Blizzard laying off 600 staff globally [Updated]
by Adam Holisky 
Feb 29th 2012 at 12:47PM
Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard, has the following to say:
Mike Morhaime
Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business. Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company.
Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward.
Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward.
It's certainly bad news for those impacted, and we here at WoW Insider hope that everyone is able to land on their feet.
According to the press release, current publishing schedules for their various games will not be affected.
Update 1:00 p.m. EST: Another statement from Mike Morhaime, after the break.
Mike Morhaime
Everyone,
We announced today that we're in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I'm sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.
In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We're in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.
After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.
I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.
You've all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.
-Mike Morhaime
We announced today that we're in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I'm sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.
In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We're in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.
After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.
I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.
You've all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.
-Mike Morhaime
Filed under: News items
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 7)
AltairAntares Feb 29th 2012 1:43PM
600 people being laid off today = 600 people all looking for a job today.
600 people Not being laid off today = ???? number of people laid off next year to compensate.
Blizz isn't laying people for kicks, or so Mike Morhame can have a bigger check, it's because the company needs to do it to operate responsibly.
Lipstick Feb 29th 2012 2:31PM
You guys are all right and you are all wrong.
It's not so much that companies want to turn a profit any longer it's that they want to turn a HIGHER profit than they did the year before. This kind of expectation is ridiculous, especially when one of the ways companies have done this is to "downsize to make things more efficient". When the only efficiency savings for many companies (not speaking specifically about blizzard) is less money spent on wages, not better processes within the company.
Sure, there are some companies which are over-staffed, and they can afford to trim a little slack here and there, but in a lot of cases these layoffs at many companies means asking those who survived the layoff axe to suddenly do the work of 2 or 3 people, often for less money.
People talk about 2 months to find another job as if they're giving away new jobs on the street corner (well they might be, work it sista.. ?!?) but the reality is that for many people, they're not finding new jobs freely these days. Those that do find new jobs, aren't often making the same as what they use to, and just because you lose your job and get a new job which pays you less than your old one, it doesn't automatically mean your bills are any less per month.
When a company as profitable as Blizzard is -- lays off people -- no matter how many people it lays off -- there is this sense that no place is safe.
I use to do a lot of call center work. They constantly were increasing production goals, and decreasing the time they wanted you to spend doing it. When the company wanted to trim workers the first thing they started to do was firing those who worked in the call center. They figured why pay a human being to do what a computer automated voice can do for free. I guarantee you that customer satisfaction suffered greatly, but the company simply didn't care. They had become too big to care, because they knew no matter how inconvenient they made their customer service they had more customers coming in than they stood to lose by going to a computer voice instead of real people behind the phones.
What this means for blizzard customer service on the phones in billing, or account services or what this might mean for GM tickets or things like that -- I hate to see. They've already been adding more and more features which are automated now.
Rafinius Mar 2nd 2012 10:24AM
Don't mind him. He seems german by name and in our country many have a different opinion on whats right and whats wrong in the corporate world. Increasing profits at the expense of (former) employess is very frowned upon by most of the midleclass and below.
eel5pe Feb 29th 2012 1:13PM
@ Adam- But "largely unaffected" does not mean completely unaffected, ya? I know one patch does not make a trend, but I was pretty discouraged by Dragon Soul with its lack of unique boss models, reused environments, and paltry 8 bosses. I'm definitely not of the "sky is falling" crowd, and remain generally pleased with the game, but the fact that they're downsizing, even if its just the cafeteria guy (GC NEEDS HIS SLOPPY JOES) does make me a bit wary.
Jere Hunter Feb 29th 2012 1:23PM
Ok, no blizzcon makes more sense now if all the interns are gone :(
(cutaia) Feb 29th 2012 1:18PM
I wonder if some of this is made up of GMs. I know we love to talk about how long support tickets take, but quite honestly, I've been seeing really short ticket times these days. I wonder if they went too far on hiring GMs and are now scaling back a bit.
Obviously I'm not suggesting this is 540 GMs being hired. Nor do I have any legitimate reason to believe I'm correct. Just musing aloud, I suppose.
Revnah Feb 29th 2012 5:16PM
It definitely is support. I'm in Ireland and have a couple friends at Blizzard here, and they are going to downsize by over 230 people in Ireland (Cork) alone. There are no devs here, only support staff, GMs etc, for different European languages. 230+ is a huge chunk out of the Cork office so here's hoping other offices will be less affected, percentage-wise.
Antonius.Prime Mar 1st 2012 4:47AM
@Rev : yeah. 230 jobs from Cork is one massive chunk from an already hard hit area. All of cork is GM and account work for all euro languages. I work in another multinational in Cork, that has languages too, traditionally it's German and French teams see the most turnover as people come over, work for 12-18 months and go home. English speakers, including eastern European nationals and African nationals, and native Irish tend to stick around longer.
But 230 people won't just be all French & Germans. Lot of people will be affected by this, not just who're let go.
