Blizzard Lays Off 600

[dobahci]

The part where capitalism comes into play is the fact that these CEO's know it, and could just leave for a different company if they aren't satisfied with their current paycheck.
To them it's not stealing rightful wages from poorer workers, it's accepting money for a job that essentially only they can do. If the company they're managing is paying them $500,000, and somebody comes along and says, "Hey, you're doing a fantastic job..! I'll pay you $14,000,000 to do that for us!", then can you really blame them for taking that job? If hiring that man on as a CEO makes the company make a fuck-ton more money at lower cost, can you blame them for paying him for the job?

I don't blame the CEO for taking a job where he can make more money, but the thing is that the whole system should never have been set up in a way so as to allow a man to make $16 million. CEOs are doing a job only they can do? I won't believe that for half a second. The job they may do is not particularly easy but they aren't harder or more diligent workers than the average engineer or doctor or artist.

A lot of people think professional athletes are overpaid, but they make significantly less than CEOs do, and have significantly riskier jobs. Every time a football player goes out on the field, he's risking the possibility of an injury that could end his career.

What risk is there for a CEO? There might be pressure to perform well due to the fact that bad leadership can wreck a company, but even when that happens, the shitty CEO in question is typically let go with a comfortable multi-million dollar severance package that ensures they'll be able to live in perfect luxury until they're able to coast into their next corporate executive job. There's NO accountability. They're never punsihed or made to suffer for their major league fuckup. You know who does suffer? All the workers who have to get laid off to offset the money lost by that CEO's shitty business decisions. And those workers don't get multi-million dollar severance packages.

 

[godofallu]

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?

Why would I be angry at him for going to college, working his way up, and helping to manage a company that employs over 5000 people? He makes 16m, well guess what most athletes laugh at that amount and what do they do for anybody?

I guess if he were to work for free that would offset 180 people or so. Still wouldn't make any sense to employ people that make you less than you pay them but hey why not throw money down the drain? It's not like the stockholders would fire him for wasting a few mill, or like his compensation is tied to performance. That isn't standard operating procedure.

Why don't you hire some people and have them stand around and do nothing? Oh because you probably use the same equation he does to determine whether you want to hire people. It isn't a moral issue, it is a financial one.

 

[Azmael Silverlance]

Lal i thought they were all in all around 600 people developers and other staff. . .
Well maybe they over-reached and with the WoW declining population it seems to me like a natural move.
However that might change with Mists Of Pondaria and who knows if the expansion is truly great we might peak again around 11/12 million.
And if they really manage to deliver expansions in shorter periods of time oh boy. . .

 

[yRar_972]

It's becoming increasingly aware (at least from what I'm seeing) is that the video game market is changing (obviously) but massive development companies and publishers are not changing. I believe that if executives lowered their salary from ridiculous high to slightly less ridiculous high, then maybe they will still have talented people working for them creating fantastic pieces of entertainment.

I wish all those affected good luck in the future.

 

[Polock]

Yep. The Economy is definitely getting better.

 

[tangoprime]

Man... I guess losses to SWTOR are hitting them harder than we thought
*checking seals on flamesuit*

 

[michael87cn]

One thing to keep in perspective is that atleast the layed off are getting severance packages, so they should be fine until they find new work.

The bad thing is obviously the impact this will have on their games. They say "mostly" the dev teams haven't been touched. That directly (in my mind) translates to: someone -was- fired from certain dev teams. Which is VERY BAD.

Can you imagine one day waking up and hearing that say, Todd Howard has been layed off from Bethesda? Would the Elder Scrolls be the same without him? No they wouldn't...

 

[Dendio]

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

After losing a ton of money on the bad 3ds launch, the Nintendo boss took a massive paycut rather than fire people off

 

[Zer0Saber]

They have to clear up some space for the pile of money that keeps getting bigger.

 

[MetalMagpie]

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.

It might not be anyone directly connected with the games at all. I work for a software company and only 70% of our employees are "technical" (programmers, support engineers, systems engineers and docs writers). The other 30% are account managers, sales people, HR, lawyers (quite a few of those), accountants, and all the other goons required to run a company.

