Activision Lay Off Hundreds Of Employees Despite "Best Ever" Financial Year
It's been their most successful year ever, but employees are still in danger.
After a major blowout during its financial conference call for 2018, Activision Blizzard have reportedly begun the process of laying off 8% of its roughly 9600 employees, equating to about 775 jobs expected to be lost. The news doesn't come as a total surprise, as the company has undergone a major process of restructuring over the past few months, including swapping out some of their biggest roles within the company and parting ways with Halo and Destiny developer, Bungie.
The layoffs are expected to hit departments within Activision, Blizzard and King, with the majority to be found in roles and studios outside the core development teams. Blizzard in particular is taking cuts to their esports and publishing departments, instead reallocating resources and adding more roles to the development teams for Call of Duty and Diablo. Still, not all dev studios will escape the cull, and restructuring at Activision's High Moon Studios is also apparently taking place. These cuts had tragically been expected for a while as well, with the developer's future being uncertain once Bungie took the Destiny IP, on which they provided support and extra manpower for the main devs to keep on schedule.
In a note to staff sent by Blizzard president J. Allen Brack, which Kotaku got their hands on, he explained the reasoning behind the cuts:
“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.”
What's particularly frustrating about the redundancies is that they come in spite of CEO Bobby Kotick reporting that the company actually enjoyed "record results", explaining that "while our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential." Though exact figures haven't been disclosed, for their 2017 annual conference it was reported that the company brought in $7.2billion. To put this into context, in the same period, another major third-party publisher, Ubisoft, made $1.7billion.
It begs the question: how much money do Activision Blizzard need to bring in for jobs to be safe? Or perhaps more importantly, how much money do investors and shareholders expect the company to be making, and how can a record year of $7billion-plus to be considered something of a disappointment?
It's been a tumultuous time, and even with companies and individuals across the gaming industry are reaching out in an attempt to aid those finding themselves without a job, Activision Blizzard's actions set a dangerous precedent for the ever-changing nature of the gaming industry as a whole.