King Digital, the renowned developer behind the addictive game application Candy Crush Saga and owned by Microsoft through its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2022, has laid off about 200 employees as part of an aggressive shift towards integrating AI-powered solutions into its services. The aim of this move is to allow AI-driven systems to take over many activities or workflows previously handled by human teams.
The layoffs, impacting approximately 200 employees, affected core development departments that are central to the company’s structure; employees in level design, narrative copywriting, and user experience (UX) were mostly hit. According to insiders, many of the mid-level professionals in these departments had spent months in designing and training the very AI tools now replacing them.
“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker. Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams,” one staffer told mobilegamer.biz. “Similarly, the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have AI tools that those individuals have been creating.”
“The fact [that] AI tools are replacing people is absolutely disgusting but it’s all about efficiency and profits even though the company is doing great overall,” the staffer continued. “If we’re introducing more feedback loops then it’s crazy to remove the developers themselves, we need more hands and less leadership.”
The Farm Heroes Saga project, based out of King’s London office, also saw devastating cuts. About 50 people, which was reported to be half of the entire team, and including key leadership positions, were put on “gardening leave ahead of their departure in September.”
These moves are in line with Microsoft’s broader investment in artificial intelligence, as the tech giant allocated roughly $80 billion towards building AI infrastructure, with a larger focus on expanding U.S.-based data centers for AI training and cloud deployment.
What makes this move more controversial is the fact that some King employees were reportedly terminated for voicing concerns about the culture of the company when they participated in internal social discussions that were critical of the company. For example, some King staff have been highly critical of how King’s human resources (HR) department handled this layoff, describing it as prioritizing corporate protection over staff welfare.
“King HR is an absolute shitshow and has been for years,” a staff member told mobile gamer. “An extreme example of an HR department whose role it is to protect the company, not the staff.”
In addition to this is King’s leadership reportedly informing employees on the day of layoffs that they aim to streamline operations by “removing layers, stakeholders and processes slowing development down, particularly middle management,” another staff told mobile gamer. A new organization chart will be presented in September, the company’s management told the remaining staff.
This structural reorganization to make space for AI adoption and integration is part of a series of job cuts Microsoft has had since the beginning of the year. In the first week of July 2025, the tech giant reported they’d be eliminating over 9,000 jobs across several teams and spanning through different countries the country has a presence in.
Right before this, the company also announced approximately 6,000 job cuts in May 2025. This isn’t shocking as the tech giant laid off about 100,000 employees in 2023.
So far, the layoff scene, especially in the tech space, has been goaded and supported by the development of AI. Companies are restructuring at a much faster speed due to the promises the technology offers. From the standpoint of these companies, AI helps with enabling data-driven decisions, reducing costs, automation of repetitive tasks, and tailored customer experiences, amongst others. And because of this, embracing the usage of the technology eventually brings them to the point where they have to determine whether they want to fully replace their workers with AI or use them simultaneously.
However, tech giants are not setting the “simultaneously” pace, as they tend to move towards fully replacing workers with AI-powered solutions, as well as investing heavily in it. One of the ripple effects of this aggressive move might be smaller companies, who haven’t achieved the structure and success of these tech giants, tilting heavily towards integrating AI into their services at the cost of human workers.
Even worse is the realization that as an employee, learning the ropes of integrating or using AI for work or going as far to train AI based on your workflows doesn’t guarantee anything. You’re still at risk of being laid off, as is evident with the Microsoft-King layoff.
