Reimagine harder, BioWare
Bioware releaseda statementyesterday.
It talked of “turning towards the future”.
It dreamed of “a more agile, focused studio”.
Nowhere in the post did the word “layoffs” appear.
But this is what the post was actually about.
Meanwhile, Microsoft called cutting thousands of jobs throughout 2024 an act of"aligning".
Like an alligator, into a slightly smaller alligator.
On some occasions statements like this will be clearer and say “eliminating” or “reducing headcount”.
But they more often use language like “restructuring” or “transitioning” or “repositioning”.
This downplays the true impact of such cuts.
Instead, they chose to “reimagine” the studio.
To put aside the kneejerk annoyance for a moment, I do understand why this lingual perfuming happens.
On a human level, being a manager having to write a statement like this is probably not easy.
But whoever does it, I don’t envy the author.
Nobody wants to write this kind of thing.
He seemed more worried about the whole thing than I was.
But whatever the motivation for couching layoffs in linguistic playdough, a difficult and uncomfortable truth is being avoided.
If you must give the command to “fire”, do not shout “sunset!”
Do not make weasels out of words.
A job cut is a job cut.
But any one of the writers BioWare just threw out the door could tell you this.
