I know it sucks for the 800 but it’s business. And from what I’ve learned they did this to evolve their current teams/operations or whatever, I forgot how they worded it. So they fired 8% of non-development employees but are now going to focus on hiring more developers and growing the development team by 20%, in which they said will hopefully improve things as they said game and sale expectations weren’t that good and with the changes stated above with less people in non-dev teams to beef up dev teams, they hope that this change will help the quality of their games and hopefully they will. But we’ll see. Don’t give up quite yet guys. Maybe they can turn things around with this change of focus.
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Hopefully this will be for the best, but that remains to be seen.
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Really trying to be optimistic but its hard to remain this way while being blasted with nonsense on almost a daily basis.
I was hugely bullish on ATVI just a year ago, I now suspect that its a buyout target.
They may be hiring more developers, but its for projects at the behest of their new huge investor tencent… I can almost guarantee that these are mobile projects aimed at chinese consumers.
This could pay off huge for ATVI as thats an enormous market and they will have the states blessing with tencent backing them, but the Blizzard we all love will die in the process more than likely.
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Yeah I’m hoping too. That’s why I carefully worded my last two sentences with words like “yet” and “maybe”.
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I’ll believe it when I see it. Sounds to me like higher ups just needed more money since their stock tanked.
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People forget that Blizzard layed off 600 people in 2012 yet still survived.
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It was basically corporate speak for downsizing in order to save money.
Also, note that BfA actually sold really well as far as I know, which begs the question why Blizzard had to cut people. The answer I think is Activision.
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I understand why it was done, but still I am sorry for those who lost their jobs.
I still don’t like the emphasis on Mobile as of late. I really hope these new Devs don’t just end up working on Warcraft: Go.
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I don’t think it’s about Blizzard “surviving”
I think peeps are just a little annoyed that Blizz have been harping on with the “our communication needs improvement, we know” rhetoric only to turn around and make cuts from the area of the company responsible for said communication
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Empathy mostly. Nothing wrong with that.
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God forbid we care about the well being of 800 well-meaning people in tenuous financial positions, including the CM of this very forum.
What kind of aliens are we to think that Blizz is just a bunch of heartless monsters to fire them while paying multi-million dollar signing bonuses to worthless suits who engage at 0% with the playerbase.
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Guys its for business we swear. Well keep screwing our consumer base who made us profitable in the first place for business. Trust me its legitimately a good idea. Our IPS are still amazingly fresh across the board. Believe us, were experts.
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It has to do with the people that are affected. Not the survival of the company.
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You seem to have forgotten to include the words, “Mobile Gaming” in the part they are developing
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Perhaps the new mobile project would bring more new players and solve the ages long problem of WoW not having enough new players. Then they’ll probably willing to put more budget on WoW again.
We gotta show them that us old timers are still a valuable market.
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Of course they will hire more developers and focus on games… mobile games, that is.
“You guys have phones, don’t you?”
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Because some of us aren’t entirely, or even remotely, Amoral? Even if we didn’t know anyone in the 800 who lost their jobs (Though we know Ythisens as one of them), we can still show sympathy for them.
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Well I think people are upset because it isn’t just excess sales and marketing people or getting rid of the bloat from all of their Esports push over the last few years…that stuff would be expected. It is the them tossing out CMs and people who communicate with us that is really the frustrating part, them seeing that as non essential when games like WoW have been struggling with dev to player communication for years.
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We live in a world where evil brings profit and virtue none at all.
Turns out most people consider themselves good and don’t care for the actions for amoral businessmen
Eat the rich.
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There’s no indication at all that they plan to hire new developers. In fact, the earnings call seemed to imply that they were just going to shuffle people around…likely to put more focus on cheaper mobile titles. Remember, specifically pertaining to where we are, they said Warcraft…not WoW itself.
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