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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Member
Posts: 55
Joined: 2005-03-08
Problem is not with the Chinese studio , problem is with the really cheap Chinese studio that will be barely capable to keep up with quality and will create more headaches for the core team than solve problems. Been through this at Gameloft , we had Chinese QA back in the days overloading the bug base with unreadable bugs and stuff that was not a bug. The CEO gave them a chance but understood this is not the way to go so we received local QA team.Now there is a problem with the android porting teams in Vietnam - they just don't have skills they need years to catch up but Vivendi won't change this cause Vietnam is cheap really cheap and Vivendi wants to be Activision one day

Senior Member
Posts: 5543
Joined: 2003-04-05
Gaming industry has turned in the banking industry, while making massive profits they close more branches and cut more jobs to make even more profits for shareholders each year, i mean how is this even sustainable, they have tunred their workforce into consumable microtransactions, poor buggers.

Senior Member
Posts: 1748
Joined: 2014-08-15
Lets face it: after Mike Morhaime leave Blizzard company,the entire gaming universe of Blizz is gone.Sad,but true.
(gaming industry is no more the industry of passion & gaming,good guys who made "Golden era of gaming" are gone from gaming industry)
Maybe that "bobby" kotick should leave the chair of CEO.Will be better and healthy for Blizzard company to break the chain who make them slave of activision.
Senior Member
Posts: 2513
Joined: 2012-04-16
At least their newly appointed CFO got a welcome bonus of $15 million dollars.
Senior Member
Posts: 320
Joined: 2014-12-09
Why would they need so many employees when they can hire a chinese studio to do a big part of the work for less; that's what they think