What if the layoff is a good thing?

[Big Thanks]

Really...

The Richest Gaming Company in the world needs to fire 800 people after posting record profits to fund some new projects....

Come on really....

But you have to take in consideration that businessman want to see GROWTH.

And in 2018 Blizzard made more revenue than in 2017...but made LESS money than in 2017.
In 2018 Blizzard made LESS 27 million dollars than in the year 2017.
Even though Blizzard games made more money in 2018!

Meaning Blizzard is having a lot of costs...somehow.

I believe they are doing something...wasting the money somewhere. I dont know.

Blizzard did not see growth in entire 2018 compared to 2017.
They only saw growth in the last 3 months compared to last year's last 3 months.

[Freshouttajail]

I think it's people's inability to think the following: a person/company/corporation/etc. can want to make profit and make a good product at the same time. I guarantee many people in this forum cringe or get a nasty feeling in their stomach when you say the word "corporation", but that's their prejudice taking over the rational part of their brain (and potentially a severe lack of how businesses actually operate and function). When Blizz was pumping out the games and content that people loved, they were a corporation. Aside from Blizz, corporations in general expand and contract constantly to meet their needs, as their goal isn't to create jobs (that's a side effect) but to maintain their business as effectively as possible. Companies are laying off and hiring people all the time, sometimes even at the same time, because the people currently employed are not what they need.

While everyone likes to tie the quality of Blizz games to evil Activision, that's just passing the blame. Even if Activision swooped in and said "Make me trillions!", that doesn't mean make a crappy game or more importantly that you can't make a great game that makes a ton of money. The reality is that the people who made the games you loved or the content you loved either don't work there anymore or don't have the passion to make the game at the same levels. The Simpsons is a great example of such things, as the show went from amazingly smart and entertaining to utter crap over time mainly due to the creative team behind the good seasons eventually leaving to do other things, and those people remaining don't have the same passion or drive to make the show what it once was. It's common with shows as much as it is with games like WoW: such content eventually has to end, and unless the original creators maintain their drive or can be replaced with people of similar drive and vision, the content will decline in quality over time and end.

Anyways, these layoffs aren't really unexpected, as the groundwork for this has been going on for well over a year or longer if people have been paying attention. These layoffs also have zero to do with the quality of the games themselves, as it's more reasonable associated with what I mentioned earlier, and this applies to almost any company in existence. Also doesn't help that the sector in which these layoffs occurred are generally prone to layoffs, and anyone who enters employment in this sector should already know that there's not much job security in it. It's much more rational to assume that the games aren't meeting your quality standards because the creators of the content you did like are no longer there creating your content, or if they are still there they've either run out of ideas and/or don't have the same passion they once did for making said content.

Good points and well said, worth reading. 5/5 to you my dude.

People often think that "Blizzard" is an entity that always thinks the same way while in fact it's just the thoughts and decisions of many different people over the years evolving in an ever changing landscape/market. As people change jobs and positions within the company, the products created will change accordingly while the name "Blizzard" will stay the same on the box.

[valax]

We'll see if the newe hirings will be good or bad . For wow , I don't think it will matter at all . The directors are the problem not the community managers or the peon developers, I sure would not be happy if they took more people into the wow team just to design and animate new cash shop mounts .
New people on the team caused LESS content during WOD

[Naiattavain]

Just playing devil's advocate with this theory.

People have been complaining the games suck ass, people yell at Blizzard about everything they do while obviously not understanding half of it, we all want good games and I see a bunch of people asking for some specific Blizzard employees to be fire. But when there is real layoffs, the community cries again.

What if after all this and the layoffs, the games become top fucking notch, super high quality, fun, it feels like the Blizzard of old, AKA we get what we want and asked for?

Do you think all the people doing emotionally biased judgment toward Activion-Blizzard would have enough self-respect to admit they were wrong in saying the layoff was a bad thing? What do consumers really want in the end, play good games or feel good about themselves for knowing 800 useless people kept their jobs that negatively affected game quality? (not saying these people are useless, this is part of the fiction scenario where we imagine the layoff is good, don't call the police plz)



And another different view point:
Just for the sake of the argument about game quality, let's take the whole "evil white men in power taking bonus while others lose their job" out of the equation for a second. Technically speaking a company who hires too many people and then has to fire some is just as bad as a company who stops hiring, because in the end both of these companies don't help the people who now don't have a job. That's just the mathematical truth. The emotional argument is that losing your job sucks so people relate to the employees being laid off, but objectively it's just as bad as not getting hired by another company who has enough budget to do so.

In that line of thinking, should companies who have enough budget be FORCED to keep/hire people they don't need just to make crying customers happy even if that generates lower quality games and that also makes customers cry?

EDIT: Changed the most important line in bold. Stop arguing about a fictional subject, just entertain the question in the following paragraph that most people did not read due to being triggered or gtfo and let the thread dies. Tired of people with absolutely no knowledge trying to argue with their feelings.

the game does suck ass now. i don't know why they changed it. i subscribed to the game for nostalgic reasons.

