Blizzard Lays Off 600

[Daemonate]

Over two million subscribers gone? ditch a much as we can to keep the airship afloat. NOT THE GOLD! NOT THE GOLD! throw some crew members over the edge instead.

HAHAHAHAH 10/10. Would read again. Etc.

The facebook responses however are a litany of stupidity and fail on this article.

The reasons Blizzard are stagnating and slowly toppling backwards are never to do with a loss of their core company values, respect for their customers and franchises combined with a general lowering in quality of output. Of course not. It's all just bad luck and economics.

 

[Giles Towers]

Unfortunately companies don't exist to employ people, it's a shame absolutely. But it's not 'wrong' unless quality of service goes down as a result. What happened here is someone said "So what do all these people do?" and the answer wasn't good enough.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

Revenue increase US$4.447 billion (2010)

Job Cuts: 12%

Bastards.

Profit may be up, but how much of it was going into the pockets of the guys and girls up top?

Solution: fire 600 people, raise your personal salary and proudly boast how well your company is doing.

 

[weirdee]

I'm glad to see that people are looking at this rationally and not making up random explanations for what could easily be a minor restructuring of a massive company. Besides, it does nothing for the workers if they keep them on as charity, if they're not really doing anything with their careers, it wouldn't be right to keep them in a comfortable but essentially useless dead end position.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

So if it isn't their development guys, are they laying off their cinematics team? Because that would be awful, those guys are some of the best I've ever seen.

No, most of their staff are community managers, GMs, maintenance guys and the like. I'd be willing to bet a couple of thousand dollars their development team does not make up 10% of the whole company's staff.

I don't know... They spend millions on their cinematics. I could actually believe that they have 600 people on that team.

 

[Strazdas]

review of its business based on current organizational needs

Notice how whenever a corporation "review's its needs" the outcome is never lower executive compensation or increase employee benefits.

Sometimes it is. its just that such news aren't usually scandalous enough to reach the majority. ive seen my fair share of "cut the government pay" changes and there was pretty much no news about it. but whenever someone decides to do the same, say, to teachers the outrage is astonishing. its jsut that when it happens people automatically assume "thats how its supposed to be" and dont report it so much. truth is, some employees have to go. sure maybe 600 at once is much, but ive seen when companies overstretch themselves with too many projects at once and start getting dangerous, and when it has to retract to their core projects, people get fired. for example when CCP fired 20% of thier staff and focused back to the game that made thier name [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/19/ccp-fire-20-staff-focus-on-eve/]

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

So if it isn't their development guys, are they laying off their cinematics team? Because that would be awful, those guys are some of the best I've ever seen.

No, most of their staff are community managers, GMs, maintenance guys and the like. I'd be willing to bet a couple of thousand dollars their development team does not make up 10% of the whole company's staff.

I don't know... They spend millions on their cinematics. I could actually believe that they have 600 people on that team.

Paying 20-40 people a decent salary over a year is "millions". The term doesn't really describe a big pile of money when it comes to bigger studios.

That said, I did a little bit of googling, and the cinematic side actually surprised me a bit. In august 2009, they had 123 people in the cinematic team. And 2000 people working as game masters, 1700 working for "international offices", 200 in quality assurance, 240 in billing, and so on.

[HEADING=1]Game design? 37 people.[/HEADING]

37 people spread throughout 4 games at the time. Man, what a fucking embarrassment and man, how right was I in all those Diablo 3 threads. When I said they probably have like 20 people working on the game, I was likely overestimating.

So that's why their trailers always looks so fucking beautiful.

 

[Cowabungaa]

2 executive wages in almost every business are competitive to the industry rates. Pay them less and they leave and your company goes under. Not many companies overpay their executives, since that would be stupid for the stockholders/owners.

Almost every company overpays its executives. Executive wages might be competitive to the industry rates, but the industry rates are too high. They have ALWAYS been too high.

You can say that you have to consider the "marginal value each worker adds" or whatever but Blizzard's one of the companies at the top of the games industry, they're not exactly going broke. And those cuts couldn't have possibly made from any other place?

I mean, these are people with lives and maybe families to support, and some executive is giving them the axe because of some numbers on a piece of paper.

I did a quick search on Mike Morhaime and found that his total. compensation for 2010 was $16,544,154.00. Figure is broken down here:
http://people.forbes.com/profile/michael-morhaime/119128

I don't know if that adds context to the issue, but honestly... how can you even look at that number without feeling angry?

Welcome to Western society. It's like that in every big organisation; they're just too big, people stop being people and start being meaningless numbers. Combine that with a "profit over people" mentality and voila, you get situations like this.

I blame the Monkey Sphere. [http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html]

 

[Me55enger]

599 members of thier customer support and the Lich King?

Blizzard are falling.

 

[Eric the Orange]

Bastards? What're you talking about? Blizzard are the good guys! They're the paragon of the industry. The company that stands up for the little guys. Stands up for the community.

I haven't heard that about blizzard in like 5 years, that's valve to the community now.

 

[punipunipyo]

well.. "...Hell...it's about time~" They can't depend on a 14 years old game (Yes, I am talking about WoW) to cash in, THEY NEED TO MAKE NEW GAMES, This is the wake up call for Blizzard, time to get to work, there is no free money. Maybe it's time for Warcraft4 eh? Perhaps we need the same thing happening to Valve, so we can finally get Episode 3?

 

[scotth266]

They probably had 600 people they just didn't need anymore. Sometimes restructuring is just that: restructuring. Even if you're a multi-million dollar company, you don't have 600 people who you pay to twiddle their thumbs or do things that are only mildly useful for your long-term plans.

And if the move to fire 600 people was a measure to stop them from being a drain on the CEO golden toilet seat fund (as everyone and their grandmother is implying), then why are they hiring for other positions? Blizzard isn't going to fire people to save money if they're just going to hire other people who will use that same money.

Logic, it works.

 

[chadachada123]

This is why, were I the owner of a company, I would never go public.

When you're public, you can no longer work for the benefit of employees. You can only fatten your CEO's wallet and the wallets of shareholders. Fuck that. I don't need to make hundreds of billions. I'd rather that money go towards helping people and giving my employees better wages.

 

[Ympulse]

After talking with a friend that works in Blizz's IGS. The people that were cut from the GM crew were people that "Should have gotten cut months ago, but management didn't want to let anyone go"

600 people, though. That's a lot of redundancy. Guess they're feeling the sub hit harder than they let on.

Catchpa: gedbnes car

 

[Vigormortis]

Bastards? What're you talking about? Blizzard are the good guys! They're the paragon of the industry. The company that stands up for the little guys. Stands up for the community.

I haven't heard that about blizzard in like 5 years, that's valve to the community now.

I hadn't heard it for years either, but damned if I wasn't flooded with messages and posts from people implying just that in regards to their suit against Valve over Dota.

 

[Charli]

This is where it can be taken a lot of different ways. And I never ever understand why companies use so much doublespeak and pointless blathering rather than just simply say what is going on? What they are affraid of spooking the investors?

Buisiness numpties are taught to do this, and it's hilarious.

I hope that cut is coming from their PR department because it's not been good stuff recently.