Huge layoffs at Blizzard: 600 jobs to go

Blizzard plans to cut around 600 jobs. It insists that its "current development and publishing schedules will not be impacted," though around 10% off the people affected are from departments "related to development."

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Blizzard Entertainment has revealed plans to cut around 600 jobs globally, saying it needs to align its workforce with "current organizational needs." It insists that its "current development and publishing schedules will not be impacted," though around 10% of the people affected are from departments "related to development."

"Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business," Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said in the announcement. "Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company."

"Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward."

However, the announcement notes Blizzard is still hiring for a number of development roles.

To put the 600 figure into perspective, back in September 2009 Gamasutra reported Blizzard had over 4,600 employees globally. Then, in December 2010, it told the Orange County Register that it had hired over 1,000 employees within the last twelve months. Furthermore, Blizzard's website say it has over 1,500 working in its European offices alone. While 600 is still a lot of jobs to cut, Blizzard is a huge company.

The layoffs are probably in support and customer service, especially considering World of Warcraft is slowly but steadily losing players. The support-intensive MMO was down to 10.3 million so-called "subscribers" in November 2011, from a peak of 12 million in October 2010.

Blizzard is also skipping BlizzCon this year, spinning the pro-gaming section off into its own event, the 2012 Battle.net World Championship.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    February 29, 2012 10:20 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Huge layoffs at Blizzard: 600 jobs to go.

    Blizzard plans to cut around 600 jobs. It insists that its "current development and publishing schedules will not be impacted," though around 10% off the people affected are from departments "related to development."

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 10:34 AM

      Yup, was wondering when this was going to happen. World of Warcraft can't go free to play fast enough. Monthly fee games FTL

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      February 29, 2012 10:34 AM

      With Diablo3 basically done they can thin out the herd until their next project hits crunch time is what Im thinking

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      February 29, 2012 10:48 AM

      This is what happens when you take your sweet ass time making games.

      • Zek legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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        February 29, 2012 11:10 AM

        Blizzard is still wildly successful. This is probably just about trimming fat, they had 4600~ employees according to Wikipedia.

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          February 29, 2012 11:17 AM

          Probably GMs and related jobs that aren't needed anymore in WoW after losing ~2 million subscribers.

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            February 29, 2012 11:22 AM

            Well, they did say departments "related to development." So I'm going to assume they wouldn't be GMs and CMs since they don't do much development.

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              February 29, 2012 12:29 PM

              You'd be surprised at the number of non-technical/development jobs exist at a company Blizzard's size.

              Combined with their growth over the past five years (adding upwards of 20% of their workforce in a year), it wouldn't surprise me if they had 600 useless employees in their ranks.

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                February 29, 2012 12:43 PM

                That's true. Also I mis-read the summary as 600 developers, not 10% of those 600 being developers.

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                  February 29, 2012 12:46 PM

                  The quote from the press release : The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development.

                  So 10% of the people come from departments related to game development. Actual developers will probably be much less, and dependent on their organizational structure.

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          February 29, 2012 12:09 PM

          That was 4.6k in 2009, and they hired another 1k in 2010.

          Wouldn't be surprised if they were over 6k at this point.

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        February 29, 2012 1:12 PM

        Nah, its what happens when you are owned by shareholders and dont ship a title every year.

        If Blizzard were still independent they would be fine and probably even bigger (profit wouldnt be siphoned off).

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          February 29, 2012 1:19 PM

          Where do you guys get this information?

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          February 29, 2012 1:21 PM

          Blizzard has always been owned by someone. They were owned by Vivendi before the Activision-Blizzard merger, and in fact still are.

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            February 29, 2012 1:23 PM

            Blizzard isn't even publicly traded.

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              February 29, 2012 2:09 PM

              Look up atvi. Activision blizzard.

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                February 29, 2012 2:38 PM

                .... that's not Blizzard.

                Prior to 2008, Blizzard Entertainment was a subsidiary by Vivendi. In 2008 Vivendi merged with Activision to create Activision-Blizzard. Blizzard is now a subsidiary of Activision-Blizzard, and one of the few (only?) to retain its executive staff & independent operation. Activision-Blizzard and Blizzard Entertainment are two different entities. atvi is Activision-Blizzard, not Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment is not publicly traded.

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                  February 29, 2012 4:49 PM

                  This is accurate. I didn't mean to imply that Blizzard was publicly traded, just that they have been owned by Vivendi for quite some time.

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                    February 29, 2012 4:53 PM

                    Right. I was adding to the wrongness of Beady's post.

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            February 29, 2012 2:12 PM

            Not always, but yeah they have for the most part been traded around like a cheap ho. Even a car rental firm owned them at one point. Lol.

      • reply
        February 29, 2012 1:29 PM

        what?

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      February 29, 2012 10:50 AM

      Eh, it's possible, though unlikely that it won't. Could be all dead weight or that could've been a team that was working on an unannounced and now canceled project.

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        February 29, 2012 11:31 AM

        It's probably this. Diablo 3 is just around the corner. Cleaning up the left overs there and some wow leftovers.

        Blizzard grew tremendously with wow alone. A well thought out, organized company was probably last on their list as they expanded.

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 10:55 AM

      Looks like Blizzard *Shades* Has a storm coming...

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 10:56 AM

      DotM safe?

