from Hacker News

Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

by joshes on 2/29/12, 7:10 PM with 121 comments

• by angrycoder on 2/29/12, 9:47 PM

  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.

• by primigenus on 2/29/12, 8:42 PM

  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.

• by ChuckMcM on 2/29/12, 8:00 PM

  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.

• by drostie on 2/29/12, 8:51 PM

  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.

• by daniel_levine on 2/29/12, 7:37 PM

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

• by justjimmy on 2/29/12, 7:23 PM

  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.

• by Goronmon on 2/29/12, 7:50 PM

  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.

• by jpadkins on 2/29/12, 8:58 PM

  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-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.

• by RandallBrown on 2/29/12, 7:43 PM

  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.

• by vyrotek on 2/29/12, 7:48 PM

  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.

• by JS_startup on 2/29/12, 8:18 PM

  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.

• by jmsduran on 2/29/12, 8:40 PM

  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.

• by thehermit on 2/29/12, 8:03 PM

  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.

• by beloch on 3/1/12, 1:27 AM

  "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".

• by zura on 3/1/12, 7:38 AM

  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.

• by kirinan on 2/29/12, 8:00 PM

  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.

• by ajross on 2/29/12, 7:25 PM

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

• by baby on 2/29/12, 7:56 PM

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

• by joering2 on 3/1/12, 12:36 AM

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

• by jjp9999 on 3/1/12, 12:18 AM

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