Activision Blizzard Cuts 8% of Jobs Amid 'Record Results In 2018' (kotaku.com) 112
On an earnings call this afternoon, publisher Activision Blizzard said that it would be eliminating 8% of its staff. "In 2018, Activision Blizzard had roughly 9,600 employees, which would mean nearly 800 people are now out of work," reports Kotaku. "This afternoon, the mega-publisher began notifying those who are being laid off across its various organizations, which include Activision, Blizzard, and King." From the report: On the earnings call, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick told investors that the company had "once again achieved record results in 2018" but that the company would be consolidating and restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019. The company said it would be cutting mainly non-game-development departments and bolstering its development staff for franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo. Development sources from across the industry told Kotaku this afternoon that the layoffs have affected Activision publishing, Blizzard, King, and some of Activision's studios, including High Moon. At Blizzard, the layoffs appear to only have affected non-game-development departments, such as publishing and esports, both of which were expected to be hit hard. "Over the last few years, many of our non-development teams expanded to support various needs," Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a note to staff. "Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I'm sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today. In our regional offices, we anticipate similar evaluations, subject to local requirements."
Thankfully, the letter promised "a comprehensive severance package," continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. "There's no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues," Brack wrote.
Thankfully, the letter promised "a comprehensive severance package," continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. "There's no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues," Brack wrote.
Don't worry (Score:3)
"This afternoon, the mega-publisher began notifying those who are being laid off across its various organizations, which include Activision, Blizzard, and King."
Don't worry - I'm sure there are still plenty of iterations of Candy Crush still in the pipeline.
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Not enough to keep them afloat
They didn't say they were going out of business, they said they were over-staffed - there is a difference.
Did you notice this in TFS?
Thankfully, the letter promised "a comprehensive severance package," continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard.
They are giving the laid-off workers their profit-sharing bonuses - that seems pretty reasonable.
This action will take them from 9,600 employees down to around 8,800, that's a huge number of employees, I think the company is doing fine.
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It's a way to clean out the house on all those under performers, or people in positions that are not doing much. And all companies have them.
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And I'm pretty sure Candy*rush(tm) is from another publisher, I think is from Facebook,
Nope, it's King [king.com].
Facebook seems to do very little actual development. They mainly open up their platform to companies like King and Zynga, as well as look for new ways to market your personal data to whomever they can.
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Games. Games for regular people to play. Games for regular people to have fun playing.
The rest is just a diversion.
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There's also the issue that Blizzard consistently treats esports as an afterthought to fill the streams at blizzcon. I think overwatch may be done a bit better (haven't watched it much) but ive watched streams of all their other esports leagues and they're just not done all that well. The announcers tend to be flat and boring, the production quality is low, etc.
I mean it's not like they're streaming a local school club or something but compared to the behemoth - league of legends - they tend to come acros
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Since Blizzard was taken over by Activision, it's all about the profits. eSports isn't that much of a money generator, it promotes your game/brand and creates a fanbase but it doesn't immediately give you (the diminishing) millions of dollars like releasing Call of Duty 21 on XBox.
eSports and the 'classic' Blizzard (StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo) games have a loyal following, but they're hard games to make and trying to monetize them with DLC (eg. Diablo 3) hasn't worked well because the fans expect a full
Learn (Score:2)
Do the art work for computer courses that teach code to journalists?
Create an Ada OS?
Help with CUDA like support on Linux?
Mixed Reality & VR https://research.mozilla.org/m... [mozilla.org]
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Teaching journalists to code was taking the piss for them telling coal miners, learn how to code. Most of those so called journalists, if they could have learned how to code, they would have learned how to code, they ain't THAT stupid but yeah, some people, well, lets be fucking honest, most people simply can not learn how to code in any meaningful commercially competitive productive manner, not a hope, simply the way it is.
No matter the effort at training in anything, in commercially competitive terms, som
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A lot of people simply can't learn to write a coherent and correctly punctuated sentence either.
