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Microsoft laid off over 1,900 people yesterday, including community managers, marketing staff and game developers from Activision Blizzard, Bethesda and Xbox teams.
Some of the teams that were hit pretty hard by this decision include Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games, Blizzard Entertainment who also cancelled their survival title, and Spyro and Crash dev team Toys For Bob, who lost 35 employees.
Toys for Bob is a fairly small team with only 85 people, which makes the layoffs pretty grim given that the studio lost around 40 per cent of their workforce.
The report confirming these layoffs at Toys For Bob comes from YouTuber "Canadian Guy Eh" who focuses on covering games like Spyro and Crash.
"Total Number I've been told was 'about 35 people' [laid off]," he said. "As of yesterday; there were 'about 85 people' directly employed under Toys For Bob"
This is the second major downsizing of Toys For Bob in the last three years. Activision Blizzard already laid off several employees back in 2021 and shifted the rest of the team to work on supporting Call of Duty titles according to the reports from developers.
This caused an uproar among the gaming community, which hoped that Microsoft would reverse this decision once they completed the purchase of Activision Blizzard to allow Toys For Bob to focus on franchises that they love.
At the moment, it's not quite clear what the future holds for Toys For Bob. Whether Microsoft allow the studio to start working on something other than Call of Duty it remains to be seen but the layoffs are certainly not encouraging.
Toys For Bob is one of the studios that Microsoft should support and help grow, not downsize, given that they specialise in family-friendly games, which is a genre where Xbox is severely lacking.
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