You're listening to the starting to the podcast about World of Warcraft and the people who play it.

And now, here are your hosts.

Well, hello and welcome to the starting zone, the podcast about World of Warcraft,

the people who play it. Today is July 6th, 2025, and my name is Spencer Downey. Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the podcast.

I'm joined as always by my co-host Jason Lucas. Jason, how are you doing on this fine Sunday?

Oh, Spencer, good morning to you. Yes, it is a fine Sunday. And this is an early start for us.

But hey, I think our brains are mostly working at this point. So we should be good to talk some wow, which is good. I just want to, at the top

of the show, I just have to mention, and I hate that I have to do this yet again, but we have

to talk about layoffs. It's a holiday week in the U.S. and Microsoft decided to celebrate by

cutting like 9,000 employees from their Xbox division, which includes Blizzard now.

And, you know, Blizzard didn't get hit as hard as some places did.

Some studios got closed.

Some games got canceled as a result of this.

Just Microsoft is a company that makes, I don't know, billions, trillions of dollars in revenue.

And they are obsessed seemingly with just cutting their

payroll to the bone and funneling their money into these pie in the sky projects or something.

This is what?

The third round of mass layoffs they've done that have affected Xbox since Activision Blizzard

acquisition closed.

It sucks, and it sucks for the people that actually make the cool stuff that we like. You know, the executives making the decisions

about the stuff have no hand in what we play. It seems like on the wow side, where they got

hit was in social media and marketing. A bunch of the social team had already started leaving because they were not picking up their contracts or whatever.

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