Despite posting the best set of financial results in its history, Activision Blizzard has said that it will be cutting 8% of its staff as part of an effort to fund investment in developers for its various game franchises.
So Nintendo execs took a pay cut to prevent retrenchments… Activision Blizzard (who’s CEO reported a $30+ million a year salary) decides after a record breaking financial year to cut almost 800 people.
It’s just scummy of them the greedy bastards
And it’s also based on forecasts. “We expect 2019 to be slightly worse than 2018 (which was a record year, BTW!) so we’re firing people. Also 2018 was below forecasts, but we’ll make staffing decisions based on forecasts that might be inaccurate anyway.”
Their stated reasoning is something I still have to digest, though — they claim to be retrenching non-dev staff to hire more devs. Upping their devs at COD, CandyCrush, and Blizzard’s top properties by an overall 20%.
Not broken down, of course, so CandyCrush could make up the vast majority of those. Not that Swedish devs are particularly cheap, just noting that one division could be disproportionately affected by cuts, while another could benefit disproportionately from hires.
I’m nurturing a theory that Bungie split from Activision when it did to avoid these layoffs. I’m sure many others are speculating the same thing, hence the number of reporters mentioning the Bungie split in their articles about this.
Ars’s article on this was also interesting. One of King’s studios, Z2Live in Seattle, is being completely shut down:
As with most Jimothy’s videos, I find myself agreeing with a lot, while simultaneously disagreeing vehemently with a lot as well.
The man knows how to drive engagement.
I sometimes get the impression that he takes a position simply to annoy or agitate a particular group
Boy, oh boy, Jim doesn’t pull any punches this time.
Blizzard looks like it’s re-hiring for the positions of some of the people they fired in February.
I’m far too old to be taking principle stances on stuff (with age comes the realisation that things are always more complicated than you think), but this kind of behaviour makes me not want to give Activision Blizzard another cent of my money ever again.
Sad part is that some of those former employees need the job so it’s as if they don’t have a choice to come back, they also have families to feed, leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
never been a fan of activision/blizzard or bobby kotick, they’re a bunch money hungry pricks and thats why there has also never been a free activision games with gold title released since GWG launched in 2013.
Hell even EA has partnered with MS on GWG.
