Activision Blizzard fires almost 800 employees

The blizzard that you all know and loved died years ago, soon hopefully this will get through to you and after a brief grieving period, you'll be fine. This happened to me with Bungie.

Don't forget about Diablo Immortal aka Diablo Mobile...

 

Don't worry, some of those 800 will find work with ex blizz devs and companies. And there's more of those than you might think.
Still it sucks, the responsible people should get fired themselves, since in the end, every problem can be traced back to mismanagement, rather than bad work on the people fired.

 

The layoffs affect Activision, Blizzard and King. It's not just Blizzard.

With the lackluster performance recently, is it not a smart thing to cut positions deemed unnecessary and increase developer funding.
You can dislike the way it was handled, I do as well, but the end goal seems to be the right way to go.

Diablo in particular will get a big boost, with multiple projects ongoing.

 

The direction for gamers is good. Cut the esports stuff, focus on games like new Warcraft and titles that are really wanted, possibly make even solely a single player game. Too bad jobs are lost, but recently Blizzard's priorities were not right so they reorganize.

Reminder that Diablo: Immortal is only a good thing. Many mobile gamers play all sort of trash, but Immortal looks honestly an engaging mobile game. Mobile games are not nearly as expensive to produce as AAA-titles, so they can be managed by a smaller group.

 

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't the topic state that they just announced a 'record turnover'? No shock really, every business is like this (ps I will be paraphrasing from events within my own job of late.) Tough financial climate where other folks are barely scraping a profit, we have L4L sales that beat last year but because we aren't making the ludicrous 'targets' for this year it's time to cut the workforce's hours followed by the CEO actually saying and I kid you f*cking not 'time to do more with less' and that's the reality the guys at the top won't be making a cut in their pay and chances are they won't be working harder it's everyone else that has to pull up the slack not because the company is failing but because they have had to tell the shareholders that they will be making a little bit less than they were promised.

Very easy, if the guys running the operation make ludicrous promises to share holders about their expected profits and then all we hear after that is how the game that, by any other standard, sold very very well didn't sell as well as the d*ckheads at the top expected the result is the shareholders get twitchy which has a knock on effect on the stock value. It's a simple case of they were promised that they would make ALL the money and they actually only made SOME of the money. Or to put it another way that record turnover is actually less than whatever moron in charge promised their actually turn over would be to shareholders.

I suspect that their is also a fair amount of reality starting to set in for some of these assh*ts. That gamers are starting to get fed up with their wallets being raided at every opportunity by predatory never ending microtransactions. That the bubble of massive amounts of cash that these systems produced for the companies is starting to burst and the reality that the shareholders will now only be able to make SOME of the money instead of ALL of the money is starting to set in.

 

Record turnover doesn't mean every job in a 9600 workforce company is still relevant though. In Blizzard's case I'd say every single one of their franchises is in decline right now, at the very least they're not growing. So there's less need for CS.
There was a purge in 2012 as well, I think due to more automated CS systems. Judging by Twitter alone, most of the people that were let go were community managers and in PR.

As for Activision I have no idea what's going on there. I haven't bought any of their games since Black Ops 1.
And no, the CEO's definitely won't be taking any paycuts, they're not Nintendo.

 

This seems to be a thing now.

https://www.coworker.org/petitions/...cketing-millions-while-laying-off-800-workers

 

laying off redundant bloat, nothing wrong with that. Blizzard are also hiring for more relevant positions. No need to get upset.

 

While you are right, this is not how it all came together. It's not about layoffs alone.
People are upset about layoffs AND how it was communicated AND the company's shape in total. Revenue is up, manager wanker gets $15M bonus, 800 people laid off. That picture just looks quite wrong.

In my personal opinion, that $15M bonus is a waste of money anyway... 900k yearly salary with 15 times that as a bonus? That's illogical. That brings people to do anything for their bonus, which is so 90s, if this is still top management strategies, management has obsoleted itself.

The company would have gained much more by firing the CEO and putting a new person in that's already in the company, cut their bonues by half, and use those $7.5M to hire new devs. You'd see that actual worth increases, since that manager does not actually create any wealth for a company. If so, he'd have to create way more than $15M to even justify such a bonus.

