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Blizzard Cuts ~600 Staff

[Feb 29, 2012, 3:00 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Blizzard Entertainment announces "staff reductions," as they are cutting approximately 600 positions, saying that: "The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development," and that: "The World of Warcraft development team will not be impacted." The World of Warcraft Forums (thanks Joao via PC Gamer) have a message from Mike Morhaime with more on this. Here's a portion:

After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.

I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.

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28.

Re: Blizzard Cuts ~600 Staff

Feb 29, 2012, 18:18

Blackhawk

Between the changes to WoW's mechanics to make gold farming less appealing and the introduction and widespread adoption of authenticators on accounts, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that the number of customer support issues has dropped dramatically over the last few years, significantly enough to require less staff to handle them.

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