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Activision Blizzard Cuts 8% of Jobs Amid 'Record Results In 2018' (kotaku.com)
On an earnings call this afternoon, publisher Activision Blizzard said that it would be eliminating 8% of its staff. "In 2018, Activision Blizzard had roughly 9,600 employees, which would mean nearly 800 people are now out of work," reports Kotaku. "This afternoon, the mega-publisher began notifying those who are being laid off across its various organizations, which include Activision, Blizzard, and King." From the report: On the earnings call, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick told investors that the company had "once again achieved record results in 2018" but that the company would be consolidating and restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019. The company said it would be cutting mainly non-game-development departments and bolstering its development staff for franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo. Development sources from across the industry told Kotaku this afternoon that the layoffs have affected Activision publishing, Blizzard, King, and some of Activision's studios, including High Moon. At Blizzard, the layoffs appear to only have affected non-game-development departments, such as publishing and esports, both of which were expected to be hit hard. "Over the last few years, many of our non-development teams expanded to support various needs," Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a note to staff. "Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I'm sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today. In our regional offices, we anticipate similar evaluations, subject to local requirements."
Thankfully, the letter promised "a comprehensive severance package," continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. "There's no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues," Brack wrote.
Thankfully, the letter promised "a comprehensive severance package," continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. "There's no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues," Brack wrote.
"This afternoon, the mega-publisher began notifying those who are being laid off across its various organizations, which include Activision, Blizzard, and King."
Don't worry - I'm sure there are still plenty of iterations of Candy Crush still in the pipeline.
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The video-game industry spent 2018 shooting itself in the foot. Waiting for Bethesda and EA to follow suit.
"missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019" == The microtransactions and loot-boxes are not working out. We need to start actually making games with realistic budgets and profit expectations.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Not a record year. Don't let the misleading slashdot headline and summary fool you. They are idiots.
The real news on Activision Blizzard
>> the layoffs appear to only have affected non-game-development departments
Good news from the perspective of a Slashdot citizen: tech skills continue to keep us out of the pool of commodity humans.
I remember back on slashdot where Wow was so big whole stories were on it and addiction was covered. Today? A few old geeks may still log in on occasion. I think micro transactions have went there course and now the CEO wants his bonus and since Wow can't grow he needs to cut costs to give himself more bonus money.
At this point I would sell if I were a long term investor. Maybe stay for short term boosts but since Kung fu panda a half decade ago I am surprised it is still around. WOTLK was the last good expansion ... written before Activation bought em.
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that everyone knows is coming. It's so frustrating because we know a recession is coming and we're doing jack squat to stop it. Just more layoffs to keep the stock prices high and maybe another round of tax cuts.
It's not even like we don't know what to do: Regulate Wall Street so they can't gamble with our money (and make no mistake, it's out money since they're "too big to fail"), pump some money into the supply side (Tax Cuts for people who actually spend money, e.g. the working class, and the "Green New Deal"), increase the minimum wage and lift those stupid bloody tariffs. It doesn't do good to put tariffs on China when they can just build their stuff in Mexico and ship it here duty free (lord I shouldn't have to explain that).
And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
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if these numbers are to be believed.
The 770 are folks need to support new product launches. Activision is letting them go because they're not releasing anything next year (except maybe a COD).
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Games. Games for regular people to play. Games for regular people to have fun playing.
The rest is just a diversion.
You understand China uses tariffs to wonderful effect don't you? I suspect you don't since you are repeating lines that others have fed you.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
There's also the issue that Blizzard consistently treats esports as an afterthought to fill the streams at blizzcon. I think overwatch may be done a bit better (haven't watched it much) but ive watched streams of all their other esports leagues and they're just not done all that well. The announcers tend to be flat and boring, the production quality is low, etc.
I mean it's not like they're streaming a local school club or something but compared to the behemoth - league of legends - they tend to come across as a bit of a sad also-ran.
If Blizzard wants to really put a stake in esports, they'll have to put in some effort (and likely a lot of dollars) to really define their role and their games rather than just acting like it's nothing more than another stage spectacle once a year (or so.)
Of course I have no idea if Blizzard does care.. maybe they're perfectly happy with their esports always being second tier rather than putting in the effort. And if that's the case then I guess it is what it is and their leagues will continue to be mediocre side show attractions.
Besides announcing the the 8% increase in their stock dividend they also announced a $1.5B, that's billion with a B, stock buyback. That's enough money to pay 1,500 employees, if those employees made $1 million per year. Sickening.
The "little people" are the 800 or so people being let go as "redundant" to the company needs, and are getting a period of free healthcare coverage, a generous severance package, and their profit-sharing bonus from last year.
Short of keeping the employees in no-show jobs, they are doing the right thing by "the little people" IMHO.
Ken
Since Blizzard was taken over by Activision, it's all about the profits. eSports isn't that much of a money generator, it promotes your game/brand and creates a fanbase but it doesn't immediately give you (the diminishing) millions of dollars like releasing Call of Duty 21 on XBox.
eSports and the 'classic' Blizzard (StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo) games have a loyal following, but they're hard games to make and trying to monetize them with DLC (eg. Diablo 3) hasn't worked well because the fans expect a fully fleshed out game with consistent lore when you pay top dollar for the title/franchise, you don't expect a Blizzard game to take you out of the game every 5 minutes into the real world to remind you to spend real money. Even things like Heroes and Hearthstone with loads of DLC and a huge fan base are 'too much work' given the revenue it brings in and the revenue model is based on respectively cramming and gambling which has turned a lot of people off.
