[CoolGuySteve]

A better question, and one that gets to the heart of why Blizzard's CEO is overpaid, is why do they need 10k people to make, distribute, and support a few video games?

There are far, far more effecient video game studios/publishers out there.

Nintendo manufactures and ships millions of hardware units in addition to producing/publishing games and they have fewer employees.

[zdragnar]

That is, in fact, why blizzard just laid off 800 people- they were from underperforming sections of the business or, iirc, business they wanted to get out of.

[Fnoord]

"Underperforming sections"? Customer Support rep which gave it his all got fired. Due to such people getting fired there's going to be a gap between community and company. How can that possibly be an "underperforming section"?

[Mirioron]

Because it takes a ton of people to offer support on video games. If you have millions of monthly players then you need a lot of employees to manage the community.

[blattimwind]

> Nintendo manufactures and ships millions of hardware units

I'd expect Nintento to have some ODM/CM like Foxconn deal with all that.