| This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe. WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat. It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat. As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial. Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry. |
Customer service is emerging from a major generational change at Blizzard. Understand that Blizzard went very quickly from a company of mostly developers to a company whose headcount was overwhelmingly focused on customer support. They had (before these layoffs) about 3,000 customer service employees worldwide. They hired a huge, huge amount of people, put together systems and tools as fast as they could, yet even so have only in the last few years been able to get their head above water. There was a lot of inefficiency, bad solutions, poor procedures and lack of automation. Todd Pawlowski was hired from Virgin America two and a half years ago to be Blizzard's VP of customer service and has been directing a huge amount of much-needed change. This is basically the latest step in Blizzard getting their act together and providing great customer service efficiently. It sucks for all the GMs that got laid off, though.
As for development, I think this doesn't indicate a whole lot, as you suggested. Maybe Cinematics is wrapping their work for Diablo 3, but the "development-related" jobs could very well be all QA positions. There is more than enough work in development for Blizzard to keep recruiting aggressively at GDC next week. The speculation elsewhere about this meaning something is changing for their future projects is far-out and wrong.