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We keep reading about stuff like this, and companies wonder why the workforce no longer have any loyalty towards their employers and will jump ship as soon as something better comes along?
The new Pump and Dump. The stock gets a pump, the employees get the dump.
being so misguided as to think a company posting their best results ever has ANY effect on whether companies continue to hold on to staff deemed unnecessary.
The powers that be have long since noticed that. They've been working for a decade or two to commoditize tech skills. There's been quite a bit of success, and if you haven't seen it you're just lucky.
It's not that hard to do really. You take a tech task and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks, assigning a person to each chunk, so that no one person is critical to the entire task. You then document the hell out of everything while using as much standard equipment as possible to avoid "institutional" knowledge.
If you think the billionaire class hasn't noticed that some of their employees are "irreplaceable" you're sorely mistaken. They're working on it, they just haven't gotten around to your job yet. It's a big economy after all. Some of us will slip through the cracks even, but that's just survival bias...
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until we stopped doing it. It started with a bit of Carter and Reagan, who began dialing back regulations on what banks could do and making stock buy backs legal (funny thing, those used to be illegal market manipulation). Clinton continued it by breaking down the wall between "Main Street" and "Wall Street" banks so that investors could mix doggy stock investments with safe mortgage investments.
Undoing all that would be a start. Talk to any economist who isn't paid by right wing think tanks and they'll tell you the rest.
Following the Great Depression economists at Universities spent decades studying all this and figuring out solutions. The only problem is nobody listens to them. Get rich quick schemes are too popular.
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Blizzard had a fair amount of autonomy under Activision until just recently. With Morhaime removed as company president and the recent focus on cost-cutting, you should expect increasing prioritization of shareholder value over entertainment value.
They are doing the best thing possible given their gross levels of company mismanagement.
Generous severance packages suck compared to having a steady job at a company that is able to create stable sustainable employment.
Not loot crates, but more loot for senior execs, whose compensation will skyrocket while they fire employees.
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They work at dehumanizing their "human resources" so they can sleep at night when they pull these things all the time. People wonder how genocide and such horrible things can even happen when there are actually a bunch of Satan worshipers involved... They only need look towards their local MBAs.
They need to pay a price for laying off human workers like they are excess resources so they are not so casual about hiring them and give them stuff to do for longer term planning if something doesn't work out. You never see them saying "our highly paid MBAs didn't meet the expectations they sold us on so we are laying them off." It's always shifting blame to somebody or something other than themselves... Their gambling with the organizations stability hardly has consequences and even when it does they get a golden parachute and find another place to gamble.
There are real costs to laying people off abruptly which are externalized as much as possible by management... and they'll go so far as to exploit bankruptcy on purpose and steal the pension fund. When will people realize sociopaths gravitate towards management? They serve a useful purpose but need to be kept from sharp objects and monitored. A % of laid off people get into drugs and depression and develop health issues -- with costly results for society. One would think they'd go for the higher pay people to minimize the # of people. (besides isn't the purpose of higher pay is higher responsibility?)
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60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Where would they get the capital to live without a paycheck for the 3-5 years it takes to establish a business?
Also the job market's pretty bad across the board. They can find people to replace them pretty easily. Workers lack solidarity so it'd be easy to get "scabs" (google the term if you haven't heard it).
This is gonna sound harsh, but we shouldn't indulge in fantasy. And "Walking off the Job to compete with your Boss" is by far the most famous business themed fantasy. In practice your Boss has capital and market share and he either buries you in price cuts or buys you outright.
At the same time we shouldn't despair. There _is_ a solution, but you're not gonna find it in the current, heavily distorted, markets. We need to man up and start regulating again. Stop buying into Ayn Rand (you're post is pretty much John Galt). There's a reason nobody paid her much mind in her day. Her ideas don't work. Just ask Eddie Lampert and Kansas.
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Are they just going to have less workers? Or are they going to foreign workers in some manner?
You see in the New World Order companies don't invest in Employees they invest in the company stock. This is why no employee should have any loyalty to a large company. You are just an expense item on a spread sheet.
once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that he wanted to take all the fun out of making video games and make it just another business because that's what would be the most profitable. I'm fairly certain that he was deeply resentful of the fact that he was running a video game company and not something more grandiose like an arms manufacturer.
Point is, these are not gamers. They don't think like gamers. They think like businessmen. Innovation isn't their thing. Let other's innovate and they'll be there to crank out a copy. Look at PUBG. They're doing alright, but the bigger companies are moving in (Epic with Fortnight and now EA with Apex Legends). Activision just fell behind on that curve, but the curve still works.
Let somebody else take the risk while you reap the rewards. This works because you can beat them to market on the consoles and release a better product because you can throw more money at optimizations. Again, PUBG needs a beast of a machine to hit a stable 60, but Fortnight does it on a Toaster.
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We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.
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Blizzard is a business that exists to make money for its investors, not to keep people employed. Employment is merely incidental. Even the games are incidental.
Look at the greater system that generates this behavior and propose changes if you want to do something about it.
Whining about the actors within it is useless.