Activision Blizzard fires almost 800 employees
Activision Blizzard published its quarterly earnings for 2018. The company achieved a record turnover, but at the same time 8 percent of the employees were made redundant, which is 800 people out of 9600 employees.
They announced in their publication of the quarterly figures that it is increasingly going to focus on its largest franchises with titles like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Warcraft and Diablo. Mostly, staff are dismissed that is not directly involved in the development of games. According to sources of game site Kotaku there is cut in the publishing and e-sports divisions.
“Over the last few years, many of our non-development teams expanded to support various needs,” Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a note to staff around 1pm PT that was obtained by Kotaku. “Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I’m sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today. In our regional offices, we anticipate similar evaluations, subject to local requirements.”
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.
The news follows months of rumors about layoffs at the publisher, which heated up early last week as word began to spread that hundreds of people across Activision Blizzard’s various divisions might lose their jobs. Leading up to today, some of the publisher’s employees had been coming to work with no clue as to what might happen. One person at Blizzard told me this morning that as employees arrived, they cried and exchanged hugs in the parking lot.
Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard's CEO, said at the announcement of the quarterly figures that the financial results for 2018 are the best in the history of the company, but that 'not the full potential was realized'.
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In the game industry EA and Activision Blizzard are famous for being shitty employers but they have really cool multimillion bonuses for their management. I haven't played any of their games in the past 8 years cause i won't sponsor such shits where designers , artists and developers are getting their asses torn and at the end the CFO takes credit for the income and takes millions in bonuses .
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Anyways, good luck to them. And I hate to read terms like "redundant" when referring to people.
Well sorry to say but from some point of view whole humankind is reduntant.
We re not doing anything positive for our planet . Mother Nature would live much better without humans.
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A bitter achievement.
Is this end of the The Blizzard as we know and love?
What?Blizzard has been horrible as a company for many many many years now, maybe since 2012? Guess people forget all about the real money auction house on diablo, or you know allowing gambling on their games through lootboxes, or terrible business practices. Not to mention all the crap Activision do since they;re holding hands together throughout all this. But don't you have a phone? you know to play diablo, spend spend spend...
CD projekt red and a few other smaller developers are the last good standing publishers/developers left. Too much greed has gone into the business, when lots of money isn't enough you know something has gone horribly wrong.
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https://www.fanbyte.com/trending/kiss-my-ass-activision-blizzard/