70% technical staff is pretty high for a software company. (We only manage it because we're quite small and don't have a very deep management structure.) A big company like Blizzard probably has about 50:50 technical to non-technical staff.

 

[MetalMagpie]

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.

It might not be anyone directly connected with the games at all. I work for a software company and only 70% of our employees are "technical" (programmers, support engineers, systems engineers and docs writers). The other 30% are account managers, sales people, HR, lawyers (quite a few of those), accountants, and all the other goons required to run a company.

70% technical staff is pretty high for a software company. (We only manage it because we're quite small and don't have a very deep management structure.) A big company like Blizzard probably has about 50:50 technical to non-technical staff.

Courtesy of Joystiq, the job distribution at Blizzard, August 2009.

Team size at Blizzard
Game Design: 37
Cinematics: 123
Platform Services: 245
Quality Assurance: 218
International Offices Population: 1,724
Game Masters: 2,056
Billing: 240
Quality Control: 67
Technical Support: 121
Online Technologies: 149

90:10 is more like it.

I make that 3256:1724 technical:non-technical, assuming "Game Masters" count as technical staff. (Any idea what they are?) International Offices will be HR, accounts, legal, payroll, etc. Looks like they don't have internal marketing.

So about 60:30 technical to non-technical by a back-of-an-envelope-calc. Not that different to my company after all.

 

[need4snacks]

It's their company and they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.

I don't understand where all this ridicule comes from. It's not Blizzard's responsibility to keep everyone happy and economically secure. If you think it is, you're wrong.

 

[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.

It might not be anyone directly connected with the games at all. I work for a software company and only 70% of our employees are "technical" (programmers, support engineers, systems engineers and docs writers). The other 30% are account managers, sales people, HR, lawyers (quite a few of those), accountants, and all the other goons required to run a company.

70% technical staff is pretty high for a software company. (We only manage it because we're quite small and don't have a very deep management structure.) A big company like Blizzard probably has about 50:50 technical to non-technical staff.

...

I was kidding. I understand that there are more people working there than those to departments.

 

[MetalMagpie]

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.

It might not be anyone directly connected with the games at all. I work for a software company and only 70% of our employees are "technical" (programmers, support engineers, systems engineers and docs writers). The other 30% are account managers, sales people, HR, lawyers (quite a few of those), accountants, and all the other goons required to run a company.

70% technical staff is pretty high for a software company. (We only manage it because we're quite small and don't have a very deep management structure.) A big company like Blizzard probably has about 50:50 technical to non-technical staff.

...

I was kidding. I understand that there are more people working there than those to departments.

Ah. Sorry, sarcasm doesn't travel well over the internet!

 

[MetalMagpie]

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.

It might not be anyone directly connected with the games at all. I work for a software company and only 70% of our employees are "technical" (programmers, support engineers, systems engineers and docs writers). The other 30% are account managers, sales people, HR, lawyers (quite a few of those), accountants, and all the other goons required to run a company.

70% technical staff is pretty high for a software company. (We only manage it because we're quite small and don't have a very deep management structure.) A big company like Blizzard probably has about 50:50 technical to non-technical staff.

Courtesy of Joystiq, the job distribution at Blizzard, August 2009.

Team size at Blizzard
Game Design: 37
Cinematics: 123
Platform Services: 245
Quality Assurance: 218
International Offices Population: 1,724
Game Masters: 2,056
Billing: 240
Quality Control: 67
Technical Support: 121
Online Technologies: 149

90:10 is more like it.

I make that 3256:1724 technical:non-technical, assuming "Game Masters" count as technical staff. (Any idea what they are?) International Offices will be HR, accounts, legal, payroll, etc. Looks like they don't have internal marketing.

So about 60:30 technical to non-technical by a back-of-an-envelope-calc. Not that different to my company after all.

you don't know what a GM is?
its basically an ingame troubleshooting help desk. They fix shit, definitely not development related.

Oh, I see. So that's actually about 25:75 technical to non-technical.