 

Just to clarify, he didn't get a 15 mill bonus just handed to him. A great deal of it is in stocks with strings attached. I don't speak economics but this is from his contract:

Also, he's not the CEO as you can see. Kotick holds that position after Morhaime left.

And naturally, Blizzard France is making cuts as well. Engagement is down globally so it just makes sense.
Title is a bit clickbaity but it's not looking great:
Four Hundred Blizzard France Employees Still Don't Know If They're Laid Off

 

Thanks for sharing the details.
All in all it's still a weird sight, a huge bonus with layoffs told about with the same breath. He's not the only one getting a bonus after all, so those $15M aren't the only bonus money going out while 800 people get fired.
If you don't see why some people think this is not supposed to go that way, I'm afraid I won't be able to explain it to you either.

 

I know what you mean. My point was simply that 15 million has not been removed from the company's cashflow, it's a pretty significant difference between stocks and cash that most people skip over.

And yes, disgusting bonuses and gigantic salaries could have been spent on the little folks, but the whole idea here is that these positions that were let go aren't needed right now.
Blizzard doesn't have anything big launching in 2019, who knows if they'll have something in 2020. They'll have to rehire some of those positions as they get closer to release.

Some of the 600 people laid off in 2012 were rehired later.

Unfortunately they also have to give the high positions big money, or some other company will snatch them up instead. Like Netflix did with Blizzard's previous CFO.

 

and why is that? I am willing to bet that a good portion of those 800 folk that are getting the boot had no process in the decisions over the last few years that have resulted in them having nothing of worth coming out in the near future. The issue is not just the fact that these folk have lost their jobs due to 'restructuring and their positions becoming obsolete' it is that the people who are responsible for the decision making that has resulted in this obsolescence will not only most likely be keeping their jobs but will no doubt be getting some nice little bonuses on the back of these quarterly results.

 

Do you not agree that far less people are engaging with Blizzard games? You may as well blame the developers, or hell why not blame the players.

Again, I'm speaking generally on Blizzard. The 800 jobs covers Activsion, Blizzard and King.

 

How about I blame Acti-Blizz, and the question is what have THEY done to engage the players?

Blame the developers, why, most developers want to make games as they see them but that usually gets sidelined by some greedy ar*ehole who sits above them resulting in their concept being compromised in favour of making the games worse by including grindy bullsh*t designed to sell micro-transaction.

Blame the players, yeah why not, how dare the players get fed up with being treated like open wallets, being forced to grind boring game concepts for days just to unlock a new skin, or a colour for their armour or a f*cking red dot for their gun site.

The point I am making is someone somewhere decided that implementing this kind of rubbish in their games was more important than actually making games that, as you said 'engage the players'. They have had 4 or 5 years of micro-transaction grindy bs driving their bottom line and it was obvious last year when the entire fiasco with SWBF2 was blowing up that their was going to be a significant backlash against this kind of nonsense so, what did Acti-Blizz do... oh yeah started f*cking around with Destiny 2 exp to make the grind even more prolonged. Shoved ludicrous grind in to COD alongside ludicrous paywalls for content, while chasing the Battle Royale fad that was blowing up the FREE TO PLAY rival Fortnite but because it's Acti-Blizz their players have to pay $60 upfront for the bottom of the line bare bones version of the game. Then the cherry on the cake, they had one playerbase they could have gotten an instant win with, engaged with by saying 'The Next Diablo, out next year on PC'. Nope mobile exclusive then sit around acting like morons pretending why they couldn't figure out why so many people were pissed and like I said I can bet you that the people who made these decisions are not the ones losing their jobs.

 

100% agree

 

Nice optics Activision... the game industry needs to unionize; this won't keep all shareholders happy. Wouldn't keep me happy - I don't hold stock in EA/Acti - hold some in other companies but god I wouldn't look at this and think "gee what a healthy thing to do". Layoffs happen but claiming that "800 were all redundant" hiring a new CFO throwing $15 mill at em etc etc - sorry but it's all misdirection.