200 employees at King, the studio behind the Candy Crush series of games, will lose their jobs as part of Microsoft’s massive layoffs. Many of them will reportedly be replaced by artificial intelligence that King employees created and trained.
200 employees at King, the studio behind the Candy Crush series of games, will lose their jobs as part of Microsoft’s massive layoffs. Many of them will reportedly be replaced by artificial intelligence that King employees created and trained.
As Mobile Gamer Biz notes, the London-based Farm Heroes Saga team will be «cut in half»: around 50 people, including key executives, will leave the company.
King has told employees that it will unveil a new organizational structure in September after negotiations with the union. Many employees are currently in limbo.
According to Bloomberg, King will cut about 200 employees in early July. It was later revealed that the layoffs will include middle management, as well as UX and copywriting specialists.
Now it has been revealed that the level design and user research staff, as well as almost half of the London-based Farm Heroes Saga team, will be laid off. Many level designers, user research staff, as well as UX and scriptwriters have also been told that they are at risk.
Specifically, these employees have spent the past few years building and training artificial intelligence tools to do their jobs. Now they are effectively being replaced, sources say.
«Most of the level design has been destroyed, which is crazy because they spent months building tools to make levels faster. Now these AI tools are effectively replacing the teams. Similarly, the copywriting team is completely freeing up people because now we have the AI tools that these people were building», — said one employee.
According to him, the fact that artificial intelligence tools are replacing humans is «absolutely disgusting, but it all comes down to efficiency and profit, even though the company as a whole is doing great.
«If we implement more feedback loops, then it’s crazy to fire the developers themselves, we need more hands and less management,» the developer says.
He suggested that the total number of employees being laid off could exceed 200. In addition to the cuts in the London, Barcelona, Stockholm and Berlin studios, many centralized employees are also being laid off, including from the research and quality control department.
Recall that in early July, Microsoft confirmed that it was laying off 9,100 employees, or about 4% of its staff, as part of another round of layoffs. The Xbox division, known as Microsoft Gaming, as well as some already announced games, were hit hard.
It later became known that these cuts at Microsoft may be an attempt by the corporation to cut costs after huge investments in artificial intelligence.
