About sixty redundancies to directly hit development teams; vast majority of cuts to affect other departments
World of Warcraft house Blizzard Entertainment is to begin a global downsizing operation that will result in 600 job losses.
The company claims that about sixty of these redundancies will come directly from game development, while the majority of redundancies will impact on other areas of the business such as customer support.
Existing development and publishing schedules will not be affected, Blizzard said.
The mass redundancies come as Blizzard exhausts huge resources to retain World of Warcraft’s gigantic yet gradually declining subscriber numbers.
“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business, said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime.
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He said Blizzard and the industry have needed to evolve in current times, as masses of audiences turn to free-to-play MMOs.
600 total, 60 specifically from software developers. Kinda hard to see how those kind of cuts wouldn't have an effect on existing products unless they canceled some project that hadn't been announced yet.
I was approached by one of their recruiters about three weeks ago.
"Left Hand calling Right Hand. Left Hand calling Right Hand. What are you up to? Over?"
it really not that bad when you consider it was 600 total from many different global locations, Ireland, Europe, the US ect. still sucks for those who lost their jobs of course but I heard they got sweet severance packages. blizzard treats employees right.
