Activision Blizzard Cuts 600 Jobs After Company Review - The UpStream

Activision Blizzard will be cutting a large portion of their workforce after it has finished an overview of its business and needs of the organization. The result is that the company plans to cut 600 employees, 90% of which will be from departments that are not involved in game development. So all my World of Warcraft and StarCraft fans need not worry about their games going away.

Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment said,

Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business. Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company. Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward.

Current game design, planning and publishing schedules will not be affected. Blizzard has said they will be giving release plans for Diablo III very soon and it is still working on World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm beta testing.

Blizzard has also said that the company is still hiring and that all job seekers should head to http://jobs.blizzard.com. If you apply, I hope your job isn't next on the chopping block.

When we discover more information about the job cuts and what's happening internally, we will let you know.