Approximately 600 employees may lose their jobs, following the review of the companies organization. It is said that about 90% of the affected employees will not come from game development and the development team behind their MMO monster, World of Warcraft, will not be affected at all.
“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business. 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,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “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.”
Blizzards projects that are currently in the works, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard DOTA, and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm will not be negatively affected because of this.
Devi’s Advocate: You don’t run a highly profitable business by retaining unnecessary employees.
Curious where all these people came from if not from all the dev teams. (Mods? Customer support for WoW? Plus toy manufacturing department?)
This makes me really angry. Blizzard is one of the most profitable developers in the world. Doesn’t matter if the people who lose their jobs aren’t coming from the developer side. If I remember Blizzard didn’t have to massively cut employees before their Activision merger. Seems unadulterated capitalism wins yet again & somewhere Bobby Kotick has a huge smile on his face wallowing in the misery of the people who will lose their jobs thanks to his legacy. What a shame!
Yeah, it seriously sucks to see something like this happening. Especially like you said, with one of the most profitable developers. They;re making millions a month but laying people off. That’s crap.