Ireland already has a high rate of mortgage repossessions and growing poverty. This won't help in the slightest I'm afraid…
ladygamertn Feb 29th 2012 1:20PM
Business is business. It is smart to continually assess the health of the business and make adjustments where necessary. Even in families sometimes difficult choices must be made. Should we reduce our cable package? Buy store brands of products? Blizzard must maintain a balance between players and shareholders. That's business, deal or get out.
Lethality Feb 29th 2012 1:26PM
But, Blizzard has culturally not had to operate under strict and traditional business "rules and practices" for some time... adjusting to that could indeed harm their culture, and output.
raingod Feb 29th 2012 1:37PM
@lethality, you're wrong, as long as they've had stockholders to report to, they operate like every other business. Always have.
Paul Feb 29th 2012 1:40PM
As true as that is, and as much as I hope that the majority of the redudancies are issued to genuinely lazy employees (those that spend a large portion of their day filing their nails or finding pointless things to do), and the fact that I understand and experienced this many times, brash statements like "deal or GTFO" are uncalled for.
Yes, it's part of business. Yes, attacking Blizzard's decision is idiotic and misguided. However, there will be people that honestly work their arses off that will be losing their jobs on this, and a statement like that is wholly inappropriate. They need to land on their feet, and given the insentive to not allow the situation to braing them down, but to tell them that it's of no real concern? Too harsh.
ladygamertn Feb 29th 2012 2:45PM
I was referring to the business... deal with changing business dynamics or get out of business. And I never use the *F* word even in jest.
Lethality Feb 29th 2012 1:23PM
I have been wondering if a slip of nearly 2m subscribers from WoW would force the bean counters to take a look at things, and sure enough. When there's more than enough cash to go around inefficiencies are overlooked...
Selfishly, I just hope this can be done without affecting quantity or volume. I would feel better if he came out and said "we've also reassigned many folks to our highest priority project - Titan". Nary a mention of it makes me wonder...
Should be interesting to see the community response over the next few days... the ones drawing conclusions, etc.
bethontheharbor Feb 29th 2012 1:24PM
And Growing up as a kid of a Boeing employee let me say that Boeing lays thousands off every year, and always have. It's like supply and demand, when they need more they'll get more, when they have to many at the moment someone gets laid off. It's like that with every global corporation. Has Boeing ever went under.. Nope, it may have narrowed its business aims, but its still going strong and making billions each year.
Mr. Morhaime did say globally. It's not like its 600 workers from the main offices. It could be guys stuffing boxes on Blizz's line at Activision. Who knows.. It's really no big deal folks. Company's always evolve and change, grow and shrink.
Alysandir Feb 29th 2012 1:35PM
So I'm reading that the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished over 13,000 for the first time since 2008. That many corporations, including GM and Exxon/Mobil are recording record profits in the billions. That the banking industry is recording profits that are five-year highs. That Apple's capitalization is approaching a half-TRILLION dollars. That, basically, the economy is doing awesome-sauce, thankyouverymuch.
Then why am I also reading about continuing mass layoffs from several companies, gas rising over $4 a gallon, and unemployment holding steady at 8.3% nationally?
Good thing the taxpayers tightened their belts and bailed everyone out...
raingod Feb 29th 2012 2:06PM
And had they not been bailed out, the car industry would have suffered even more, leading to more lay offs; more people would have lost their homes, and the economy wouldn't be on the rebound-slow as its rebounding.
Think for once.
Arbolamante Feb 29th 2012 2:50PM
@raingod -- I think Alysander is on your side on this. It's more a sense of if the elites are doing great, why is everything still rotten for everyone else?
Alysandir Feb 29th 2012 3:08PM
@raingod:
Think for once? Okay...I think you completely missed my point. How's that?
Arbolamante got it in one.
Caz Feb 29th 2012 1:38PM
The worst thing about layoffs like this in a coprorate environment is that these workers will never be replaced. Sure, more people will be hired as needs grow - but the additioanl workload that remainign employees get as a result of these staff reductions will never be lifted.
As soon as a company realized is can do the same amount of work with less people, that becomes the new normal.
I have been at my corporate Finance my job for 6 years. In that time, I have witnessed three waves of layoffs and absorbed the workloads of 3 different individuals. I now have four times the workload that I was hired to handle, and trust me, there is no relief in sight - nor has my salary been adjusted to reflect that I'm doing four times the workload. We are reporting record profits and have no debt.
Not to get political, but this is why corporate tax cuts do not create employment, despite what certain campaigns would have you believe - no matter how much of a reduction in the corporate tax rate we receive (and we employ 12,000 in the U.S. right now), we will not use that to replace laid off employees. We hire as needed based on new contracts, and constantly trim the fat. Do more with less people, that is the corporate golden rule. Reductions in taxes are reductions in the cost of doing business, and that extra profit will go directly to the pockets of shareholders.