Originally posted by Rusty715

Originally posted by slickbizzle

Originally posted by mastergravy

lets just say they have 10mil subs. at 15$ a pop per month thats a 150mil made per month. and they need to lay off 600 employees. theres more going on here than what people are thinking at that kinda cost no co. on earth needs to layoff anyone.

 

Maybe the fact that they don't have 10 million people paying $15 a month?

 

 

It always comes back to how many actually pay a sub in NA and EU doesnt it? Ok lets do that then.  Even if its 3 million Blizz is not going broke anytime soon. And thats still over 2 million players more than any other P2P MMO that I know of.

Where do you think much of the money to develop Diablo 3 is coming from?

I love the people in here who remind me of the Occupy crowd picketing the wrong locations.

Businesses routinely cut fat and reduce overhead.  Comcast has been laying off people for a long while, not because of the economy (well some, sure) but because those jobs are reduntant due to computerizing and automating alot of the remedial tasks.

When last a checked, customer service wasn't "redudant," it was just automated, meaning that Blizzard doesn't care if players actually have their support issues resolved, they just want to be able to say they've gone through the motions. Prepare to never get anything but a generic message for a support issue from now on.

Originally posted by mmoDAD

#1. No Blizzcon.

#2. Job Cuts.

 

How the hell can Blizzard, with 10,000,000 people paying $15.00 monthly fees, $box sales, $expansion sales, and RMT sales, get to the point where they need to cut workers?

 

Idiots.

Well.. most likely there aren't 10 million people paying $15/mo.  Who knows how many of that 10 million are part of a monthly free trial churn.... aren't the Asian subscribers on different types of plans, as well?

Regardless... just because you CAN pay people - doesn't mean you do.  If there isn't work for them to do - or the work isn't worth the amount you're paying.... you make cuts.  They are running a business, not a charity.

Originally posted by expresso

Offcial quote from Blizzard;

Everyone,

We announced today that we’re in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I'm sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.

In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We’re in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.

After evaluating our current organizational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed. As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.

I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.

You've all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.

-Mike Morhaime

Wow that sure is a lot of excess people laying about.  Did everyone one have a personal secretary over there or what?

Alot of this has to do with how tech has grown over the last couple years. Alot of blizzard services require far less moderation and run much more flawlessly than before. Trends aside, automation is usually what leads to downsizing in most companies.

As for the competition killing Blizzard? Ya ok, SWTOR has its own plethora of issues it has to deal with, TERA is garbage, GW2 is way overhyped so it'll be a let down because we'll never be able to reach the freakin pedestal the fanbois put it on. As for any sandbox games.. i wish them well but its such dangerous territory. So ya i think blizzard games are going to be alright for atleast 2-3 years.

Either way Blizzard is a good company to work for, i'm willing to wager those laid off weren't kicked straight to the curb without a brown bag and bottle.

Some people seem happy that folks are losing jobs, in my opinion that's just  shitty regardless of how you feel Blizzard has wronged your precious MMO universe.  I don't like to see people out of work.

Well the screwed up, they didnt see the decline in WoWs interest coming? really its a video game and its ages old.  That and how little effort i feel they put into getting Diablo 3 out, like...how many years has it been since i saw the first gameplay video?  Ah well, i hope TITAN is the major title on their development list or is that cancelled or not due out until 2020 now?

Back in 2005, WoW was a brilliant, brilliant game.

But this is 2012, and "kill 10 x" in a field doesn't cut it anymore. It was ok in the Plaguelands, when it was a little scary - that was the last time it really worked well.

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Originally posted by Yamota

Originally posted by zymurgeist

 

 Corporations are not charities nor should they be.

Nor should they be all about greed.

 Yes they really should. At least where it affects profits.  They can do good things too but they exist to make money.

Look up the word greed. Greed is not a healthy approach to making profit, it is an excessive need for it. So that it can negatively affect the environment, the society, the economy etc.

A good company has both social and environmental responsibilities to the societies for which they operate. They are not greed above all entities. If they became that then you have the current crisis with credit default swaps where greed has become so great that it cares nothing about global economic stability.

