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Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

gamespot.com

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Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#81

Post by marshray »

gyardley wrote: post #13
justjimmy wrote: post #2

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.

Just speculating -- but perhaps Blizzard prefers to get rid of their lower performers all at once in a 'layoff' instead of sacking them one-by-one. Many larger companies do this; I suspect it minimizes dismissal-related lawsuits.

Probably depends on the state, but wouldn't a 'layoff' mean the company would pay higher unemployment compensation premiums?

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#82

Post by donal_cahalane »

baby wrote: post #22

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

So it's been confirmed that 200 of the jobs going are here in Ireland where Blizzard have over 800 staff.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/blizzard.html

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#83

Post by Steko »

daniel_levine wrote: post #5

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

Red 5 Studios is beta testing their AAA title Firefall right now. Many ex-blizzard folks (WoW Lead Mark Kern, etc.) are at the core of Red 5 and it's rumored that Blizzard's big unannounced MMO project Titan may share some of the core gameplay elements of Firefall ("skill based" TF2 style gameplay with MMO persistent world effects).

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#84

Post by marshray »

runevault wrote: post #47
latortuga wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so sure. First off, they list 10.2M as the current subscriber base, taken times a conservative estimate of $13/mo (the every 3 months plan, IIRC) and that's over one and a half billion dollars a year. Second, they are rumored have a new MMO in the pipeline - suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket. I think that, on the contrary, the era of Blizzard printing money is still go…

Except there is a subset of people who played WoW and have since sworn off MMOs entirely (I am one such and I have a coworker who has also done so). I somehow doubt this is THAT rare an occurrence.

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.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#85

Post by Steko »

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.

Blizzard CM Bashiok basically came out last week and said don't expect too much of Diablo 3, keep your expectations low and you'll be pleasantly surprised but if you're expectations are too high you might be disappointed.

Major buzzkill for a lot of people but the handwriting was on the wall with the release delays, the annual pass giveaway, word of mouth on the beta, etc.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#86

Post by zach »

primigenus wrote: post #45

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 s…

This is the correct read on this news.

Customer service is emerging from a major generational change at Blizzard. Understand that Blizzard went very quickly from a company of mostly developers to a company whose headcount was overwhelmingly focused on customer support. They had (before these layoffs) about 3,000 customer service employees worldwide. They hired a huge, huge amount of people, put together systems and tools as fast as they could, yet even so have only in the last few years been able to get their head above water. There was a lot of inefficiency, bad solutions, poor procedures and lack of automation. Todd Pawlowski was hired from Virgin America two and a half years ago to be Blizzard's VP of customer service and has been directing a huge amount of much-needed change. This is basically the latest step in Blizzard getting their act together and providing great customer service efficiently. It sucks for all the GMs that got laid off, though.

As for development, I think this doesn't indicate a whole lot, as you suggested. Maybe Cinematics is wrapping their work for Diablo 3, but the "development-related" jobs could very well be all QA positions. There is more than enough work in development for Blizzard to keep recruiting aggressively at GDC next week. The speculation elsewhere about this meaning something is changing for their future projects is far-out and wrong.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#87

Post by jamesaguilar »

cheald wrote: post #71
ChuckMcM wrote: post #25

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 t…

It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

He meant it ironically.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#88

Post by parfe »

danvideo wrote: post #53
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't already, give Torchlight a try - Mac/PC/XBLA and only $15. http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/

Looks interesting. On first glance it does appear similar to Trine though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trine_(video_game) Which I wasn't a big fan of... anyone know if that's the case?

Torchlight is a highly overrated Diablo 1 clone. The game has barely any story. The side quest system literally repeats "Kill the monster on level 5" "Kill the monster on level 10" "Kill the monster on level 15" etc.

The game has some okay graphics and the loot system is decent. If you enjoy looting corpses for a slightly upgraded item over and over in a noxiously repetitive manner then I say go for it.

Five people in my office bough the game. I played it on very hard and beat it. I was the only person to reach the end despite everyone else playing on normal difficulty.

I beat the game out of spite. I never felt so angry at a game before but my sheer hatred of it drove me to finish.

I guarantee most positive reviews come from people who did not finish the game. It's just not fun after the first 10, 20, 30, 40, infinite floors in the same dungeon.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#89

Post by ErikRogneby »

cheald wrote: post #71
ChuckMcM wrote: post #25

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 t…

It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

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.

Re: Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers

#90

Post by cheald »

ErikRogneby wrote: post #89
cheald wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that the word "paltry" would be applied to WoW's subscriber base. It dwarfs even its biggest competitors by an order of magnitude!

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.
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