Activision Blizzard Cuts 600 Jobs
 

Reuters reports that Activision Blizzard has cut 600 jobs due to World of Warcraft's continuing loss of subscribers.

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Yet they are still probably making millions in profits.

Bet they didn't readjust Ol' Bobby's Wednesday bonus to keep a few people in work though.

Agreed. When you read that the company who prints money is cutting jobs simply to "streamline" themselves.... it's always little people getting hurt so the CEOs can continue stirring their martinis with platinum swizzle sticks.

The goose is no longer laying golden eggs? No wonder kotick has a new gig.

Cripes, way to reward the people who have made it possible for you to eat your gold-flake encrusted truffles, Kottick. Seriously--when a company is still turning a very healthy profit, it's disgusting for upper-management to simply sweep in and ruin hundreds of lives all in the name of "streamlining".

What a piece of complete and utter garbage Activision's red-headed wonder CEO is.

I dont see why they couldn't streamline while including these people.

This is strange indeed, I would have expected them to reroute the forces towards their new MMO. It's hard to find and re-hire decent talent again, but maybe most of these jobs are for support/qa/customer service employees who don't really contribute to the development cycle.

I take my message back, of course support/qa/customer service people contribute to the over-all picture. I was trying to say the people they selected were not key individuals that would be considered for new projects and with the old project dying out it's time to let them go. Every company goes through a clean-up period.

well it held in there for some time..but it's the circle of life

and before anyone says "oh this is all on activision, blizzard are still saints" need I remind you that in order to inflate their numbers and attract activision in the first place, blizzard was counting all of those asian internet cafe customers as "subscribers", even if they only played for an hour and never came back.

Blizzard wanted the big bucks, and now they have to deal with the cold hard reality of what money does to people.

Rather flimsy excuse to cut jobs. They act like WoW is on the verge of going under. It's probably 3x as profitable as the next highest grossing MMO.

Wow, maybe there really is a mass exodus from all other MMO's to SWTOR. I thought that was just a rumor.

WoW's customer service has always been dirt slow. If they were ever 'overstaffed' it must have happened in the last 6 months or so.

It seems more likely that someone's trying to protect profit growth by cutting cost centers.

I guess I can only keep on hoping I never actually need anything from the service department.

Until you play SWTOR or read their forums.

This is good news... for the Gamers out there... maybe, just maybe, we can finally come out of this stagnate period of time of MMO's being the same old same old... crappy grinds... as much as I loved WoW, the first couple of years, I have come to the painful realization that WoW stifled the MMO market... in such a huge way....

I pray to the Videogame gods that we have a new Era filled with NEW and INVIGORATED MMO Designs that Master the Craft of innovation and design! :)

History repeats itself. See Circuit City America's last stand against Worst Buy.

I see nothing wrong with this--their work needs have lowered. Does everyone's job need to be protected until the employer goes out of business entirely? Are private organizations supposed to have employees, or wards?

My, obviously limited, experience when submitting a ticket with 3 different MMO's

LOTRO: 15 minute wait
SWTOR: 5 minute wait
WOW: 2 day wait and then ticket mysteriously canceled with no contact

When you're the big kid on campus you can get away with terrible customer service, when you're hemorrhaging subscribers that's when you need to step it up, not cut it back.