8 ms·

Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

199 points by joshes 15y ago

justjimmy 15y ago
Not really sure what to make of this…been a Blizzard fan since ToD, saw Blizz growing, merging, corporated, massive growth… 3 Major Projects in the Pipeline, 1 Untitled Project, and it lays off 600 people? It's a money printing machine with it's stranglehold on subscription based MMO (as opposed to freemium), I'd hate to think they're laying off people to appease the shareholders and maximize profit.
- puppop 15y ago
  So, instead they can keep the 600 people, piss off shareholders and reduce profit?
  - nkassis 15y ago
    I see it a little differently, I wouldn't feel good about keeping people around doing nothing of worth for the company. I guess they could have thought of other projects for them but that could put stress on other parts of the company. At least some of these people can now work for companies that do need them. It might be because I never want to work for a company that thinks of me as dead weight. It wouldn't be a good environment to work in.
    - res0nat0r 15y ago
      The key here is to make sure you never let yourself become an employee who is considered dead weight.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - _delirium 15y ago
    In this case the shareholders outside the multi-layered conglomerate are fairly distant, so I'd guess internal bean-counting is a more proximal pressure on Blizzard. They're owned by a holding company, Activision Blizzard, which is public, but has the majority of its shares owned by yet another holding company, Vivendi SA. So Vivendi's shareholders are the main ultimate shareholders, but those individuals control Blizzard in only a very convoluted and indirect way. I would guess that you might see different kinds of decisions from an independent Blizzard, even if it were public (though it would also have more risks in that case).
- icefox 15y ago
  Maybe they have been successful year after year and there are a some people that should have been let go or became redundant over the years and this partially being used to clean house? Seen it plenty of times before and wouldn't be surprised.
- gyardley 15y ago
  Just speculating -- but perhaps Blizzard prefers to get rid of their lower performers all at once in a 'layoff' instead of sacking them one-by-one. Many larger companies do this; I suspect it minimizes dismissal-related lawsuits.
  - marshray 15y ago
    Probably depends on the state, but wouldn't a 'layoff' mean the company would pay higher unemployment compensation premiums?
    - itsameta4 15y ago
      ...which is still probably cheaper than a single wrongful termination suit. Calling it a layoff prevents that.
      - marshray 15y ago
        Former employees can still sue over the way the layoffs were conducted.
- cube13 15y ago
  Technically, it's 2 major projects: Diablo 3 and the new MMO Titan. Starcraft 2 and WoW are in more of a maintenance cycle with the expansions coming out this year. Neither probably need as many developers as the new projects at this point. The layoffs are probably due to WoW losing subscriptions over the last few years, and Diablo 3 nearing completion. The majority of the 540 non-developer positions are probably level 1 support or low level IT related positions because they don't need as much support personnel. The developer positions are most likely contract employees for Diablo 3 that aren't getting their contracts renewed.
  - NickPollard 15y ago
    SC2 and WoW expansions are still major, MAJOR projects, believe me. Calling it just maintenance really does a disservice to the amount of work that goes into these things. For Blizzard, this applies doubly so. I expect that Heart of the Swarm is a bigger project that most studios can dream of, in all manners - technology, art and design, production, distribution, marketing, and all the other attendant features that go with modern game development.
    - justjimmy 15y ago
      Not to mention the sick cinematics that Blizzard is renowned for. Definitely not 'maintenance' work. Patches for WoW – maybe – but expansions are huge effort! Not to mention Blizzard aim for global simultaneous release for its games whenever it can. (Asia used to lag behind WoW's expansion up to a whole year compared to NA/Europe) Can't imagine the effort and coordination required for that task.
    - cube13 15y ago
      I'm not arguing that the WoW and SC2 expansions not major projects. I'm saying that compared to the new projects(D3 and Titan), the overall personnel allocation is smaller for Heart of the Swarm and Mists of Pandaria. The development effort on those isn't on a new codebase(unlike D3 or Titan). They're adding new features and reworking game systems in the expansions(especially with the WoW expansion, where they're completely rewriting basically every class), but the overall effort required to complete those isn't nearly as much as what they need for the new MMO.
ajross 15y ago
Presumably the era of "printing money with WoW" is over, then?
- latortuga 15y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. First off, they list 10.2M as the current subscriber base, taken times a conservative estimate of $13/mo (the every 3 months plan, IIRC) and that's over one and a half billion dollars a year. Second, they are rumored have a new MMO in the pipeline - suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket. I think that, on the contrary, the era of Blizzard printing money is still going strong.
  - marshray 15y ago
    suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket Not a reasonable way to estimate potential demand. Maybe something closer to "Some percentage of established MMO gamers who now play WoW or Star Wars Online will try it according to how appealing it looks and how well it's marketed and priced."
  - runevault 15y ago
    Except there is a subset of people who played WoW and have since sworn off MMOs entirely (I am one such and I have a coworker who has also done so). I somehow doubt this is THAT rare an occurrence.
    - marshray 15y ago
      I think I've met people who've committed to do that, but for every one of them I've probably met many more who just got bored with it or wandered off to another game.
      - runevault 15y ago
        Sure not claiming it's a majority, but I could imagine it being 5-10%, which is still enough people to invalidate the original argument of "they'll get everyone who tried WoW" back.
daniel_levine 15y ago
I look forward to the companies that will be spawned by ex-Blizzard folks
- shingen 15y ago
  Yep, hopefully now we won't have to wait a decade for a better version of Diablo.
  - justjimmy 15y ago
    That's what I thought, till I played Hellgate. Man that was a disappointment…
    - michaelbuckbee 15y ago
      If you haven't already, give Torchlight a try - Mac/PC/XBLA and only $15. http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/
      - danvideo 15y ago
        Looks interesting. On first glance it does appear similar to Trine though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game) Which I wasn't a big fan of... anyone know if that's the case?
        StavrosK 15y ago
        They are nothing alike. I've only played Diablo slightly, but Torchlight is much closer to Diablo (hell, Trine is a platformer). I enjoyed both games, but if you like Diablo, you'll love Torchlight. Torchlight 2 is coming soon too, I believe.
        betterth 15y ago
        Trine was a fun little fantasy arcade scroller. Side to side action. A platformer. Torchlight is a dungeon crawler in the vein of diablo. Lots of equipment dropping, items to get, etc, as opposed to the more platformer-style of Trine. Very, very different games that happen to be set in the same fantasy genre.
RandallBrown 15y ago
Those 10% are related to game development, but that doesn't mean they're developers. I would guess that it's more likely to be slightly more "disposable" roles like testers. It still sucks though. It seemed like Blizzard was just printing money.
- ineedtosleep 15y ago
  They were, and are likely still are, however, I have a feeling this hinges on something from the Activision HQ.
- chc 15y ago
  They're presumably winding down some parts of Diablo 3 development and maybe even Heart of the Swarm, so it could just be that they don't expect to be doing as much in the near future rather than simple cost-cutting.
  - chaud 15y ago
    They still have the upcoming Titan game and another unannounced game that they are hiring for.
vyrotek 15y ago
I was under the impression that this sort of churn happened at all game dev companies when projects were nearing completion. Typically they are roles like QA, writers, and designers that may move to other projects or not.
- barrybe 15y ago
  You are correct, but it's still fun to speculate wildly.
Goronmon 15y ago
The company's massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game has struggled in the past year, slipping to 10.2 million subscribers through the end of December. I'm not sure "struggled" is the word they were looking for there.
- TheCapn 15y ago
  Without Googling for statistics wasn't WoW peaking around 13mill subscribers? A ~20% decline is seemingly quite a massive hit if you ask me and would definitely warrant a few layoffs.
  - Goronmon 15y ago
    Sure, subscriptions may have declined quite a bit, but I think it's a bit silly to call the game "struggling" considering it's position in the market.
    - marshray 15y ago
      If you're slowly-but-surely losing subscribers, going through downsizing, laying off developers, from a business perspecitive it's "struggling".
    - aGHz 15y ago
      I imagine the implied turn of phrase was actually "struggled to make the numbers". As TheCapn pointed out, an unaccounted for 20% drop in plans is bound to shake things up a little.
    - robryan 15y ago
      If you have a look at how player numbers have declined for any other mmo, their numbers are amazing. Can't forget that WoW come out in 2004, the life span of most games is measured in months. The game doesn't hold people's interest indefinitely, even of it is a lot longer than most games and probably most people who would want to try the game already have. Also competition is way higher than it was in 2004.
    - 15y ago
baby 15y ago
So who was laid off if not Game Masters in WoW? Can someone from the inside comment on this?
- donal_cahalane 15y ago
  So it's been confirmed that 200 of the jobs going are here in Ireland where Blizzard have over 800 staff. http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/blizzard.html http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/blizzard.html
