According to a new report, staff who recently lost their jobs at Microsoft subsidiary King are being replaced by AI tools they helped to train, and morale at the company is now extremely low.
Last week, as part of a wider layoff wave targeting around 9,000 employees company-wide, Microsoft laid off hundreds of staff at Candy Crush Saga studio King, as well as canceling projects and closing studios under the Xbox banner.
Now, according to a new mobilegamer.biz report (which cites “multiple sources” within the studio), it sounds like those staff members, who work in areas like narrative copywriting and level design, are being replaced by AI tools they were originally involved in creating.
As an insider apparently told mobilegamer.biz, AI tools created by level designers and writers “are basically replacing the teams” of staff who were laid off earlier this month, which the source calls “absolutely disgusting”.
They go on to say that King is only concerned with “efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall”, suggesting that a better strategy than laying off employees might have been “more hands and less leadership”.
A different source pointed to an internal survey carried out at King prior to the layoffs, claiming that the results of that survey showed morale is “in the gutter” despite the improvement of same being “a top priority” for leaders.
In an internal memo apparently seen by mobilegamer.biz, King leadership says the studio has “not been growing” despite a rapidly-changing industry, and that the plan was to “simplify the organization”, leading to a “rebalancing of headcount across King”.
As well as King, other Xbox studios were also affected by layoffs and closures in Microsoft’s most recent employee-cutting spree. Casualties include Rare’s Everwild, which was shuttered as part of this wave, and Xbox’s Perfect Dark reboot, which was shut down along with its developer The Initiative.
It’s worth noting that revenue isn’t exactly in decline for Microsoft; the company’s most recent financial results show that revenue is up on the same period last year, with Xbox “content and services” increasing by 8% year-on-year.
Still, if this mobilegamer.biz report is to be believed, that hasn’t stopped studio leadership ruthlessly gunning for more growth, even if that means hundreds of employees losing their jobs. We’ll have to wait and see what happens as a result, I suppose.
