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.