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I find these sorts of events fascinating. Blizzard does have quite the money machine with WoW. Even a paltry 10.2M subscribers, assuming the adjusted monthly income per subscriber is $10 that is $102M/month in revenue from that franchise. The interesting bit is that to make that count they really need a good operational plan with respect to their infrastructure. I got a peek at their infrastructure early on because the company where I worked (Netapp) was trying to sell them filers for their Oracle instances which were running the game. And the game is essentially a ginormous database being updated constantly based on player actions. What we saw was a very complex (and expensive) infrastructure which was clearly built expediently. I would think that over time they would have been working to refine this to something more manageable (and cost effective). Ultimately, there is a 'killer' persistent world infrastructure architecture for this sort of traffic. Would be a good research topic for a thesis I suspect.
- malero 15y ago
  You forgot to include these services: character name changes, character race changes, character transfers, guild transfers, vanity pets and mounts. I'm not proud to say that I have spent money on all of these except the guild transfer service.
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    That is true, although as mentioned above the Chinese get their own deal. And Blizzard did get into the 'real gold for virtual goods market' which is quite large. Teasing apart the revenue per subscriber from their reports, talks, and sometimes off hand remarks is very challenging. There is the 'max' rate of $15/month, there are the 'free til level 20' players, there are the 'Yearly Pass' types, and of course there are the pay per hour guys in China and elsewhere in southeast Asia. So my guesstimate at $10 per was a 'blended' rate. Pessimists seem to put it closer to $7, not sure why though.
- cheald 15y ago
  It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!
kirinan 15y ago
This is interesting, I knew one of their main sources of revenue (World of Warcraft) wasn't doing as hot, but still had over 10million people, which at 15$ a month subscription, is nothing to scoff at. The 60 developers is the most interesting, they have a lot of in the queue for them (D3, Starcraft 2: expansion, and Titan (their next MMO), Im guessing they either weren't pulling their weight or this has something to do with Diablo 3 being almost complete.
- afterburner 15y ago
  I believe less than half the 10 million pay the $15 a month typically charged in North America. Many accounts in China are linked to internet cafes, which charge peanuts by the hour to their customers. Still, the 4 million or so North American and European monthly accounts still makes it huge.
thehermit 15y ago
This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Blizzard took on millions of new customers fast, so they went on a hiring spree for support staff. 5+ years ago it was not unusual to take 2-3 days and even over a week to get an issue resolved. Now even more than 12 hours is a busy day. I'm sure they have streamlined their support systems behind the scenes and just don't require as many employees, even if they kept their peek subscriber levels.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
JS_startup 15y ago
This seems like an appropriate enough place to put this: The Diablo 3 beta? Not that good. I put thousands of hours into D1 and D2 but have zero desire to keep playing the D3 beta. Also it sucks to hear about the lay-offs.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  That's not really very surprising. You probably wouldn't have played D2 for very long if it was only normal difficulty, and only the section before Blood Raven. Personally I quite enjoyed the beta, a lot more than I enjoyed the same period of the D2 game. I'm anticipate spending many, many hours enjoying D3.
  - JS_startup 15y ago
    It's not even the length or difficulty, I just didn't feel motivated to get through it. Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      In a game that is so progression based, knowing that all the power you accumulate will go to no useful end can be a real motivation killer. The point of Diablo games has always been to get nice stuff so you can murder progressively more difficult enemies. When there isn't going to be a progressively more difficult enemy, why get nice stuff? I didn't have any problem with the pacing, somewhat agree on the problem of corridor level design, and again I had no problem with the art style. But some of that is a taste issue where our priorities just don't align.
    - ak217 15y ago
      Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style. Sounds like Diablo 2. (I loved that game, btw.)
jmsduran 15y ago
Damn, I hate hearing about layoffs. I work in a close-knit team of developers and testers, where each of one us is an important contributor to our company's goal, and it impacts our productivity tremendously when someone leaves. Maybe I'm naive, but I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off. I'm sure not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, and there must be some legal mumbo jumbo out there that prevents this from happening... Anyways, I'm sure those laid off developers are talented, and hope they'll rebound quickly to a greater opportunity.
- marshray 15y ago
  There was a time where a company I worked for was having to downsize for a second time. They were planning to keep me on, but cancel the software project I'd been leading. I talked them into letting me the severance package and I went looking around elsewhere. I relocated for a better salary in a bigger city and the company I left was able to retain a couple of other staff (including a single mom!) I don't want to make it sound like I was more noble than I really was -- it was the right move for me at the time.
