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Amazon ran Comixology straight into the ground, and now it's laying off staff
After ruining the reading experience across the app and web, Amazon is laying off the very people that could fix things
Comixology was once heralded as the place to purchase digital comic books, thanks to its worthwhile discovery, awesome sales, and easy navigability for perusing decades of books from a large assortment of publishers. While Amazon bought the company back in 2013, it wasn't until 2022 that Amazon started tossing its weight around, completely replacing the user experience on the web and app with something much closer to the Kindle interface, and it was nowhere near ready. This rushed and poorly thought-out move left the Comixology team scrambling to fix all the things Amazon broke with the switch, and now Amazon is laying many of them off.
Pokémon GO developer cancels four projects just two days after announcing a new game
Niantic faces economic turmoil, lays off 8% of its staff
Two days ago, Niantic announced yet another augmented reality game, this time themed around the NBA. But it would seem Niantic has been struggling to reproduce the success of Pokémon GO, despite having slapped all manner of brands on similar games over the last few years, like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (already shuttered as a failure), Catan: World Explorers (also canceled), and Pikmin Bloom. One-trick-pony just about sums up the company, and even though it's put in a lot of effort to build out its AR tech as a platform (known as Lightship), it would seem the success of Pokémon GO isn't enough to carry the studio forward as its branded clones fail to find similar success. In comes Bloomberg with a recent report that the company is facing a time of economic turmoil, per a leaked internal staff email, and so the studio has canceled four upcoming games while laying off 8% of its staff.
Massive Mozilla cuts threaten the future of Firefox
The company plans a new focus on products that make money
Mozilla has been around for over 20 years, but the current economic conditions in the US are affecting everyone in new ways. In a blog post, CEO Mitchell Baker has outlined some consequences of the pandemic, including a major loss of revenue that has lead to restructuring that will see the company become smaller and more focused on keeping itself out of the foxhole.
T-Mobile reportedly takes hatchet to Sprint, cutting entire sales division and other jobs
Hundreds potentially getting Magenta's pink slips
T-Mobile has reportedly issued layoffs to hundreds of employees within Sprint, the carrier it had completed a merger with in April. The decision comes in line with efforts to consolidate and move the latter's workforce under the former's system and marks another step in the protracted wrap-up of the Sprint brand. But the company is also catching heat for crowding more people onto unemployment during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and drifting away from the hiring goals it made to the regulators who had approved the merger.
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- OnePlus has posted a more complete statement to its forums, indicating that the layoffs aren't quite as extensive as rumored. According to the company, a total of 20 total employees are affected by the company's restructuring in Europe:
OnePlus has reportedly made severe staffing cuts in its European operations. While the tech brand has experienced massive growth in other markets over the past few years, it has also faced major headwinds across the continent in the same time which have led to previous rounds of layoffs.
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Late last week, the Statesman reported that Samsung is shutting down its CPU design division at one of its Austin R&D facilities, laying off 290 employees. This corroborates month-old leaks that the company was downsizing its CPU design branch, responsible for Samsung's in-house Exynos series chipsets.
Essential may be at work on making an AI-focused alternative smartphone that operates mainly on voice commands, but it'll have to do so with a significantly reduced staff. Essential has confirmed that it is laying off a large portion of its staff, which Bloomberg reports amounts to roughly 30 percent of the 120-person workforce — mainly in the hardware and sales divisions.
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Telltale Games has won critical praise for titles like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, but that was not enough to keep the lights on. A flood of now-former employees report that Telltale is closing its doors in the near future after laying off most workers. Telltale has not officially confirmed any changes as of yet, but this looks like the end.
Qualcomm doesn't have to worry about a hostile takeover anymore, but the company is still trying to please stockholders. It previously promised to reduce costs by $1 billion, and part of that seems to be laying off a large number of employees.
Motorola has confirmed that it is laying people in its Chicago office off, though it also says "our Moto Z family will continue." Prior to this announcement, multiple people close to the company have stated that a significant portion of Moto's engineering staff in Chicago has been laid off, with a Moto Mod owner going as far as saying the "Z team in Moto was irreversibly impacted." However, Motorola says that the Moto Z line will "continue."
According to a report from The Information, Snap (of Snapchat fame) has recently laid off about two dozen people, most of which were in the content team. These firings seem to fit in line with the company's financial difficulties and overall attempts at consolidation, as well as the recent setbacks for the platform's original content.
Telltale Games is one of the most widely-known game studios in the industry, and is often credited for re-popularizing the graphic adventure genre. All of the company's titles in recent years have arrived on Android, among other platforms (like iOS, Windows, PS4, Xbox One, and some on Mac). Unfortunately, Telltale announced a 25% reduction of staff today, affecting 90 individuals.
The business world is a harsh place and failures to perform adequately can have painful consequences. This is the unfortunate reality that almost 3,000 ZTE employees are about to face, according to Reuters. Overall, about 5% of ZTE's global workforce will face the axe.
Amazon's Fire Phone, the logical smartphone extension of its Kindle Fire tablet series, is a dud. A combination of lackluster reviews, carrier semi-exclusivity, and most of all being tied into Amazon's app and service environment have made it more or less a total failure. The company never publishes hard data for its hardware sales, but casual observation and constant discounts (sometimes more than $500 off of the original $650 off-contract price) imply that the product has been a wash.
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It's not easy being a chip and component maker in the smartphone industry and trying to turn a profit when competitors are driving the prices down to a point where an entire phone can cost somewhere around $50. It's even harder when the high-end market is being governed by a few players, the major one of whom decides to "dump" your chips and use their own for its flagship. That's Qualcomm's conundrum right now. The company, which has been a mainstay on the spec sheet of a grand majority of the Android phones we talk about here on Android Police, is hitting a rough patch — not enough to sound the alarm sirens, but enough to jeopardize the employment of thousands of its workforce.
Gameloft is one of the most prolific and high-profile developers of mobile games, having taken an early lead with the rise of the iTunes App Store and continuing to release games at a rapid pace. But all is not well for the well-known developer: this morning reports have surfaced that the company has completely shut down its New York City studio and related offices.
Every major corporation has to fire people at some point. But Microsoft's plan to eliminate 18,000 jobs this year is, to say the least, a big deal. The company announced its plans on a blog post titled "Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture," written by new CEO Satya Nadella. Former Nokia employees will bear the brunt of this downsize, with 12,500 office and factory workers from the Finnish phone giant being laid off.
[Updated x4: Official Word] OnLive May Be Closing Today—Or It Might Be Fine—As Conflicting Rumors Surface
Update 4: OnLive has finally issued the following statement: We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed
Update 4: OnLive has finally issued the following statement: