Report: Activision Blizzard’s King Team Sees Axed Job Roles ‘Replaced’ By AI

We apologise in advance for bringing another AI story to you today, but a fresh report from MobileGamer suggests that Activision Blizzard’s King team is a part of the Microsoft Gaming business seeing human job roles shift to AI.

It had previously been reported by the likes of Bloomberg that Candy Crush developer King was set to let go of roughly 200 staff as part of these recent layoffs – and now this new report suggests that “many of the staff cut will effectively be replaced by the AI tools they built and trained”.

MobileGamer says sources speaking anonymously have told them that “many level design and user research staff plus practically half of the London-based Farm Heroes Saga team are to be made redundant”. The sources also go on to say that those level designers and user research staff “spent the last few years” building AI tools to speed up the whole process – tools that have now contributed to their job cuts.

In addition to these sources speaking about AI’s role in these job losses, the outlet has got hold of an internal memo sent out to King employees as these layoffs started to happen. We’ll include the contents of that internal memo below:

“Why is this happening?

The industry is changing fast, and our business has not been growing.

When that happens, we must not only look outside, at competitors and the market, but also inside.

As we’ve talked about before, we are making several changes to get the business back to growth. Unlocking many more Al tools is one recent example. Investing more in marketing this year is another.

We’re fortunate to have many talented individuals at King. But we also have a collective problem: the size and structure of the company often makes it difficult to get things done.

So we plan to simplify the organization – fewer layers, fewer overlapping remits, fewer hours spent on alignment, fewer people in meetings, fewer stakeholders for every project.

Many leaders across King have been asked to redesign their organizations to be smaller overall. There will be some new roles created in these redesigns, and some rebalancing of headcount across King. But overall King will be a smaller company.”

It’s important to note that we can’t verify this internal memo ourselves, and that this is all reported information at present, so do bear that in mind. However, just yesterday we posted about a very real Xbox job advert that clearly used AI in its imagery – Microsoft is going big on this and it’s seemingly affecting a fair few parts of its overall business, potentially including gaming teams such as King as suggested in this report.

Keep it civil and discuss this report down in the comments section below.