On an earnings call this afternoon, the company said that it would be eliminating 8% of its staff. In 2018, Activision Blizzard had roughly 9,600 employees, which would mean nearly 800 people are now out of work.
Sad :-/
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The question is from which part of the company they laid off the most? Did they mention anything of that? Were the ones that got fired worked in Esports? Business marketing? Or Game Development?
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We are the 8% rabble rabble. Sack the suits who made this mess, starting with number 1. One person’s livelihood is not worth more than 800 people’s.
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Activision is really digging itself in a hole.
No company can justify 8% workforce cut with the revenue they said they’ve made… I’m sad for Blizzard… definitely seems like the end of an era is near.
Basically shareholders and management types who don’t give a damn about blizz IP that care about stock prices are bleeding the legacy of blizzard like vampires.
Call it business whatever, but they came in to captilalize on blizz’s name, made crap decisions, turned their own recently purchased brand into crap, and now they are cutting back on workforce to save their stock prices. It’s a roundabout way for business savvy CEO frat types to buy up organizations use them up like a husk and screw everyone over but themselves
I hope to god activision execs show up to next blizzcon and get chased out of the convention by fans throwing rotten tomatoes it’s what they rightfully deserve
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At this point I kinda feel like good riddance.
Activision destroyed Blizzard and have taken a huge poo on the entire gaming industry. Screw em (Obviously intending to use stronger language here). Once they’ve finished killing off Blizzard’s IPs it’s just whatever. There’s plenty of other games out there worth playing.
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Maybe if they hadn’t paid their accountant 15 million they’d have enough for regular workers… but hey accounting is way harder than coding, have you seen the tax code…
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Some one posted a link to a Kotaku article yesterday that said the lay offs would be in sales and marketing. Here’s a quote from an article they posted today.
“The company said it would be cutting mainly non-game-development departments and bolstering its development staff for franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo .”
Still not good news, but maybe development might not take a big hit from this.
You guys have phones right?
Bolstering the dying IPs they think they can milk forever and failing to realize gamers want new games.
Activision dying will be as good as if EA were to.
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It’s really cool how Bobby Kotick announced record earnings for Acivision-Blizzard, too. I’m sure laying off 800 people had nothing to do with it.
The problem is that their growth did not meet their spending pattern. For the number of people they had they were expecting much larger growth than they ended up getting, hence the move to downsize.
From what I can tell most of the core Blizzard teams are being left untoched, if not even boosted by this move. Franchises like Diablo, Overwatch, Warcraft and the like are getting staff increases for faster development growth. It is only games like Heroes of the Storm which had a huge development team but comparatively few players that ended up losing, as one can guess by the number of people who have been moved away from it.
From the sounds of it many of the jobs being lost are admin, support or other miscellaneous expendable jobs that do not produce products. Additionally it seems that only Blizzard USA is being trimmed at the moment, with offices in other countries not effected.
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How many of these are WOW GMs, or people tasked with building/promoting E-sports.
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$15 million is a drop in the bucket at a company like that.
800 at $60,000 is almost $50 million in salarys and we know they likely were making more than that. Also count things like stock options, 401k benefits, health care benefits they were probably paying closer to $100,000 an employee that is getting canned. That’s significant savings.
Are people here all kids or just real grown ups who have no idea how the real world works?
How is this surprising? Just because the business is profitable doesn’t mean every business unit is contributing to it. Cutting the dead weight like esports for ded games like Hots is a valid business decision. They spent so much on HGC over the past few years, and gained absolutely nothing for it. Some divisions deserve to be cut.
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Because it’s never enough for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmW0GhdDOvw
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From what has been said, they were nearly all, if not all, non-developers.
So marketing, esports, customer service/support, those sort of things. Kotaku also reported some of the people that were removed were veterans, like 10 to 15 years in the company.
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You very clearly did not bother to realize what happened and just think they removed esports again.
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$15 million given to some guy rather than keeping the whole company alive
Isn’t CAAApitalism great?
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you can expect HOTS To have more cuts this year.
Game may never die,but it could get to the point to where its just 1 programmer doing all the work to maintain everything.
You very clearly do not bother to read properly. That was an example used as to why businesses cut business units out. The point being made is that businesses balance costs against revenue. 800 people are being laid off because they are a dead weight to the company. They contribute little to the bottom line while costing the company a fortune to keep them on board… for doing nothing that contributes to the bottom line.
It’s a simple concept. Try to figure it out by yourself can you?