- ido 15y ago
  I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off. Assuming the company isn't really hurting for cash you lay off people that don't contribute more than what they cost. You can either let them go or I guess cut their salaries, but cutting someone else's salary doesn't really solve the problem that you're paying someone more than what you're getting from them.
primigenus 15y ago
This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe. WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat. It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat. As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial. Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry.
- withad 15y ago
  They've apparently recently automated a big chunk of their customer support [1], which (along with the decrease in WoW subscribers) would probably explain big cuts to the customer service department. [1] http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-lays-off-600-likely-primarily-in-customer-service http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-la...
- ars 15y ago
  Why do it in one shot like this? Why not lay people off incrementally?
  - CptCodeMonkey 15y ago
    I've been in a situation where the company was laying people off incrementally over the span of 18 months. I hated going to work, didn't give a shit about the company, and I was not unique or alone in that opinion. If you have to lay people off, do it as quickly and with as much dignity as possible.
drostie 15y ago
I know it's naive, but it wasn't until I read this article that I started to think of the WoW programmers as human beings, as opposed to some universal geometric constant about the WoW universe. I would like to see a documentary filmed inside of the WoW studio, if it's at all possible. Like, it could be really Serious Business, which would be hilarious, or it could be a more relaxed-artists type of story, which could be a fun romp. And maybe we get to see a sysadmin saying, "those are the Legacy Systems, they're from the Early Days, basically the entire World of Warcraft is held together with duct tape and a prayer." It would be great, man.
- packetslave 15y ago
  FWIW, I've seen one of Blizzard's hosting cages. It's more like "held together with hundred dollar bills and big fat DC power cables"
jpadkins 15y ago
Remember, John Staats (designer for WoW, lead designer for their next gen MMO code named titan) was let go in November. http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/07/rumor-senior-titan-designer-laid-off-by-blizzard/ http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/07/rumor-senior-titan-d... There was rumor that it was more than just 1 lead designer was being cut, but nothing substantial. I don't think those 60 developer staff were just "QA people" etc.. I bet they killed or scoped down the whole project.
angrycoder 15y ago
The key is the last line of the press release. The accounting charges associated with Blizzard's reduction in workforce are not anticipated to be material to Activision Blizzard, Inc. and were included in the 2012 financial outlook that was provided on February 9, 2012. I worked at 2 BigCo's while they went through layoff periods. What people don't know unless they've worked at a BigCo is that a significant number of its employees are interchangable or in some cases just dead weight. For every department of 10-20 people, there are 2 or 3 that have the bulk of the knowledge and do the majority of the work. There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person. Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.
- alanfalcon 15y ago
  I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked accounts (I can't begin to describe how many people have their WoW accounts hacked, and recovery used to take hours in the early days).
  - mbenjaminsmith 15y ago
    Not to say people aren't upset. I'm sure they are. But what you're saying is people are surprised to be laid off when it's clear they were no longer necessary? If how things were done changed significantly (needing far fewer people) isn't that going to obviously lead to layoffs? Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.
    - 15y ago
jjp9999 15y ago
Well, they must be getting ready to Diablo 3 then.
joering2 15y ago
seriously non of those emps could be fit into 102 positions here: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/directory.html#region=Americas http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/directory.html#...
beloch 15y ago
"Blizzard went on to note that its development and publishing schedule has not been impacted by the staff cuts. " This is easy to say when your publishing schedule is, as it has always been, "When it's done".
- Jare 15y ago
  Oh, but Blizzard does schedule, of course, it's just that following that schedule is often not their #1 priority. Look at this from back in 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/leaked-blizzard-roadmap-shows-release-dates-for-pretty-much-everything/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/leaked-blizzard-roadmap-sho... (Diablo 3 has already deviated from that, of course) However, even if the cuts are not going to cause schedule changes, that doesn't mean they do not reflect scope changes.
zura 15y ago
It is ironic that the same big companies who are laying off hundreds of people, actually are hiring constantly - they have hundreds of open job postings, even with the similar titles.

