Activion-Blizzard Lets Go of Around 800 Employees, Announces No Major Games for 2019

We’re two months in and 2019 has had its first major victim in the gaming industry, as just yesterday, hundreds of Activision-Blizzard employees had been laid off by their company.

A lot is happening, so let’s break it down. While 2018 has been the most financially successful year (revenue-wise) of Activision-Blizzard’s history, it was not a year without some major hiccups. That was the year where we had outcry over Diablo Immortal. It was the year where Destiny developer Bungie broke up with Activision, losing them one of their major flagship IPs. It was the year where the Heroes of the Storm eSport scene was abruptly shut down, leading to the sudden unemployment of around 400 people. And the reason for all these things is because Activision-Blizzard has new leadership - one Bobby Kotick - who was unhappy with 2018 and wanted to refocus the company on developing new games and monetization schemes while also cutting costs.

So in short, he wants to make more money. And one of the ways to do that is to cut expenses, so… rather than reducing his $28.6 million salary, he decided to let go of 8 percent of his workforce. Given how Activision Blizzard has almost 10,000 people employed, that averages out to around 800 people being out of work, almost entirely from non-development areas. Specifically, publishing and the esports sectors, although some studios, such as High Moon and King, lost a few developers.

In an email Kotaku managed to obtain, Blizzard president J. Allen Brack had this to say:

“Over the last few years, many of our non-development teams expanded to support various needs… 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.”

The good news is that the same email promises a comprehensive severance package, including health insurance, career coaching, profit-sharing bonuses, and help getting a new job. The bad news is… literally everything else, obviously.

But wait: there’s more. In the same quarterly earnings call where this news was unveiled, COO Coddy Johnson spoke about how the company would actually be hiring more people, specifically developers, to work on future Diablo products, which will include but is not limited to Diablo Immortal:

"Diablo's development headcount will grow substantially as the teams work on several projects underway for the franchise, as well as the global launch for Diablo Immortal,"

But don’t be getting too excited: because it was also announced that Blizzard won’t be releasing any new major games in 2019.

So, in short: they’re firing a bunch of people, hiring new Diablo devs, but Blizzard, at least, has no plans to launch any big games this year. So yeah... things are going a little bit crazy over at Activision-Blizzard. We’ll have to wait and see what it means for the rest of us, though.