It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.
Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.
Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.
This same comment gets posted on nearly every layoffs thread. A lot of people work at tech companies. Despite that, it sucks for someone to lose their job.
As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.
>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?
The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.
Larian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game
Baldur's Gate 3 was in development for nearly six years even with asset reuse and basically being the only thing that Larian was working on. And that isn't even taking contractors into account (BG3 credits around 2300 workers).
I don't think you're making the point you think you are.
Crazier still is the cost of employing 22,000 people in one division. Even at a low ball of $100K/year/employee, that’s $2.2 billion in people costs per year. Microsoft needs to be recouping at least $50/year from every single Xbox owner (estimating 50 million out there) to cover that cost alone.
Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.
40% increase isn't even that bad compared to some I've seen.
I saw that before the recent layoffs at Discord their employee headcount had grown 5x since 2020, and after the layoffs they're merely at 4x their size of 2020
It doesn't actually have any real impact and there are plenty of counter example, but the fact that Activision is a 40+ years old company who slowly grew to that number before jumping 40% in two years for no reason (no major shift, new product or anything like that, no "we own the world" like microsoft, ...) somehow makes it feel way worse to me that yet another not even a decade tech company that grew crazy for the numbers.