199 points by joshes 15y ago

Not really sure what to make of this…been a Blizzard fan since ToD, saw Blizz growing, merging, corporated, massive growth… 3 Major Projects in the Pipeline, 1 Untitled Project, and it lays off 600 people? It's a money printing machine with it's stranglehold on subscription based MMO (as opposed to freemium), I'd hate to think they're laying off people to appease the shareholders and maximize profit.

puppop 15y ago
So, instead they can keep the 600 people, piss off shareholders and reduce profit?
- nkassis 15y ago
  I see it a little differently, I wouldn't feel good about keeping people around doing nothing of worth for the company. I guess they could have thought of other projects for them but that could put stress on other parts of the company. At least some of these people can now work for companies that do need them. It might be because I never want to work for a company that thinks of me as dead weight. It wouldn't be a good environment to work in.
  - res0nat0r 15y ago
    The key here is to make sure you never let yourself become an employee who is considered dead weight.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- _delirium 15y ago
  In this case the shareholders outside the multi-layered conglomerate are fairly distant, so I'd guess internal bean-counting is a more proximal pressure on Blizzard. They're owned by a holding company, Activision Blizzard, which is public, but has the majority of its shares owned by yet another holding company, Vivendi SA. So Vivendi's shareholders are the main ultimate shareholders, but those individuals control Blizzard in only a very convoluted and indirect way. I would guess that you might see different kinds of decisions from an independent Blizzard, even if it were public (though it would also have more risks in that case).
icefox 15y ago
Maybe they have been successful year after year and there are a some people that should have been let go or became redundant over the years and this partially being used to clean house? Seen it plenty of times before and wouldn't be surprised.
gyardley 15y ago
Just speculating -- but perhaps Blizzard prefers to get rid of their lower performers all at once in a 'layoff' instead of sacking them one-by-one. Many larger companies do this; I suspect it minimizes dismissal-related lawsuits.
- marshray 15y ago
  Probably depends on the state, but wouldn't a 'layoff' mean the company would pay higher unemployment compensation premiums?
  - itsameta4 15y ago
    ...which is still probably cheaper than a single wrongful termination suit. Calling it a layoff prevents that.
    - marshray 15y ago
      Former employees can still sue over the way the layoffs were conducted.
cube13 15y ago
Technically, it's 2 major projects: Diablo 3 and the new MMO Titan. Starcraft 2 and WoW are in more of a maintenance cycle with the expansions coming out this year. Neither probably need as many developers as the new projects at this point. The layoffs are probably due to WoW losing subscriptions over the last few years, and Diablo 3 nearing completion. The majority of the 540 non-developer positions are probably level 1 support or low level IT related positions because they don't need as much support personnel. The developer positions are most likely contract employees for Diablo 3 that aren't getting their contracts renewed.
- NickPollard 15y ago
  SC2 and WoW expansions are still major, MAJOR projects, believe me. Calling it just maintenance really does a disservice to the amount of work that goes into these things. For Blizzard, this applies doubly so. I expect that Heart of the Swarm is a bigger project that most studios can dream of, in all manners - technology, art and design, production, distribution, marketing, and all the other attendant features that go with modern game development.
  - justjimmy 15y ago
    Not to mention the sick cinematics that Blizzard is renowned for. Definitely not 'maintenance' work. Patches for WoW – maybe – but expansions are huge effort! Not to mention Blizzard aim for global simultaneous release for its games whenever it can. (Asia used to lag behind WoW's expansion up to a whole year compared to NA/Europe) Can't imagine the effort and coordination required for that task.
  - cube13 15y ago
    I'm not arguing that the WoW and SC2 expansions not major projects. I'm saying that compared to the new projects(D3 and Titan), the overall personnel allocation is smaller for Heart of the Swarm and Mists of Pandaria. The development effort on those isn't on a new codebase(unlike D3 or Titan). They're adding new features and reworking game systems in the expansions(especially with the WoW expansion, where they're completely rewriting basically every class), but the overall effort required to complete those isn't nearly as much as what they need for the new MMO.

ajross 15y ago

Presumably the era of "printing money with WoW" is over, then?

latortuga 15y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. First off, they list 10.2M as the current subscriber base, taken times a conservative estimate of $13/mo (the every 3 months plan, IIRC) and that's over one and a half billion dollars a year. Second, they are rumored have a new MMO in the pipeline - suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket. I think that, on the contrary, the era of Blizzard printing money is still going strong.
- marshray 15y ago
  suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket Not a reasonable way to estimate potential demand. Maybe something closer to "Some percentage of established MMO gamers who now play WoW or Star Wars Online will try it according to how appealing it looks and how well it's marketed and priced."
- runevault 15y ago
  Except there is a subset of people who played WoW and have since sworn off MMOs entirely (I am one such and I have a coworker who has also done so). I somehow doubt this is THAT rare an occurrence.
  - marshray 15y ago
    I think I've met people who've committed to do that, but for every one of them I've probably met many more who just got bored with it or wandered off to another game.
    - runevault 15y ago
      Sure not claiming it's a majority, but I could imagine it being 5-10%, which is still enough people to invalidate the original argument of "they'll get everyone who tried WoW" back.

daniel_levine 15y ago

I look forward to the companies that will be spawned by ex-Blizzard folks

shingen 15y ago
Yep, hopefully now we won't have to wait a decade for a better version of Diablo.
- justjimmy 15y ago
  That's what I thought, till I played Hellgate. Man that was a disappointment…
  - michaelbuckbee 15y ago
    If you haven't already, give Torchlight a try - Mac/PC/XBLA and only $15. http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/
    - danvideo 15y ago
      Looks interesting. On first glance it does appear similar to Trine though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game) Which I wasn't a big fan of... anyone know if that's the case?
      - StavrosK 15y ago
        They are nothing alike. I've only played Diablo slightly, but Torchlight is much closer to Diablo (hell, Trine is a platformer). I enjoyed both games, but if you like Diablo, you'll love Torchlight. Torchlight 2 is coming soon too, I believe.
      - betterth 15y ago
        Trine was a fun little fantasy arcade scroller. Side to side action. A platformer. Torchlight is a dungeon crawler in the vein of diablo. Lots of equipment dropping, items to get, etc, as opposed to the more platformer-style of Trine. Very, very different games that happen to be set in the same fantasy genre.

RandallBrown 15y ago

Those 10% are related to game development, but that doesn't mean they're developers. I would guess that it's more likely to be slightly more "disposable" roles like testers. It still sucks though. It seemed like Blizzard was just printing money.

ineedtosleep 15y ago
They were, and are likely still are, however, I have a feeling this hinges on something from the Activision HQ.
chc 15y ago
They're presumably winding down some parts of Diablo 3 development and maybe even Heart of the Swarm, so it could just be that they don't expect to be doing as much in the near future rather than simple cost-cutting.
- chaud 15y ago
  They still have the upcoming Titan game and another unannounced game that they are hiring for.

vyrotek 15y ago

I was under the impression that this sort of churn happened at all game dev companies when projects were nearing completion. Typically they are roles like QA, writers, and designers that may move to other projects or not.

barrybe 15y ago
You are correct, but it's still fun to speculate wildly.

Goronmon 15y ago

The company's massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game has struggled in the past year, slipping to 10.2 million subscribers through the end of December. I'm not sure "struggled" is the word they were looking for there.

TheCapn 15y ago
Without Googling for statistics wasn't WoW peaking around 13mill subscribers? A ~20% decline is seemingly quite a massive hit if you ask me and would definitely warrant a few layoffs.
- Goronmon 15y ago
  Sure, subscriptions may have declined quite a bit, but I think it's a bit silly to call the game "struggling" considering it's position in the market.
  - marshray 15y ago
    If you're slowly-but-surely losing subscribers, going through downsizing, laying off developers, from a business perspecitive it's "struggling".
  - aGHz 15y ago
    I imagine the implied turn of phrase was actually "struggled to make the numbers". As TheCapn pointed out, an unaccounted for 20% drop in plans is bound to shake things up a little.
  - robryan 15y ago
    If you have a look at how player numbers have declined for any other mmo, their numbers are amazing. Can't forget that WoW come out in 2004, the life span of most games is measured in months. The game doesn't hold people's interest indefinitely, even of it is a lot longer than most games and probably most people who would want to try the game already have. Also competition is way higher than it was in 2004.
  - 15y ago

baby 15y ago

So who was laid off if not Game Masters in WoW? Can someone from the inside comment on this?

