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'.