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Gaming giant Blizzard/Activision recently announced a round of layoffs involving 600 members of its staff with most of the laid off employees in positions not related to game development.
Here’s what Mike Morhaime, CEO and Co-Founder of Blizzard has to say about the recent layoffs:
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 serve 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.
Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today’s announcement, we’re proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward.
– Mike Morhaime, CEO and Co-founder of Blizzard
Source: BusinessWire
Additionally, Mr. Morhaime did make a second announcement offering some more details about the layoffs. According to Mr. Morhaime, the layoffs are only due to an overexpansion of some of Blizzard’s departments and that no game releases, patches, etc. will be affected or delayed.
Everyone,
We announced today that we’re in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I’m sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.
In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We’re in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.
After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we’ll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.
I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today’s announcement. 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.
You’ve all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.
-Mike Morhaime
Source: Battle.net
Source: Joystiq
