Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#101

Post by res0nat0r » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 1:11 AM UTC

nkassis wrote: post #10

puppop wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, instead they can keep the 600 people, piss off shareholders and reduce profit?

I see it a little differently, I wouldn't feel good about keeping people around doing nothing of worth for the company. I guess they could have thought of other projects for them but that could put stress on other parts of the company. At least some of these people can now work for companies that do need them. It might be because I never want to work for a company that thinks of me as dead weight. It wouldn't be a go…

The key here is to make sure you never let yourself become an employee who is considered dead weight.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#102

Post by beloch » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

"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".

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#103

Post by Devilboy » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 1:32 AM UTC

talmand wrote: post #93

weaksauce wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morale wise it's probably better to do it in one large chunk instead of smaller servings where people are wondering if they are going to get cut in the next round.

But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one? Layoffs are bad for morale regardless of how it is handled. I've been through both sides of a layoff and it wasn't fun either way.

Layoffs are bad for morale either way, but one big round is much better morale-wise than 20 small rounds.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#104

Post by fryguy » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 2:11 AM UTC

JS_startup wrote: post #32

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.

I was in the D2 beta back in the day, and I had a similar feeling I did now in the D3 beta. It was kind of tiring that the best thing that could be done in the game was killing the countess I think it was (fairly early in act 1) and getting the best low level items and using the first couple tiers of skills. I think there was even less to do in that one, even. Both games are definitely fun in the beta, but lacking something. I think D3 will be pretty fun when it's actually released and we can do everything in the game.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#105

Post by Tsagadai » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 2:40 AM UTC

cahrens wrote: post #79

georgemcbay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"scary" depends on your perspective. The way I look at it, the fact that they still have ~10 million customers for WoW is damn near a miracle -- this is a game that came out in 2004! Surely they know nothing lasts forever, which is why they are working on that other MMO. I have to believe they are smart enough there that this eventual dropoff was too expected to be "scary". Also, it isn't like WoW is the only thing t…

Actually Starcraft 2 failed in its target group: South Korea, the original is still king in The Land of The Morning Calm. Blizzard screwed themselves over with the requirement of being online to play.

The original and Warcraft 3 are still very heavily played in the ubiquitous PC방 (an internet cafe but darker, allows smoking, 24 hour and focused on gaming). Recently, Starcraft 2 is getting even less love from Koreans because Blizzard either opened up the login process or merged servers which has allowed far more Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese players onto the servers (which is affecting pings and causing more games to lag out). I saw one other guy in a 300 seat PC방 playing Starcraft 2 while I saw about 50% of people playing Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#106

Post by alanfalcon » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 2:55 AM UTC

angrycoder wrote: post #72

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…

I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked accounts (I can't begin to describe how many people have their WoW accounts hacked, and recovery used to take hours in the early days).

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#107

Post by bonch » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 3:38 AM UTC

Goronmon wrote: post #23

TheCapn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Googling for statistics wasn't WoW peaking around 13mill subscribers? A ~20% decline is seemingly quite a massive hit if you ask me and would definitely warrant a few layoffs.

Sure, subscriptions may have declined quite a bit, but I think it's a bit silly to call the game "struggling" considering it's position in the market.

Think about it. A loss of 3 million subscribers at $15/mo is a loss of $45,000,000 in revenue over the course of 12 months.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#108

Post by DrStalker » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 3:52 AM UTC

runevault wrote: post #94

marshray wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I've met people who've committed to do that, but for every one of them I've probably met many more who just got bored with it or wandered off to another game.

Sure not claiming it's a majority, but I could imagine it being 5-10%, which is still enough people to invalidate the original argument of "they'll get everyone who tried WoW" back.

90% of everyone who every played WoW is still a rather huge market. Even 50% would be huge.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#109

Post by Empedocles99 » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 4:10 AM UTC

cheald wrote: post #90

ErikRogneby wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on who you consider their competitors. WoW worldwide is about 50% of the MMORPG market. It will be interesting to see how SWTOR fares in that space. Almost up to 2M subs already, However if you consider the larger online gaming market I would consider WoW's main competitors the likes of Zynga. Farmville alone has 28.4M monthly active users.

I'm not sure I would consider WoW (a game with a monthly subscription and a 20+ GB client) to be a direct competitor with Farmville (a free-to-play game with a browser-based client). I suspect that they appeal to very different audiences.

You would only be partially correct. See this report we did at Raptr:

http://blog.raptr.com/2011/09/27/zynga-report/

Specifically, ~20% of WOW players also played a Zynga game, and ~30% of XBox players also played a Zynga game.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#110

Post by mbenjaminsmith » Thu, Mar 01, 2012, 4:42 AM UTC

alanfalcon wrote: post #106

angrycoder wrote: post #72

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…

I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked a…

Not to say people aren't upset. I'm sure they are. But what you're saying is people are surprised to be laid off when it's clear they were no longer necessary? If how things were done changed significantly (needing far fewer people) isn't that going to obviously lead to layoffs? Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.