Blizzard Lays Off 600 Employees - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 29 February 2012 / 5,090 Views
Blizzard, the World of Warcraft developer, has told its investors that they will be laying off 600 employees. The World of Warcraft team will be unaffected by the layoffs and 90 percent of the cuts will come from departments that are not related to game development. Blizzard made it clear that its development and publishing schedule remains unaffected and the release date for Diablo III will be announced in the "near future."
"Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "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."
Morhaime continued, "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."
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Easy Blizzard have thousands of employees doing customer support for Wow......That's most likely where the cuts are coming from...
Considering there are probably just as many bots/gold farmers as actual players then it makes since. You don't need to give costumer support to a bot.
*sense, just read that again... Oops!
That's a lot of people to suddenly lay off O.o
Hope they've received their fair 30/60 day notice and any pay pending.
I wonder what in the hell they could possibly have 600 employees doing that isn't related to game design...
Slave them until the product is finished, fire them and then profit.
They said these layoffs aren't related to game development.
So my guess is they fired janitors :D
Wow they have a lot of crap to take out then.
They must show Skrotick they're evil enough to do business together.
Hmm... On wikipedia it says that Blizzard Entertainment had 4600 employees by 2009.
Looks like they have lots of non-video game developers over there O_O'
"Making a lot of profit just isn't enough for us any more, we need to make huge profits. What shall we do?" "Easiest thing to do is give a bunch of people the sack." "Cool, let's do that then."
"changing needs" = "Diablo beta testing is pretty much done. GTFO."
