Lmao at the people who think Blizzard is giving up on esports cause of this.
They’re just moving away from live events because streaming them as they currently do is just as effective and y’know, the US still has the whole plague situation to deal with.
Having an Activision Blizzard pedigree is like having a Master’s in Anthropology, which is to say completely worthless. The only reason I’d bother hiring a person who worked at Blizzard would be out of sheer sympathy because that must have sucked.
Did the 800+ that got laid off in their record 5b+ profit (with 540m back from taxes without paying any) get severance?
Wasn’t there some criminal shenanigans in the E-sport community involving teams that played Blizzard games? I can think of Method and one recently from Overwatch. Could those have tanked performance/views/etcetc and led to downsizing?
It’s really Blizzard exec’s own fault for not listening to players and consumers.
Blizzard: How about esports as a spectator thing?
Players: No. We don’t want to watch your games, we want to play them. We watch streamers because they are entertaining. We have no interest in people we dint know playing games we don’t care about. Your games are not balanced enough to be an esport. Just work on content for these games
Blizzard: Sooo… $$$?
Players: No. We don’t want this.
Blizzard: well, we invested in esports and it seems like people arent interested in it. what a mystery. We will never know.
So anyway, who wants to play heroes of the storm?
People do watch MDI and AWC, but they don’t need as many people because no live events
They’re not killing the esports divisions.
Ya, for mid to low level employees that’s actually really good.
I do not know a single player I have spoken to who watched MDI. not in guild / trade chat / even m+ groups. The best response I get is an ambivalent shrug.
If you look on youtube the MDI videos barely get 2-300k views. Some dont even break 100k. That’s… not a lot.
It doesn’t say the exact amount, but yes it looks like their packages were also really nice.
“The letter also promised “a comprehensive severance package,” continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. (Blizzard employees receive twice yearly bonuses based on how the company performed financially.) “There’s no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues,” Brack wrote.”
For such a niche thing, that’s actually not that bad, problem with wow esports is only people who play wow will understand it.
I watch MDI all the time, it’s entertaining.
Little late, but this is the article the Op is talking about after copa-pasting the link into google. 
That’s better than most regular season Major League Baseball games…by 2 or 3 times. So that sounds pretty successful to me.
that title is misleading… while they indeed give them gift cards it totally is a flamebait invitation…
pathetic “journalists” these days all for clicks and ad revenue.
Yeah, all possibly 15 games on PC. 
/s
I understand that $200 of something is still pretty nice, infact, if i have that, guaranteed that will go into the Spyro 4 (whenever that comes out) and Tony Hawk 1+2 (if they decided to stop the Epic Game exclusivity nonsense) and—… that’s it, maybe pocket the rest as sub money, but honestly i wouldn’t be too happy to have a Blizzard card personally, considering theirs really only 2 games i play (well 1 now), and 2 games i want that might possibly come or already on other platforms and the rest don’t really interest me. I would be happy as hell to get a $200 Steam gift card. That holds way more value to me because that’s way more games to choose from.
Not all chefs eat at their own restaurant.
Are you talking about recordings on youtube, or play on live tv? Because YouTube still racks up hits after the fact until the video is taken down, though admittedly the most views come from initial upload.
If you watched one round of the MDI and you can see why. Awful.
Blizzard tried to jump on the ESports bandwagon and failed. I feel sorry for the 50 people that were laid off, but things are tough all over. Capitalism 101.
Just because they had better-than-expected profits in 2020 doesn’t mean they should keep paying people to organize live events in a division that is moving to digital only. The gift card thing is weird tho – especially since it’s for their own merch.
“Here’s $200 to give back to us eventually.”
Maybe they learned something from how poorly they handled HOTS…
And yet Shadowlands lacks non e-sports content. They turned dungeons and battlegrounds into an e-sport and their entire customer base has been rioting about it for 5 months and they only double down on it. Makes ya wonder what else is going on behind the scenes. mayhaps the game is being propped up by whale spenders skipping the e-sports checks? When I see you duelist gear I assume you bought tokens for it because if there wasn’t huge demand for it then the party finder wouldn’t be full of paid carry 24/7 and they wouldn’t be commanding such comical amounts of gold. Your “exclusive” rewards are sullied by their “exclusivity” and has tanked all Blizzard credibility and consumer confidence, hope it was worth it.