28% of Microsoft's Massive In-Game Ad Unit Laid Off
Game news website Gamasutra reported that as part of Microsoft’s effort to lay off 5,000 employees, 28 percent of staff at its Massive in-game advertising unit have been given the boot.
You have to do a little math to figure out how many, exactly, have been let go at Massive. Wired noted that about 100 employees would be 75 percent of its staff, meaning that Massive had about 133 employees in total. If 28 percent of them are gone, then 37 actual employees were laid off.
Massive is responsible for the ingenius — and occasionally ridiculous — in-game ad placements that allowed clients to place live ad buys in online multiplayer games, in addition to installing brands as product placements in published titles. The image is from Battlefield 2142, where:
… the dawn of a new Ice age has thrown the world into a panic. The soil not covered by ice can only feed a fraction of the Earth’s population. The math is simple and brutal: some will live, most will die.
And a lot of people drink Pepsi, apparently.
Massive had the biggest jump on all of the in-game advertising rivals, so the cutbacks are almost like a commentary on the future of the entire industry.
The layoffs bring the BNET Ad Agency Layoff Counter to 32,656.
- For a running tally of ad business layoffs, see:
- BNET’s Ad Agency Layoff Counter
Jim Edwards, a former managing editor of Adweek, has covered drug marketing at Brandweek for four years, and is a former Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University's business and journalism schools. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email.
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