600 Blizzard Employees To Be Laid Off
Citing that some departments have become “overstaffed”, Blizzard announced in a press release that the company is going to be laying off some of its workers. The press release announced that approximately 600 people will lose their jobs.
The aim of the downsizing is to reduce some of the redundancies that Blizzard has, as Mike Morhaime explained in a post on Blizzard’s forums. Ninety percent of the affected employees come from departments now related to game development, and the World of Warcraft development team won’t be impacted by the downsizing.
It’s tough to see a company like Blizzard lay off so many people, but it appears that Blizzard had to do something after seeing how Cataclysm failed to stop the steady drop in subscribers to World of Warcraft. Hopefully, Blizzard will have a better 2012 with the release of Diablo III, and possibly other Blizzard projects, later this year.
