Why is blizzard firing everyone?

Community General Discussion
1

I’m confused can someone tell me what’s going on

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2

Welcome to corporate America, where the bosses take care of themselves and nothing/nobody else.
Sips the morning tea

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3

“Restructuring” for more devs in order to have more game content. I don’t buy it as the full reason…

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4

Corporate restructuring, and they were laid off not fired. That means they get a severance package and benefits to help them transition to a new job.

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5

Money

(10) char

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6

I can already tell this thread is about to go crazy. I’m not even gonna try and jump in. I’ll just watch the scenario unfold from the corner.
/:popcorn:

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800 people that you didn’t know existed got fired so you need to act like your single mother of 10 got fired instead. Make sure you lace your outrage with socialism and a good “I quit” rant.

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Getting rid of everyone they could run without. I mean I get it, why have community managers if you don’t even care about player feedback :man_shrugging:

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9

lvl 13. First post.

Odds on it being someone’s alt that just wants to stir up more drama?

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I would say something about the youth of today and being overreactionary (is that a word?) but then I would sound like my old man.

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11

  1. They can.

  2. BFA is bad.

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12

A comment on Reddit pointed out that while revenue was up, profit was down - and primarily from two divisions. So that’s not good, and restructuring is a way to resolve that issue.

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Lmao! +1. At least this spammed topic moved those stupid lfr spam threads down the line some lol.

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^-------This, Big Difference as this player described between being fired and laid off.

Also, it is part of life to have things like this happen as much as it stinks. Think about all the other people who get laid off that no one ever knows about.

I was laid off once so far and I was given a choice between taking a lump sum of money or being re-located to another part of the company with a pay cut.

So, I am sure the people being laid off have been given some options on what to do next.

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15

They didn’t fire everyone, but they did fire 8% of the workforce, or about 800 people.

This happened despite having completed their most profitable year ever. But that is the past, and the layoffs are about the future, specifically 2019.

Blizzard described in the call that there would be few major releases across Acti-Blizz titles in 2019, well below what they admit should be happening. But that means less revenue, and if they want to maintain profits from this past year, the only way to do that is to reduce expenses. The quickest and easiest way for management to do that is to eliminate jobs, lots and lots of jobs.

Plus, Wall Street likes big layoffs like this vs. other means, and Wall Street reacted as anticipated by driving up the stock price after yesterday’s quarterly earnings report and call.

Now, Blizzard could have reduced headcount through attrition (not filling positions as people leave or retire), voluntary package separations (where people chose to leave by accepting a buyout deal), or retraining people from jobs they don’t need going forward into jobs they need more of, like the stated increase in hiring for developers in 2019.

But all those things take time, typically over a year or two, and they seem to really want a big bottom line impact quickly at the start of what they said would be a difficult 2019, so they chose to use layoffs.

The only good news, potentially, is an increase of 20% in developers, but they described this as being “in the aggregate” across all their IP. So that doesn’t necessarilly mean each title gets 20% more devs, as some may get more, some less, and theoretically, some could even go down if “in the aggregate” the total is 20% more in the end.

So does that mean WoW gets more devs? Probably. Does that mean they’ll be working on the next WoW expansion(s)? Maybe. Blizzard has also said they have top devs already working on mobile apps for all their IP, they describe mobile as being the future in yesterday’s call, and Wall Street views them as being well-positioned for mobile going forward down the road in 2020 and beyond, as evidenced by Acti-Blizz being frequently mentioned as a take over target for cash rich Apple due to their positioning for mobile for the future. So maybe WoW-PC will see some more devs, maybe not, but definitely whatever WoW-mobile stuff they are working on will certainly see more hires going forward.

Around here, the biggest change you’ll notice is that the Baby Yak, CM Ythisens, is unfortunately one of those that was let go yesterday. So GD just lost it’s most visible and active blue, and that speaks volumes about what Blizz really thinks about their often repeated promise of “improved communications” with the players.

#BringBackTheYak

#YakMountsForYthisens

/moo :cow:

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My main is ransrot and I posted this on my phone. So idk why it posted it on this char

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It wasn’t most profitable. They had the highest revenue, but profits were down. That means they earned a lot of cash but their costs internally were too high so overall money was lost. Unfortunately layoffs are an effective way of cutting costs.

In other words, they spent a lot of money on failing games that didn’t earn their keep, and those games have lost staff as a result.

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Low yearly numbers led to executives concerned for future financial stability for the company. (Even though this was “thier most profitable year to date.”)Large portions of sectors were laid off to restructure the company to be “more development”, which is odd considering they did lay off a couple development roles.

They’re planing on upping development employee numbers by approximately 20% for Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Diablo®, Hearthstone, Overwatch, and Warcraft® (World of Warcraft and Warcraft are different in terms of legality I believe.)

To be honest though cutting off a large amount of the PR team and Community Managers is a horrible idea. Profits are down because they’ve lost touch on what makes their products worth paying for, no increase in development will ever fix that.

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Has anyone but literally 1 guy at JP Morgan said anything about Apple buying Acti-Blizz? And the article was more “here are some companies Apple COULD buy”…and listed like 5? Any other article I have ever seen is based on what that 1 guy is speculating about.

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CEO gets millions despite failings of the product, fires 700+

Beginning to see why so many folks hate big business.

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