Gaming🎮 While impressing shareholders about Xbox revenue, Microsoft avoids saying "layoffs" when talking about 1900 job losses

[Royal_Lizard]

After laying off a small town’s worth of people from its gaming arm just last week, Microsoft has managed to host an earnings call that, in a fashion that feels wrong even if it’s predictable, saw its top execs vaguely touch on said layoffs... without actually talking about the layoffs.

Yup, after it sent 1,900 staff packing following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, plenty of whom have thankfully received lots of support from their coworkers and communities, the company behind Xbox has held its big call to discuss how the second quarter of the 2024 fiscal year has gone. While it’s exactly the kind of setting in which you’d expect to find a lot of corpospeak and couching of things in solely number-related terms, the exact way those layoffs have been mentioned - or not really mentioned - feels noteworthy.

During the call, there was naturally plenty of discussion about where Xbox is at financially in the wake of Activision Blizzard properly becoming a part of it. In case you’re wondering, Xbox’s gaming revenue is up by 49%, having brought in just over $7 billion for the quarter that ended in December 2023.

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