Activision Blizzard Announces Fourth-Quarter and 2018 Financial Results. Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick calls these the best in company history, as a way of leading into a confirmation of the rumor they plan on celebrating with layoffs and a restructuring: "While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential," he explains. "To help us reach our full potential, we have made a number of important leadership changes. These changes should enable us to achieve the many opportunities our industry affords us, especially with our powerful owned franchises, our strong commercial capabilities, our direct digital connections to hundreds of millions of players, and our extraordinarily talented employees." Kotaku has details from the earnings conference call, where Kotick clarifies that office staff is being cut (they place the number of jobs loss at about 800), but they are adding developers. Word is: "The company said it would be cutting mainly non-game-development departments and bolstering its development staff for franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo." Despite the name-check of Diablo, USgamer has another detail from the call, saying there will be "no major frontline release for Blizzard in 2019." Word is they will be concentrating on their already released games. One more tidbit from the conference call comes from Charlie INTEL, where they confirm the unexpected news to expect a new Call of Duty game from Infinity Ward this year. Word is this game will be "rooted in franchise history" and will feature "huge" multiplayer and a co-op mode.