Blizzard Cutting 600 Jobs, Most Unrelated to Game Development

Everyone not making WoW. That's who.

Now that Kotick is gone who do we have to blame for this? 600 lives are ruined from the company that prints money all for the sake of "streamlining". Bullshit I say. Business as usual they say.

Marketing. It's always marketing.

so glad I don't care about WoW at all

hope bob's ok.

Well that still sucks even if it's not game devs.

So... Blizzard had 600 people working on non-game development jobs? How fucking big is this company??

You would think that the makers of Starcraft would know the dangers of expanding too quickly.

That sucks. 600 is a pretty darn high number of employees.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

They've been advertising here to hire for a while.

I'm guessing it's related to the cancellation of Blizzcon - I wonder the number of people required to plan/market/execute a conference for 30,000 people.

@buckybit said:

Good for Blizzard! Watch the D.I.C.E. video with Frank Pearce, Mike Capps & Ted Price from earlier this year (on Gamespot). Blizzard is waaay too big! Letting people go, when they have to (probably already 12 months later then they should have) is a healthy thing for a BIG company.

They still have literally 1000s of community-managers & online-support staff.

No good designer or programmer is leaving the mothership. Be assured.

Good for Blizzard for firing people from their jobs? Yeah real good work.

Alex's writing is so good that he can make me laugh in such a sad story.

Hopefully Jose Roberto is safe.

600 without even touching the dev teams? That's fucking enormous.

So if it's not from WoW then 60 people just got dropped from Diablo 3 and SC2?

It's worth noting that Blizzard is almost permanently hiring customer support + community management staff in Europe, as well. Obviously that's not much consolation for the people losing their jobs, but I wouldn't read into this as any sort of decline in Blizzard's profits.

What they get for rehashing the same shit.

They should fire the team working on diablo 3 because it was sure shit before they did a total overhaul a month ago.  Anyway, if they can fire 500ish customer service reps, that makes me think they are losing business and losing it BIG and FAST.

There are a lot of things that can be at play here and even if your still turning a profit in this day an age you need to cut out what you can.

1. You could have it where a staff member has improved and learnt more skills or is just very productive and you do not need the 3 other people doing roles because this person can manage it. You can give them a bit of a pay rise which they would be very happy with but it would be a lot less then paying three other people.

2. Modern software and online software and even just better systems in place for project management, time management and so on means that if you had people managing or a coordinator as they are often termed are not needed as much so you can cut those too.

3. As someone mentioned - Marketing. I think a lot of these roles are a big waste of money anyway But with the power of the net for example you could produce some interesting CGI and post it on youtube and get a lot of traffic and buz greater then what you would have got from magazines.

Exclusives and these deals for news and information, limiting this gets people interested and want to know about the product, even if it is crap. You just have to know. All these sorts of modern techniques can be achieved without the staff you once had...

Just a few examples of why this sort of thing happens. Since this is a statement of 90% not related to game development this is just streamlining that often happens. They will take on new projects when profits are high and then higher more staff and then scale back again at another period of time.

Ohh shit, I think my roommate just lost his job...

They say 90% of the 600 are not directly tied to game development, that still means 60 people directly tied to game development were laid off. That's still a very significant number.

Good move, I hear they were low on cash...

Still, that's 600 people without jobs now. One must wonder if this isn't an Activision decision....

It's a fair assumption that the 60 game devs let go were primarily on the Diablo III team. With that game nearing or past content completion, it would be easy to let go some freelance guys.

All that F2P shit finally killing it.

pfff activision cuts that many jobs every day...

600 people that have apparently been judged as useless and nothing and are going to starve to death in a gutter without any love or understanding, which in reality can actually do amazing things just like any other human being.

Capitalism.

They are outsourcing their entire customer service to a vendor in the phillipines.

So remove your credit card info from any blizzard accounts you may have as soon as possible.

I'm betting it's people working on all that garbage they sell that doesn't make any money. T-shirts, action figures, art books, all that blizzard merch. The card game.

They recently had me do a survey that had questions about all that shit. I'm certain they discovered no one cares about customer service or all those extras they had, so they cut em out.

I certainly hope anyone playing a Blizz game doesn't have their account hacked because it's probably going to be hell to get things corrected now. I wonder if they looked at the Microsoft hacking epidemic and decided that if people are willing to wait 21-28 days to have their accounts fixed, Blizz gamers would probably tolerate waiting a week or so to hear back from a service representative. Maybe they'll toss in a free pet and all is forgiven.

@buzz_killington said:

So... Blizzard had 600 people working on non-game development jobs? How fucking big is this company??

There used to be about 500 pole dancers and strippers to greet potential new customers. Oh and some marketing people. Those are about the same as strippers and pole dancers, just not as attractive.

While 600 people are a lot to let go, it is at least nice that only 10% of them were related to game development (most of them probably were working on Diablo 3 since they already stated that the WoW development team wasn't affected) and the remaining 540 people were generally non-essential for the game development so the games won't be affected by it directly.

It was probably cleaners, marketing, human relation, public relation, catering, some of those working on merchandise, legal department, the ones who worked on the World of Warcraft magazine (since it was canceled) and probably some of the people working on books and comics.

Three times you said that WoW will be unaffected. And it's not like this is a super long article, either.

It's Blizzard. They employ an enormous number of people. They have like 4 teams working on 4 projects at different stages (WoW, Titan, StarCraft II: 2, Diablo 3), not to mention the amount of maintenance something like WoW requires, and the support capabilities they have to have for owning some of the most popular IPs in the industry.

Yes, people losing jobs is sad, but there is no need for people to go "boooo Blizzard" just because they let people go. They likely had a good reason for it, and employing people that aren't needed isn't a smart thing for a business, especially when that business is important to far more people's well being. Those people will likely find jobs elsewhere. No one has one job all of their life. If this were any other developer it wouldn't be that crazy because the number would be tiny, but Blizzard is more than a developer now.

I wonder if they are making their support stuff a little more integrated and centralized, and don't need to hire as many people? Seems like a smart thing to do with 3 different Battle.net franchises on or near shelves. I'm sure there are a number of reasons for the cuts, but money is likely not a huge issue for Blizzard right now. Testing might be a big dumping ground, I'm not sure if that's considered game development or not.

@Dalfiuss said:

They say 90% of the 600 are not directly tied to game development, that still means 60 people directly tied to game development were laid off. That's still a very significant number.

60 people from 4 teams that could be up to 400+ strong when combined. Blizzard is huge, you have to remember that. Most developers don't have that many teams working on such high profile games. It's not a small number, but put it in perspective and it's not as big as say, Bungie losing 60 of it's developers.

You're right Alex. I can't wait for the next Diablo III delay announcement.

Maybe all the TPS report guys who do useless paperwork that's uneeded.