donal_cahalane 15y ago
So it's been confirmed that 200 of the jobs going are here in Ireland where Blizzard have over 800 staff. http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/blizzard.html http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/blizzard.html

ChuckMcM 15y ago

I find these sorts of events fascinating. Blizzard does have quite the money machine with WoW. Even a paltry 10.2M subscribers, assuming the adjusted monthly income per subscriber is $10 that is $102M/month in revenue from that franchise. The interesting bit is that to make that count they really need a good operational plan with respect to their infrastructure. I got a peek at their infrastructure early on because the company where I worked (Netapp) was trying to sell them filers for their Oracle instances which were running the game. And the game is essentially a ginormous database being updated constantly based on player actions. What we saw was a very complex (and expensive) infrastructure which was clearly built expediently. I would think that over time they would have been working to refine this to something more manageable (and cost effective). Ultimately, there is a 'killer' persistent world infrastructure architecture for this sort of traffic. Would be a good research topic for a thesis I suspect.

malero 15y ago
You forgot to include these services: character name changes, character race changes, character transfers, guild transfers, vanity pets and mounts. I'm not proud to say that I have spent money on all of these except the guild transfer service.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  That is true, although as mentioned above the Chinese get their own deal. And Blizzard did get into the 'real gold for virtual goods market' which is quite large. Teasing apart the revenue per subscriber from their reports, talks, and sometimes off hand remarks is very challenging. There is the 'max' rate of $15/month, there are the 'free til level 20' players, there are the 'Yearly Pass' types, and of course there are the pay per hour guys in China and elsewhere in southeast Asia. So my guesstimate at $10 per was a 'blended' rate. Pessimists seem to put it closer to $7, not sure why though.
cheald 15y ago
It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

kirinan 15y ago

This is interesting, I knew one of their main sources of revenue (World of Warcraft) wasn't doing as hot, but still had over 10million people, which at 15$ a month subscription, is nothing to scoff at. The 60 developers is the most interesting, they have a lot of in the queue for them (D3, Starcraft 2: expansion, and Titan (their next MMO), Im guessing they either weren't pulling their weight or this has something to do with Diablo 3 being almost complete.

afterburner 15y ago
I believe less than half the 10 million pay the $15 a month typically charged in North America. Many accounts in China are linked to internet cafes, which charge peanuts by the hour to their customers. Still, the 4 million or so North American and European monthly accounts still makes it huge.

thehermit 15y ago

This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Blizzard took on millions of new customers fast, so they went on a hiring spree for support staff. 5+ years ago it was not unusual to take 2-3 days and even over a week to get an issue resolved. Now even more than 12 hours is a busy day. I'm sure they have streamlined their support systems behind the scenes and just don't require as many employees, even if they kept their peek subscriber levels.

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JS_startup 15y ago

This seems like an appropriate enough place to put this: The Diablo 3 beta? Not that good. I put thousands of hours into D1 and D2 but have zero desire to keep playing the D3 beta. Also it sucks to hear about the lay-offs.

jamesaguilar 15y ago
That's not really very surprising. You probably wouldn't have played D2 for very long if it was only normal difficulty, and only the section before Blood Raven. Personally I quite enjoyed the beta, a lot more than I enjoyed the same period of the D2 game. I'm anticipate spending many, many hours enjoying D3.
- JS_startup 15y ago
  It's not even the length or difficulty, I just didn't feel motivated to get through it. Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    In a game that is so progression based, knowing that all the power you accumulate will go to no useful end can be a real motivation killer. The point of Diablo games has always been to get nice stuff so you can murder progressively more difficult enemies. When there isn't going to be a progressively more difficult enemy, why get nice stuff? I didn't have any problem with the pacing, somewhat agree on the problem of corridor level design, and again I had no problem with the art style. But some of that is a taste issue where our priorities just don't align.
  - ak217 15y ago
    Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style. Sounds like Diablo 2. (I loved that game, btw.)

jmsduran 15y ago

Damn, I hate hearing about layoffs. I work in a close-knit team of developers and testers, where each of one us is an important contributor to our company's goal, and it impacts our productivity tremendously when someone leaves. Maybe I'm naive, but I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off. I'm sure not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, and there must be some legal mumbo jumbo out there that prevents this from happening... Anyways, I'm sure those laid off developers are talented, and hope they'll rebound quickly to a greater opportunity.

