Potter franchise.

‘Atomic Heart’ is a first-person shooter that puts the player in the shoes of a KGB agent “in a mad and sublime utopian world” of an alternate history USSR, shown as a technological wonder of robotics, albeit with a dark conspiracy brewing. The game’s unique retrofuturistic Soviet dystopia aesthetic has been cited as one of its main draws, although the style has also opened the game up to political controversy.

Ukrainian YouTuber 'Harenko' claimed that ‘Atomic Heart’ glorifies the Soviet Union and the KGB, and called on Western players to boycott it. However, multiple American content creators discarded that notion, citing the subversive nature of ‘Atomic Heart’ as a commentary on Cold War propaganda. Some also criticized developer Mundfish – many of whose staff are Russian – for not taking a stance on the conflict in Ukraine. The developers tweeted in January that they “do not comment on politics or religion” and are a “global team.”

YouTube game critic Luke Stephens argued on Friday that boycott calls appeared to mean that “a lot of people are simply engaging in McCarthyism, dismissing this studio, because it has Russians working within it.” He added that this kind of logic was “a slippery slope.”

The game’s success on Steam cannot be attributed to Russian users, as the digital storefront suspended sales in the country in response to Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine. By EarthWeb estimates, there are around 11.5 million Russian users on the platform. Instead, ‘Atomic Heart’ is available for purchase in the country via a service called VK Play.

‘Atomic Heart’ was positively received by critics, with review aggregator Open Critic currently listing it as 74/100 and its Metacritic score standing at 75/100.