Blizzard - 600 Staff Cut

Blizzard has announced 600 staff will be let go after a business review. Here's the pertinent part of the press release:

IRVINE, Calif., Feb 29, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. today announced that it has conducted a review of its business based on current organizational needs. Following a completion of the review, the company is conducting a global reduction in workforce of approximately 600 employees. The company anticipates approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development. The World of Warcraft(R) development team will not be impacted.
"Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business. Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward."
Blizzard's current development and publishing schedules will not be impacted. The company will announce specific release plans for Diablo(R) III in the near future, and it's continuing to drive aggressively toward beta testing for World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria(TM), Blizzard DOTA, and StarCraft(R) II: Heart of the Swarm(TM). Blizzard also remains committed to maintaining its high standards of quality for customer service delivery. In addition, Blizzard is still recruiting and looking to hire qualified developers for a number of open positions. Further details are available at http://jobs.blizzard.com .

More information.

lol, those poor sods still want to do their dota.
hopeless

WoW!

That's a lot of people who don't work on games that work for Blizzard. Are they firing their entire customer support?

I doubt the development team will not be impacted. They probably support development indirectly at the least…

Are subscriptions on WoW dropping a lot? I'm betting most of the staff cut has something to do with that game.

Originally Posted by azarhal
WoW!

That's a lot of people who don't work on games that work for Blizzard. Are they firing their entire customer support?

Activision Blizzard has several thousand total employees.

Perhaps they issued a lot of pinkslips to Legal, Finance, HR, IT, etc., maybe shut down some overseas offices and merged some marketing depts?

Originally Posted by CountChocula
Activision Blizzard has several thousand total employees.

Just means it sucks to be them since they'll have to pull the extra work those 600 did.

Maybe they also fired the rest of the team on Titan?

Yeah, I'll bet it's related to a shrinking WoW user base.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Yeah, I'll bet it's related to a shrinking WoW user base.

That's my guess. Smaller user base means you need less support people and maybe a few less people that support the support people.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I doubt the development team will not be impacted. They probably support development indirectly at the least…

this

management, marketing, legal, finance, QA, IT, tech support are all not development..that's a lot of people to be specifically working for Blizzard supposedly not working with WoW.

They will all be hired back when titan is released if there still available. WOW is slowing down.

Hey, how do you think they're going to pay for executive bonuses and perks?

Or buy back stock to increase the stock prices for their options?