More Details About “The 600″
Posted 1 March 2012 by FluxYesterday’s big news was the 600 ex-Blizzard employees. The official explanation by Mike Morhaime stressed that these were primarily not members of the game development teams, and business/financial analysis in articles like this one from the Orange County Business Journal listed declining WoW sub figures and company revenues after a 2011 went by without any new game releases. That gave the impression that it was mostly WoW CS people and other office workers who weren’t especially “needed” anymore.
However, as Gamespot pointed out, the original ATVI investor press release stated that 60 people “were actively involved in game development.” That might not sound like a lot, given that Blizzard (formerly) had about 4700 employees globally, but when you consider that only about 1700 of those worked in Irvine, where all their game development is done, and that only a few hundred of those Irvine employees are actively involved in game development, and that Blizzard specifically said that no one working on WoW was included… 60 is a lot!
You have to figure that at least a third, and probably more like half of the game dev people in Irvine are working on WoW, once you include the cinematics and sound and other departments that work on all of Blizzard’s titles. So how do you take 60 people out of the D3, SC2, Titan, and DoTA teams without that making a big difference?
I don’t know… that math sounds pretty tricky to me. You’re free to ask it on the Battle.net forums, but don’t expect an answer, and if you create a thread to ask the question it will be promptly closed and/or deleted. All such threads are getting that treatment, with an identical reply tacked on before the lock.
We understand your desire to discuss this topic, but a thread already exists. We’d appreciate you adding your thoughts to it, instead of creating a new thread. You can find that thread here
A few of the threads to earn this closing act are trolly or just dumb, but some others make valid points. Click through for a selection of them, all courtesy of our time (and sanity) saving Blue Tracker.
Now they have numerous employees jobless and fans on the edge of their seats (as once again its most likely activision slowing down the release of diablo 3 and jeopardizing blizzards quarterly finances). Personally I think blizzard did great without the merge. Just some 2cents i wanted to throw out there.
Guess we know why the Skill UI and Chat sucks
Hard to work hard on a project when you know your going to lose your job. I mean I feel really bad for the people losing there jobs but its obvious in the quality of some aspects of the game
What is the point of testing this game for free when you can fire 600 employees? This is the wrong time to support a company of greed rather than showing the artistic side of America.
This is another sad day in gaming history. If you were terminated in Wisconsin and have IT experience let me know.
GUYS, one of my friends from Europe just got his beta-key!! They started sending out to Europe.
That’s great news! *goes to battle.net and start F5ing*
Also – reading those selected posts, I feel quite sad for humanity in general. How people got there from ’600 job losses’ is beyond me. I especially liked the one about the skill/rune ui – lol!
you got off topic on the first comment. impressive.
Merging companies = merging investor pools = more profit pressure on board members from shareholders.
2011 was a plateau year for Blizzard. Even though the Activision side had COD:MW3, the Blizzard side had nothing but WoW subs to tow the ship. Blizzard salaries and overall company spending didn’t decrease much, if at all.
Something had to give – me thinks the next investor meeting is going to reveal more WoW sub declines and if there’s no D3 by then, even more grief.
And with Guild Wars 2 right around the corner, WoW is going to lose even more customers than it did to ToR.
— Also – GW2 had 1 million Beta sign=ups in a 50 hour period.
If even 1/4 of those people quit WoW just to play the GW2 beta for a few weeks, Blizzard is gonna feel it.
Especially if ArenaNet keeps inviting them back to all weekend beta events.
I guess the question is though, how many people who go to play GW2 for a couple of weeks will actually cancel their WoW subscriptions for that time? Not many..
Yeah… but in this 1mln are people who sign up from multiple computers.
maybe they axed an unannounced project
it was the D3 console port?:P
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=35596560&postcount=116
Love the poster
yay wow is finally dieing
Yer kidding rite?
Even if wow was to go down to 1mil subs they would still be making upward of 10 mil usd a month…A MONTH. That’s more than some AAA games make in a year. So lets not write wow off the books just yet.
Taking joy in the decline of a persistent virtual world is disgusting. Do you jump for joy every time you learn that a games servers are shutting down? Were you there cheering, firing off bottle rockets when Star Wars Galaxies shut down in December?
…yes……..games sucks…..
….go out in your garden, make a few holes and start to grow some potatoes……
….mybe you learn something new for a change…..
the future of this planet depend on it…
…THE FUTURE are POTATOES……..and tomatos….i like tomatos 2
umad fanboy?
WoW won’t die, the second that game goes free to play, blizzard will make obscene profits. I direct you towards DnD online, when that game went F2P awhile ago profits skyrocketed.
League of Legends as well is doing pretty well.
WoW will have a new life when blizzard lets go of monthly fees, and millions come back because of it..buying pets…server transfers…race changes…sex changes…etc etc etc etc etc.
WoW will never die. It will just be replaced. Many companies would kill to have an MMO “dying” the way you propose WoW is. lol
lol cool story bro
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Blizzard laying off 600 since Blizzard were overstaffed. If Blizzard wouldn’t have layd off 600 then right now, Blizz would be paying 600 employes to do nothing. It doesn’t matter how much Mike M. makes, if there’s no work for the employers to do, there is no reason for them to be in the company. Since there’s nothing for them to do.
Nah, I’m pretty sure they just transfered all of their work to one guy. Poor guy…
Surely if D3 is all but complete then a large chunk of the “60″ will come from the QA department?
More likely QA is pulling massive overtime from now to release so that the day 0 patch fixes most of the bugs in the ‘complete’ release.
Be prepared that these bad news will have some great news as follow-up next week.
Sucks for the ppl losing their jobs but hopefully they can move on to something better, maybe even start something on their own. ArenaNet, the company making Guild Wars 2, was founded by three former Blizzard employees who played important roles in developing Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo II and Battlenet(the good one) for example, they also have many devs who previously worked at Mythic with Warhammer and DaoC.
It would be interesting to know where developers were cut and why