Corporations should not act like phsycopaths, they need to care about the societies from which they operate.

Rift > WoW thats all

Originally posted by Yamota

Look up the word greed. Greed is not a healthy approach to making profit, it is an excessive need for it. So that it can negatively affect the environment, the society, the economy etc.

A good company has both social and environmental responsibilities to the societies for which they operate. They are not greed above all entities. If they became that then you have the current crisis with credit default swaps where greed has become so great that it cares nothing about global economic stability.

Corporations should not act like phsycopaths, they need to care about the societies from which they operate.

Company, yes. But corporations like EA and Activision are a step up from a regular company. And they are greedy.

I guess Activision put some preassure on Blizzard, I knew merging was a dumb idea.

There are few independant MMO companies that make AAA MMOs. Either are they like Bioware and Blizzard controlled by larger corps or they are like Undead labs funded by a corp (in their case Microsoft).

A small gaming company might make games for the fun of it even if they still need income enough to go round. A corp works in a very different way. And we all remember that activision quote about "taking the fun out of making games".

If your defending Blizz/Activision keep in mind they posted a over 1 billion net profit last year.

It's pretty obvious they fired a bunch of hardworking plebs so the usurping execs could line their wallets a little more.

Originally posted by TyvolusNext

So the bad news is this will prolly cause delays in the amount of time it takes Blizzard to get new games, expansions, etc out the door. 

The good news, is you shouldnt even notice as it already takes them forever to finish any project as it is.

 

 

Blizzard has always been notorious for taking their time to get a title as close to "right" as "right" can be, with the exception of a couple of WoW expansions, and even those were for the most part pretty polished, if not what everyone wanted.

This is why the Q&A for Diablo III's release date said, (paraphrasing) "It'll be finished when it's finished, and not a day sooner."  The same thing happened when Diablo II was in development, and it's probably why there's a crapload of speculation about TITAN project, but no one knows a damned thing.

As sick of WoW as I have become, I respect Blizzard's stance to take their time on a project, however misguided as it might be, rather than pull a SOE and crank a new EQ expansion out every 6 months, bug-filled or otherwise.

they could have saved those job is they would just fired greg street.

Originally posted by Suzie_Ford

Develop-Online.net is reporting that World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo developer, Blizzard Entertainment, is making 600 jobs 'redundant'. According to the report, 10% of the jobs will come out of the game development crew with the rest coming out of business oriented departments like customer support.

The announcement of job cuts comes as World of Warcraft is slowly but surely losing its grip as the top game in the MMO space.

“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business, said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime.

Read the full article at the link above.

i call shenanigans. blizzard has never even HAD customer support.

Originally posted by headphones

Originally posted by Suzie_Ford

Develop-Online.net is reporting that World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo developer, Blizzard Entertainment, is making 600 jobs 'redundant'. According to the report, 10% of the jobs will come out of the game development crew with the rest coming out of business oriented departments like customer support.

The announcement of job cuts comes as World of Warcraft is slowly but surely losing its grip as the top game in the MMO space.

“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business, said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime.

Read the full article at the link above.

i call shenanigans. blizzard has never even HAD customer support.

well they had people to talk with the callcenter in india, guess they will not need then anymore :p

Originally posted by headphones

Originally posted by Suzie_Ford

Develop-Online.net is reporting that World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo developer, Blizzard Entertainment, is making 600 jobs 'redundant'. According to the report, 10% of the jobs will come out of the game development crew with the rest coming out of business oriented departments like customer support.

The announcement of job cuts comes as World of Warcraft is slowly but surely losing its grip as the top game in the MMO space.

“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business, said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime.

Read the full article at the link above.

i call shenanigans. blizzard has never even HAD customer support.

I must be lucky then. I recently have to call them to remove my Authenticator because I got a new iphone. It didn't take me long to have them remove my old one so I can add my new one in. Overall, I was happy it went smoothly.

I am probably on their good customer list LOL