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Blizzard had a fair amount of autonomy under Activision until just recently. With Morhaime removed as company president and the recent focus on cost-cutting, you should expect increasing prioritization of shareholder value over entertainment value.
It's been a record year for blunders (Score:5, Insightful)
The video-game industry spent 2018 shooting itself in the foot. Waiting for Bethesda and EA to follow suit.
"missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019" == The microtransactions and loot-boxes are not working out. We need to start actually making games with realistic budgets and profit expectations.
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What are you waiting for? EA pioneered canning people. https://heavy.com/games/2017/1... [heavy.com]
Re:It's been a record year for blunders (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just a realistic budget and profit expectation that's needed - what's needed is some risk. They almost all play it safe, and just iterate the same-old-same-old now with better graphics.
Trust that you've got good people, (that is, if you haven't laid them all off) and let them try something new. A lot of the tries will be flops, but if you can find that big new thing, you're going to make bank. No, it's not a sure thing. But FFS, you're just laying people off left and right anyway. Might as well take a risk to have a break-out hit in the process.
If I was in the business, I think I'd rather try something crazy innovative and get laid off when it didn't work out than grind out another clone of a decade old game only to get laid off anyway.
And if you're just trying to milk your stock incentives, you've got enough name recognition and money to risk having to take your golden parachute and go cry on your yacht for 6 months before getting hired somewhere else. Take a risk and shoot for a giant payout! I mean, if you're the C* of a major gaming company, you absolutely do not have anything to lose. At least nothing that you're going to miss.
Re:It's been a record year for blunders (Score:4, Funny)
what's needed is some risk
Oh I don't think anyone has taken a bigger risk than Blizzard recently. Announcing a mobile game at Blizcon? The developers are lucky they didn't get lynched by the angry mob.
One of Activision's CEOs (Score:3)
Point is, these are not gamers. They don't think like gamers. They think like businessmen. Innovation isn't their thing. Let other's innovate and they'll be there t
Found the quote on Ars (Score:2)
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The industry may have, but the ones doing the layoffs have announced quite a hefty profit and the CEO just scored himself a nice 8 figure bonus.
disposable humans (Score:2)
They work at dehumanizing their "human resources" so they can sleep at night when they pull these things all the time. People wonder how genocide and such horrible things can even happen when there are actually a bunch of Satan worshipers involved... They only need look towards their local MBAs.
They need to pay a price for laying off human workers like they are excess resources so they are not so casual about hiring them and give them stuff to do for longer term planning if something doesn't work out. Yo
Bad all around (Score:3, Informative)
Not a record year. Don't let the misleading slashdot headline and summary fool you. They are idiots.
The real news on Activision Blizzard [bloomberg.com]
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Yeah - I got laid off after 9.8% growth when they required 10% growth, as did 15% of the company. Got a consultant role that paid basically the same (benefits aren't as good), but pay is decent; Everyone I know that was laid off was hired by the same consulting company, and all of them extremely competent. I have no idea what the layoff criteria was, but I could pick 15 more incompetent workers than the did, but I imagine it was all about salary.
Non-dev = commodity human (Score:4, Interesting)
Good news from the perspective of a Slashdot citizen: tech skills continue to keep us out of the pool of commodity humans.
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Tracer is really cute and sexy. Besides, she's an imaginary character, who the fuck cares if she's gay or not?
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So, immature people with poor social skills.
That describes their entire customer base.
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i thought he meant soldier?
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A silver lining for the laid off non-technical personnel is that they now have more time to learn to code.
Yes and no (Score:2)
It's not that hard to do really. You take a tech task and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks, assigning a person to each chunk, so that no one person is critical to the entire task. You then document the hell out of everything while using as much standard equipment as possible to avoid "instituti
Who the hell plays Wow anymore? (Score:2)
I remember back on slashdot where Wow was so big whole stories were on it and addiction was covered. Today? A few old geeks may still log in on occasion. I think micro transactions have went there course and now the CEO wants his bonus and since Wow can't grow he needs to cut costs to give himself more bonus money.
At this point I would sell if I were a long term investor. Maybe stay for short term boosts but since Kung fu panda a half decade ago I am surprised it is still around. WOTLK was the last good exp
5.8 million (Score:3)
The 770 are folks need to support new product launches. Activision is letting them go because they're not releasing anything next year (except maybe a COD).
They're prepping for the recession (Score:4, Informative)
It's not even like we don't know what to do: Regulate Wall Street so they can't gamble with our money (and make no mistake, it's out money since they're "too big to fail"), pump some money into the supply side (Tax Cuts for people who actually spend money, e.g. the working class, and the "Green New Deal"), increase the minimum wage and lift those stupid bloody tariffs. It doesn't do good to put tariffs on China when they can just build their stuff in Mexico and ship it here duty free (lord I shouldn't have to explain that).
And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
i would ask, but (Score:1, Insightful)
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"It's not even like we don't know what to do:"
Boy you got that right!
" Regulate Wall Street so they can't gamble with our money"
Never going to work... not ever!
The only thing that is going to happen is that new laws designed but make it look like you are getting what you wanted but ultimately will be used to just make you subservient and to further entrench the wealth of the elite into a smaller group of hands.
You, like most others, are going to spend their entire lives under the thumb of the bourgeois beca
Regulating Wall Street worked just fine (Score:3)
Undoing all that would be a start. Talk to any economist who isn't paid by right wing think tanks and they'll
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Wow, you seem really pissed, but uninformed.
How does increasing the minimum wage help us avoid a recession?
Are you aware of the new trade agreement w/ Mexico? It sounds like you had your talking point ready from the NAFTA days of yesteryear.
The tariffs are a bargaining chip to lower Chinese tariffs on American goods. It is amazing how many critics of Trump fail to grasp even the most basic negotiating tactics - for instance, why does the administration say they can't rule out another (partial) government sh
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And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
Funny thing there. If you tell everyone that the current administration is doing nothing to stop the impending recession, you actually cause people to be concerned which in turn can trigger the very recession you were trying to avoid.
The other thing is that people don't like bad news and studies have demonstrated that they begin to avoid news if it shows their own outlook as bleak (but they relish bad news for perceived enemies). Yeah, it's kinda like humans have their own Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.
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And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
The media doesn't work for the public, it's there to lie to you and keep you distracted.
Media under capitalism [youtu.be]
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I am just waiting for the day... that an entire productive force or at least the part driving the development simply quits away and founds their own company in case of such a layoff.
I am just gessing what panic the management suddenly would get in case of such a situation.
Sadly not going to happen (Score:2)
Also the job market's pretty bad across the board. They can find people to replace them pretty easily. Workers lack solidarity so it'd be easy to get "scabs" (google the term if you haven't heard it).
This is gonna sound harsh, but we shouldn't indulge in fantasy. And "Walking off the Job to compete with your Boss" is by far the most famous busi
Re:What about the dividends? (Score:5, Insightful)
The "little people" are the 800 or so people being let go as "redundant" to the company needs, and are getting a period of free healthcare coverage, a generous severance package, and their profit-sharing bonus from last year.
Short of keeping the employees in no-show jobs, they are doing the right thing by "the little people" IMHO.
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They are doing the best thing possible given their gross levels of company mismanagement.
Generous severance packages suck compared to having a steady job at a company that is able to create stable sustainable employment.
and an 8% increase in it's dividend, coincidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The new Pump and Dump. The stock gets a pump, the employees get the dump.
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Imagine (Score:2)
being so misguided as to think a company posting their best results ever has ANY effect on whether companies continue to hold on to staff deemed unnecessary.
It's all about the looting (Score:2)
Not loot crates, but more loot for senior execs, whose compensation will skyrocket while they fire employees.
Replacing Americans with visa workers? Offshoring? (Score:2)
Are they just going to have less workers? Or are they going to foreign workers in some manner?
Stop complaining. (Score:2)
Look at the greater system that generates this behavior and propose changes if you want to do something about it.
Whining about the actors within it is useless.