COMMENTARY | Blizzard, the company behind the popular MMO World of Warcraft, has announced that over 600 company employees will be affected by layoffs.
The news comes from Blizards’s CEO Mike Morhime, who posted the information in a forum thread under his community username, Bashiok.
Morhime commented on the layoffs, saying “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 server 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.”
He also said, “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.”
This news comes just two months after Blizzard announced that there will be no BlizzCon in 2012, but will instead hold a Battle.net World Championship event. BlizzCon is expected to return in 2013.
Ninety precent of the staff affected by the layoffs were in departments unrelated to the development of the videogames we all love and eagerly anticipate. That is the only good news to come out of this unfortunate series of events. Well, that and the fact that information regarding Diablo III’s release date will possibly come to light in the upcoming weeks.
Many ill-informed forum-goers and commenters are blaming Activision for the layoffs at Blizzard. That, of course, couldn’t be farther from the truth. Activision and Blizzard are both sister companies owned by Vivendia SA. Other than sharing a name (Activision-Blizzard), the two have nothing to do with each other. They are separate entities with separate CEOs who make the decisions they do.
Blizzard was simply overstaffed and decided it would save the company money by cutting back on unneeded assets. There will be minimal (if any) impact to the quality of their products.
My heart goes out to those affected by the layoffs. I hope everyone manages to bounce back quickly with their future endeavors.
The full announcement regarding the layoffs may be read here.