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 10:59 AM

      [deleted]

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      February 29, 2012 11:12 AM

      :( Blizz and valve are two companies that really make me worry when they dish out layoffs.

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      February 29, 2012 11:18 AM

      Why the "subscribers" in quotes? Afaik Blizzard has always published active subscriber numbers.

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        February 29, 2012 12:41 PM

        Because a WoW "subscriber" is not necessarily what people think of as a subscriber:

        World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 12:49 PM

          Basically, anyone who has given Blizzard cash monies in the past month to play WoW.

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 1:49 PM

          I see, thanks Alice.

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 11:20 AM

      I blame Obama's policies.

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        February 29, 2012 11:21 AM

        I blame Obama as a human being.

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 11:33 AM

          I blame Obama's secret midnight rituals to the Great Old Ones.

          • reply
            February 29, 2012 12:17 PM

            All this crazy shit started happening once Obama started singing

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      February 29, 2012 11:22 AM

      This makes sense, even the no impact to current development line. It's not current development they're cutting, it's future expansion packs they just cut. This one reason why I left the game biz. No job security. Well, almost no company is all that stable any more, but game studios are the worst I've seen in my professional career. The loss of your job has almost no relationship to the quality of your work, or even of your team.

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        February 29, 2012 11:31 AM

        This makes me really sad =(

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      February 29, 2012 11:22 AM

      I guess WoW can't pay for everything forever...

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 11:25 AM

      [deleted]

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 11:30 AM

      Fun.

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 11:32 AM

      Isn't Diane at Blizz? Hope she didn't get cut.

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      February 29, 2012 12:06 PM

      so this isn't just culling WoW QA then? It's actual artists/programmers/designers? Wow. that's pretty nuts.

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        February 29, 2012 12:12 PM

        It's the Blizzconn team + people who were still getting paid to work on Starcraft: Ghost.

        ... they fixed the glitch.

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      February 29, 2012 12:17 PM

      From the BusinessWire press release:

      "The company will announce specific release plans for Diablo® III in the near future, and it’s continuing to drive aggressively toward beta testing for World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria™, Blizzard DOTA, and StarCraft® II: Heart of the Swarm™. "

      "Blizzard DOTA" .... wat?

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 12:21 PM

      crap, a friend of mine just got hired several months ago on the low end of the Blizz totem, hope his job is still ok..

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 12:23 PM

      how many total employees does blizzard have?

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      February 29, 2012 12:40 PM

      If these were quality devs (which I doubt they were) I'm optimistic about this because this could lead to creation of smaller new dev houses.

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 12:42 PM

      Still no release date for HotS

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      February 29, 2012 1:18 PM

      I hope no Shackers lost their jobs. :(

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        February 29, 2012 1:25 PM

        I was part of it. Though I don't post too often. Now I can though!

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          February 29, 2012 1:25 PM

          what were you working on?

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            February 29, 2012 1:27 PM

            Orchammer 400

          • reply
            February 29, 2012 1:39 PM

            It was essentially QA on the support side. We'd go through all bugs sent in via tickets from players and send them to QA if they were actually bugs and then we also fixed a lot of player issues where they may have had something mess up due to a bug.

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              February 29, 2012 1:40 PM

              oh are you located in Austin? How many QA folk were laid off? I have a friend of a friend who works there..

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                February 29, 2012 1:44 PM

                Irvine and I have no idea how many from the rest of QA, though I know some of them got let go. The specific thing I did was only me and one other person and he is still okay.

              • reply
                February 29, 2012 2:14 PM

                [deleted]

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              February 29, 2012 1:40 PM

              Sorry bud :(

            • reply
              February 29, 2012 1:40 PM

              WAIT hold on I have an inventory bug. I'm missing all of the maximum ilvl item tokens. :D

            • reply
              February 29, 2012 3:14 PM

              [deleted]

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              February 29, 2012 3:28 PM

              QA is a bad place to cut. I wonder why now? Activision just trying to put on a good show for investors next quarter?

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                February 29, 2012 8:36 PM

                They left some of it intact. My job probably makes more sense than some other QA departments since a lot of our bugs were due to GM's not really understanding the game and submitting things that weren't actually bugs. So we had a lot of trash to go through. Since there are less GM's now and presumably the ones being kept aren't retarded there should hopefully be less bugs overall from there.

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 1:35 PM

          [deleted]

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          February 29, 2012 1:45 PM

          Sorry man. As much as layoffs seem to be part and parcel for the industry, it still blows for those affected :(

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 2:14 PM

          [deleted]

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          February 29, 2012 2:48 PM

          if it makes you feel any better the DOW was over 13,000 yesterday...

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 2:50 PM

          if youre ex-blizzard you can go anywhere right?

        • reply
          February 29, 2012 9:22 PM

          [deleted]

          • reply
            February 29, 2012 11:19 PM

            Indeed, should meet up again sometime. I have lots of free time now.

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          March 1, 2012 12:07 AM

          did you steal 999999999 gold before you left?

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 3:23 PM

      Obama.

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 4:37 PM

      I just ran into about 20 newly unemployed at the Spectrum. Sorry gents :|

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 5:55 PM

      [deleted]

    • reply
      February 29, 2012 5:57 PM

      Mists of Welfaria

    • reply
      March 6, 2012 5:20 PM

      Notch will probably hire all of them.

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