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Playtika, the Israeli tech company that made its name with through a series of wildly successful online gambling and gaming titles with hundreds of millions of players, is leveling the latest swing of the layoffs pendulum. The company today has confirmed that it is laying of 15% of its staff. Playtika currently employs 4,100, so the redundancies will impact 615 people across the company’s global footprint in Europe, Israel and the U.S.

A memo sent to employees that TechCrunch has seen notes that three titles will also be sunset as it seeks to rationalize costs across the board. We understand that these will be ‘MergeStories,’ ‘DiceLife’ and ‘Ghost Detective’. We also understand that the company is also going to offer alternative roles to a proportion of employees impacted by the cuts. Playtika’s most popular titles, such as ‘Best Fiends’, have racked up at least 100 million users.

”Playtika’s success is rooted in our agility, efficiency, creativity and obsession with delivering the most fun forms of mobile entertainment to our players,” CEO Robert Antokol told TechCrunch in an email in response to questions about the cuts. “We consistently evaluate our strategic plans with attention to many factors, including the economic environment. We believe the structure announced today further leverages our core strengths of delivering superior in-game experiences and scaling mobile games to global franchises in continuation of growth. Saying goodbye to talented colleagues and friends is difficult. They will always be part of Playtika’s rich history and a foundation to our bright future as we build on our reputation as a technology and entertainment powerhouse.”

The layoffs have been the subject of rumors since last week in the Israeli press — although the actual figures are higher than the 500 number getting reported.

Playtika — publicly traded on Nasdaq — has been facing an especially tough year in what has been a hard time for the tech sector overall.

The company was one of the wave of businesses that went public last year, riding on the back of a huge surge in usage among pandemic consumers cooped up at home and staying out of in-person social situations.

In its IPO in June 2021, it debuted with a per-share price of $27 and a valuation of over $11 billion to raise nearly $1.9 billion, before climbing to a market cap of over $14 billion in its first day of trading.

But those figures have seen massive drops. Currently, its market cap (pre-market open on December 12) stands at $3.1 billion, with stock priced at $8.61/share as of market close on Friday.

The company also missed on earnings estimates in the last quarter. Although third-quarter revenues climbed slightly to $647.8 million versus $635.9 million in the same quarter a year ago, net income dropped to $68.2 million versus $80.5 million in Q3 2021.

And last week, one of its shareholders, Joffre Capital, pulled out of a deal to take a majority stake in the company after disputes over governance. Although this wasn’t cited in the memo sent to employees, that inevitably will have an impact on the company’s financial planning going forward.

It’s not game-over just yet, but online gaming is going to lose a lot of lives in the coming months.

Playtika itself had already cut 250 workers in May; Electronic Arts is reportedly looking for a buyer; Unity laid off around 200 people earlier this year, and some believe this is just the start.

More to come.

Playtika lays off 610 workers, shuts down three online gaming titles amid broader restructure by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft is to acquire a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), the company that owns the London Stock Exchange as well as a several other businesses including financial market data company Refinitiv which LSEG acquired from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium last year for $27 billion.

Microsoft’s stake, which it bought from the same Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium,constitutes part of a bigger 10-year partnership, which includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on cloud computing services. This will involve LSEG migrating its data platform and “other key technology infrastructure” over to Azure, while the Workspace data and analytics product it procured as part of its Refinitiv acquisition last year will be integrated with core Microsoft applications including Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 software suite.

This initial partnership will create a single product spanning data, analytics, and collaboration, and could go some way toward helping LSEG challenge the likes of Bloomberg as the go-to platform for finance and investment workers.

The integration will allow all LSEG customers to collaborate with each other through Teams, and generate models and graphs through connecting LSEG content and Excel, for example. But the scope of the partnership seems fairly far-reaching, with plans to mesh Microsoft’s cloud-based machine learning smarts with LSEG’s analytics and modelling to “co-develop a new suite of solutions” for financial institutions, the companies said.

So this is a win-win for both firms: a huge cloud contract for Microsoft that opens it to Refinitiv’s 40,000 customers, as well as an equity investment in a major Bloomberg challenger. And for LSEG, it now has the technological and financial backing of one of world’s biggest public cloud companies.

“Bringing together our leading data sets, analytics, and global customer base with Microsoft’s comprehensive and trusted cloud services and global reach creates attractive revenue growth opportunities for both companies,” LSEG CEO David Schwimmer said in a press release.

Microsoft to acquire 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group as part of 10-year cloud partnership by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch