MW3 players fear for game’s future after mass layoffs at Sledgehammer Games
Max Candelarezi
On January 25, Microsoft announced mass layoffs affecting Activision’s division, including several Call of Duty development teams, especially MW3 devs’ SHG. Following the news, players have shared their concerns about how could affect the future of the game.
Despite the launch of Season 1 Reloaded in MW3 and Warzone, Activision’s division, including Call of Duty, has been severely affected by massive layoffs from Microsoft, who to “aligned on the best opportunities for growth” have let go of 1,900 company employees.
Surprisingly, this comes after almost four months since Microsoft closed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $70 billion. After learning the news, players quickly shared their concerns on how this could affect the game’s future, especially upon realizing the huge impact it had on SHG, MW3’s dev team.
In a Reddit post, user ‘thatscomplex1015’ questioned the sudden layoffs hitting Activision, saying, “What is Microsoft doing?” And followed, “QA lead just lost his whole team? We’re actually f*cked. We finally got a group of Devs who listen to our feedback and communicate with us and they get fired is crazy.”
In the image the OP attached, there’s an X post of SHG‘s Senior QA Lead, Michael Guerra, where they shared, “I lost basically my entire team. I am at a loss for words right now.” Announcing the whole SHG QA team has been let go by Microsoft.
“The QA team was clearly terrible. Last week’s update was the latest in a trend of game breaking issues. If you can’t do your job, why should you keep it?” a user said, however, another one explained, “they roll out updates before debugging the QA feedback actually, they prefer not being late over being consistent with their updates.
Answering another voice “Damn, so the fired the entire QA team. So does that mean the intention is to rebuild the team… that will help reduce the amount of bugs with every new update? Or are they just going to let us the end users become the QA team?”
Despite no news being shared about how the future of MW3 will be affected by Microsoft’s mass layoffs, players noted the “games industry is on a down wards trend since the Covid peak,” so they fear “this will continue across the board.”
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