Blizzard has confirmed that the publisher is laying off approximately 600 employees worldwide, and of those layoffs, roughly 90% will be unassociated with game development. Blizzard also noted that none of the layoffs are related to the World of Warcraft dev team.
In the press statement, Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime announced, ”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.”
”Knowing that,” Morhaime added, ”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 also emphasized that none of the games being developed, including Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard Defense of the Ancients, and Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, will be affected in any way by the layoffs, and that they’ll have the same amount of dedicated work and polish that all Blizzard titles enjoy.
In addition, the company is still recruiting developers for a number of open positions.