marshray 15y ago
There was a time where a company I worked for was having to downsize for a second time. They were planning to keep me on, but cancel the software project I'd been leading. I talked them into letting me the severance package and I went looking around elsewhere. I relocated for a better salary in a bigger city and the company I left was able to retain a couple of other staff (including a single mom!) I don't want to make it sound like I was more noble than I really was -- it was the right move for me at the time.
ido 15y ago
I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off. Assuming the company isn't really hurting for cash you lay off people that don't contribute more than what they cost. You can either let them go or I guess cut their salaries, but cutting someone else's salary doesn't really solve the problem that you're paying someone more than what you're getting from them.

primigenus 15y ago

This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe. WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat. It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat. As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial. Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry.

withad 15y ago
They've apparently recently automated a big chunk of their customer support [1], which (along with the decrease in WoW subscribers) would probably explain big cuts to the customer service department. [1] http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-lays-off-600-likely-primarily-in-customer-service http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-la...
ars 15y ago
Why do it in one shot like this? Why not lay people off incrementally?
- CptCodeMonkey 15y ago
  I've been in a situation where the company was laying people off incrementally over the span of 18 months. I hated going to work, didn't give a shit about the company, and I was not unique or alone in that opinion. If you have to lay people off, do it as quickly and with as much dignity as possible.

drostie 15y ago

I know it's naive, but it wasn't until I read this article that I started to think of the WoW programmers as human beings, as opposed to some universal geometric constant about the WoW universe. I would like to see a documentary filmed inside of the WoW studio, if it's at all possible. Like, it could be really Serious Business, which would be hilarious, or it could be a more relaxed-artists type of story, which could be a fun romp. And maybe we get to see a sysadmin saying, "those are the Legacy Systems, they're from the Early Days, basically the entire World of Warcraft is held together with duct tape and a prayer." It would be great, man.

packetslave 15y ago
FWIW, I've seen one of Blizzard's hosting cages. It's more like "held together with hundred dollar bills and big fat DC power cables"

jpadkins 15y ago

Remember, John Staats (designer for WoW, lead designer for their next gen MMO code named titan) was let go in November. http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/07/rumor-senior-titan-designer-laid-off-by-blizzard/ http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/07/rumor-senior-titan-d... There was rumor that it was more than just 1 lead designer was being cut, but nothing substantial. I don't think those 60 developer staff were just "QA people" etc.. I bet they killed or scoped down the whole project.

angrycoder 15y ago

The key is the last line of the press release. The accounting charges associated with Blizzard's reduction in workforce are not anticipated to be material to Activision Blizzard, Inc. and were included in the 2012 financial outlook that was provided on February 9, 2012. I worked at 2 BigCo's while they went through layoff periods. What people don't know unless they've worked at a BigCo is that a significant number of its employees are interchangable or in some cases just dead weight. For every department of 10-20 people, there are 2 or 3 that have the bulk of the knowledge and do the majority of the work. There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person. Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.

alanfalcon 15y ago
I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked accounts (I can't begin to describe how many people have their WoW accounts hacked, and recovery used to take hours in the early days).
- mbenjaminsmith 15y ago
  Not to say people aren't upset. I'm sure they are. But what you're saying is people are surprised to be laid off when it's clear they were no longer necessary? If how things were done changed significantly (needing far fewer people) isn't that going to obviously lead to layoffs? Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.
  - 15y ago

jjp9999 15y ago

Well, they must be getting ready to Diablo 3 then.

joering2 15y ago

seriously non of those emps could be fit into 102 positions here: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/directory.html#region=Americas http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/directory.html#...

beloch 15y ago

"Blizzard went on to note that its development and publishing schedule has not been impacted by the staff cuts. " This is easy to say when your publishing schedule is, as it has always been, "When it's done".

Jare 15y ago
Oh, but Blizzard does schedule, of course, it's just that following that schedule is often not their #1 priority. Look at this from back in 2010 http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/leaked-blizzard-roadmap-shows-release-dates-for-pretty-much-everything/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/leaked-blizzard-roadmap-sho... (Diablo 3 has already deviated from that, of course) However, even if the cuts are not going to cause schedule changes, that doesn't mean they do not reflect scope changes.

zura 15y ago

It is ironic that the same big companies who are laying off hundreds of people, actually are hiring constantly - they have hundreds of open job postings, even with the similar titles.