Blizzard lay off 600 - development unit not affected

[SaraiE]

Layoff - Blizzard 600 people.

Sad for those people.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/busines...ntent=Business

Saraie

[Targ]

Wow, record fourth-quarter earnings and then they come out with layoffs to further punch up the P and L statement.
I suspect somebody is looking to sell the company.

[MiRai]

Mike Morhaime released a statement about this earlier today...

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4079626833

And here's someone that was affected - http://twitter.com/#!/jakesones/stat...58260577767425

[Peli]

Youch. That's more than 10% of their estimated workforce according to this article and it speculates that a majority of the cuts are from customer service (20-30% off the top)... so don't expect GM response times to get any better... I can't help but think that Targ's right. You don't post record profits and then announce a significant layoff (under the guise of having "some departments be overstaffed") weeks later.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I have read a few articles about this. If I had to guess, it has nothing to do with subscriptions being down from 12 million to 10 million. That is still 150 million a month in subs alone, not counting licencing fees and other merchandise. Blizz also has Starcraft 2 still pulling in huge amounts of cash and D3 is going to break every box sale record known to man in the entertainment business. WoW and SC2 have an expansion pack ready to drop and when it does, prepare for all the other mmo's to become ghost towns compared to what they are now.

Customer service is going to be hit the biggest. In the past, it took weeks to have compromised accounts restored, now its automated once the complaint has been verified. Billing and ingame support is being outsourced because it makes business sense to. Also being part of Activision, there is no reason to double up on these departments as well.

I am surprised they haven't done it already, but with MoP coming out, they should just require people to have and authenticator as part of the expansion and include one in the retail box. I can't believe SW:TOR didn't do this when it launched.

Still, it's sad to see people loose their jobs. But when I worked at Dell, we had a director who was famous for saying "If the tools worked, I would fire all of you." He referred to the crappy phone queue system, inaccurate diagnostic tools, and the inability for customers who know their way around a computer to get parts and fix them their-selves.

The writing for this one has been on the wall for quite some time.

[JohnGabriel]

Mike Morhaime released a statement about this earlier today...

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4079626833

And here's someone that was affected - http://twitter.com/#!/jakesones/statuses/174958260577767425

The guy laid off was a designer, while the blue post said mostly "non-developer" positions were laid off. That seems odd.

[Bollwerk]

Mostly = there could have been some devs laid off

[Starbuck_Jones]

We also do not know what he designed, what project (named or un-named) he was assigned to either. For all we know, he could have designed Keragin's new look, or created the last round of Facebook ads.