Blizzard Cuts 600 Active Positions

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/218208-message-from-mike-morhaime/

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120229005855/en/Blizzard-Entertainment-Announces-Staff-Reductions

You know, I can't really think of anything which hasn't been already been put into these two announcements, except for the fact that the Hate Dumb is approaching critical mass.

edited 1st Mar '12 12:01:47 AM by tclittle

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

Blizzard's always been a bit of an awkward company in some respects. It is a gaming company developed by gamers and, more importantly, RUN by gamers. That can be a problem when you have to expand your business structure and the guys in charge graduated from Caltech with computer science degrees. Obviously they ended up hiring too eagerly, and it bit them in the bum. I'm not going to cry "corporate incompetence" here, because even companies with world famous business leaders in charge make this very same mistake, but it does display one of Blizzard's biggest criticisms - oftentimes the ambition of the developers outstrips what is actually feasible.

For example, riding the success of World Of Warcraft, they are hoping to release three major titles in one year. That is unheard of in the industry outside of the big dogs (Nintendo, Sony, EA...), and I suspect that it will not go well, and their ambitious corporate executives are squarely to blame for pushing this insane agenda. Diablo III will be excellent, Mists of Pandaria adequate, and Heart of the Swarm an abysmal failure (or preferably, delayed to 2013). I base this wild speculation on what happened with the first Star Craft II title, Sons of Liberty, which came off as excellent on scenario design but a step backwards on game mechanics (it is Star Craft, but with better graphics. No real leaps or taking risks with the genre like they did with Heroes in War Craft 3, no effort at any sort of innovation at all really) and with a sloppy campaign story that could have been good with more polish (A lot more. I don't want to derail the thread, but suffice it to say I found the campaign's story to be boring and flat, mostly because the "choose your own adventure" idea did not translate into a coherent and interesting story like previous Blizzard titles have always delivered). They also failed to deliver on promises of e-sport support (beyond a simple ladder), and custom maps at launch. But I digress...

To sum it all up, good company with a policy of quality over quantity has tried to switch gears to "quantity AND quality" and ran off the road. Here's to hoping they get back on track once the resources devoted to Diablo III are liberated for other projects.

That... is a lot of employees.

Oh wow. Just... Wow.

Cutting 600 jobs the same year that you want to release three large projects is strange beyond belief.

You're seriously going to call critics of this Hate Dumb? Go to hell.

Losing a job is a terrible thing in this economy. Do not trivialize it unless you're perfectly fine with your own workplace laying you off.

Maybe this decision was necessary for the company's survival or future profits, but that doesn't mean I should approve of it.

edited 1st Mar '12 8:57:40 AM by Scardoll

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

Most of the jobs they're cutting have nothing to do with development.

Jonah Falcon

Just checked it up on Wikipedia, the employee count for Blizz was around 4600 in 2009.

Now I'm wondering HOW CAN THEY USE SO MANY PEOPLE?!

edited 1st Mar '12 9:15:03 AM by VutherA

^ That's not just developers, but all of the support staff, down to the janitors.

Full Of Stars: Why do you think Ho TS is going to tank? There's plenty of SCII multiplayer junkies who won't want to be left out of the new multiplayer units and maps, plus I believe its only $39.99 as opposed to $59.99.

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Keep in mind that this is an international company. They need customer support staff for every game they run, and in every language they run it in. Translators, PR people, managers for their local branches, janitors for their local branches, etc. Now obviously, a lot of those jobs will overlap or can be streamlined, but that's exactly what they're doing right now.

The whole business is very unfortunate, but it doesn't surprise me much either.

The conclusions being jumped to by the idiots on the forums are beyond belief. If it proves anything to me, it's that people who go onto forums to vent their rage about a gaming company are among the least intelligent specimens of humanity that it's possible to find.

I mean, they literally ignored the part of the press release that says, "We aren't cutting dev staff." How dumb can you get?

edited 1st Mar '12 9:37:33 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Sorry, I didn't mean it would be a financial disaster, but a critical disaster. Blizzard is fortunate in that folks will simply buy something just because it has the blizzard logo on it, but I do see the game being Blizzard's first title in a long time that does not break records for sales, and it getting a very poor critical reception.

They ignored it because 60 members of the development team are being cut. Obviously not the main powerhouses, but a lot of the code monkeys and background/concept artists are taking one for the team. It is their "reward" for working so hard on Diablo3.

edited 1st Mar '12 9:41:58 AM by MyGodItsFullofStars

I'm sorry, I don't give a shit whether they fired dev staff or not; I don't play any Blizzard games. I'm more concerned that they just cut the jobs for over half a thousand people.

I understand that downsizing is a necessary evil, but if expenses were a problem, they shouldn't have scheduled three high profile games (With all the necessary money put into ads, shipping, etc.) in the same fiscal year.

edited 1st Mar '12 10:45:04 AM by Scardoll

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

They didn't say they weren't cutting dev staff.

They said

1. None of the staff cut were World Of Warcraft staff
2. 10% of the 600 were associated with developers
3. None of the games in development are affected at all

Jonah Falcon

They said the dev staff would be "largely unaffected", which is different.

Instead, I have learned a horrible truth of existence...some stories have no meaning.

This is probably due to reorganization efforts from the Actavision side I wouldnt be surprised in the coming months that they hire more developers from the money being saved here.

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

@ Scardoll: I just want to claify, I was talking about the kind of "fans" turning this into a "lol blizzard is dying' type of crap.

I really didn't mean it any other way.

"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

But Activision doesn own Blizzard

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Xan-Xan/