[RoKPaNda]

Really...

The Richest Gaming Company in the world needs to fire 800 people after posting record profits to fund some new projects....

Come on really....

Pretty basic and smart business strategy. If you have less need of support staff and you have dead esports titles it makes more sense to trim the fat than to keep handing out paychecks for sitting around doing nothing. That's money that can be better used on projects.

You don't become the "richest gaming company in the world" as you put it by wasting money.

[Freshouttajail]

I have given both my feelings and facts mate, You not liking them isn't my problem.

Your facts are shitposting and here's why:

You do realize community mangers (and the rest of the people they fired) rarely work in the same building as the developers right? Also once again Multi-Billion Dollar Company can buy/build another building if it matters so dam much.

That can only come from someone with little knowledge of the subject. I work for a game company and I know a bunch personnally. All their community management work in the same building. That being said, I'm not saying that all companies are exactly like that, I have no issue imagining a company that does have its community management in another building. But randomly claiming that it's a rare case to have community management in the same building is pretty shortsighted thing to say.

The company made record breaking profits and yet still fired 800 people...

There is nothing good about that period.

They got a fuck ton of money they could use to add more resources to other projects. It didn't have to come at the cost of 800 jobs.

It could have came at the cost of the 15mil pay bonus the fucker got.

If these jobs are considered to be useless for their future plans then why should they keep them? You don't know what their plans are, you are just being emotional about this decision and not thinking straight because of it. It's called being triggered. You will deny it, I don't care, you are factually triggered by this event and it impares your ability to think. No one here knows Blizzards plans for the future so no one can say that they were wrong in doing this layoff. Does it suck to see 800 people lose their job? Sure it does, but maybe it will be justified, we don't know yet. If they end up re-hiring for the exact same jobs in a year then you are more than welcome to get back at me and say "I told you so" but jumpin to conclusion right now is idiotic at best. Secondly, no company is forced to keep jobs and employees they don't need regardless of the profit they made. It's not a charity, it's a company.

No chance in hell this helps improve games.

They didn't need to fire anyone to get more staff for game development. This is Activision-Blizzard we are talking about here, They are the richest western game publisher around if not the richest world wide.

They fired 800 people but gave the CEO a 15mil pay bonus. This has shit to do with improving the quality of games.

First of all, you factually don't know that it can't improve the game quality, no one does. As other people have stated in this thread before, it happened that restructuration helped making better quality products. There's 2 smaller game studios near the one I work for that just went through exactly that. They had a spike growth and it kinda got out of control, it became too much too quick so they had to scale down. They are both doing much better now.
I'm of course not saying EVERY STUDIOS SHOULD DO THAT. I'm just saying it's possible, as proven by the facts at hand. So if it's possible, it means you are wrong in saying "No chance in hell this helps improve games."

Also you're just repeating yourself in that post, repeating a wrong point I must add. You factually don't know if they needed to fire 800 people. I'm not saying that I know they did, but you're the one making a baseless claim so you're the only one here being proven wrong.

And last point, while getting a 15m bonus while people are getting fired looks like a douche move, we're also not playing Socialist Tycoon here. If the jobs are not needed then they shouldn't keep them just for charity. The 15mil bonus should go towards production tho, not in that guy's pockets, that I believe we can all agree on.

[Aggrophobic]

20% increase in development resources in aggregate for Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo

which cant be much for wow alone i guess

Yeah, likely. If you think mobile games and microtransactions is the same as quality I guess.

[rrayy]

I will say this nicely. The same people who build story, who build systems, who build classes and the managers that approve those things are still in place.

The one thing that might change with the next expansion is that they will guess better about their decisions right now as to what new things will make players happy. But it will still be a guess made in advance by a couple of years and no one knows whether or not it will work out.

Now that the layoffs are mostly done in Irvine people will take the rest of the week to get over their personal angst about it and move on more determined than ever to see that it doesn't need to happen again. If that's morale improvement then fine. That's how it works in offices for the most part. That doesn't necessarily translate to a better product. Just people working harder.

The layoffs didn't touch WoW in any significant way. Don't thank that is going to cause them to re-think anything.

[Soon-TM]

Layoffs may be a good thing... for the company. Certainly not for its workers.

[luciano]

It isn't.

/thread

[rrayy]

Pretty basic and smart business strategy. If you have less need of support staff and you have dead esports titles it makes more sense to trim the fat than to keep handing out paychecks for sitting around doing nothing. That's money that can be better used on projects.

You don't become the "richest gaming company in the world" as you put it by wasting money.

Exactly. You don't pay salaries because you can. You pay them because you need those people. If you don't need those people, why bother keeping them on when you can spend that money in areas that actually need it?

- - - Updated - - -

We'll see if the newe hirings will be good or bad . For wow , I don't think it will matter at all . The directors are the problem not the community managers or the peon developers, I sure would not be happy if they took more people into the wow team just to design and animate new cash shop mounts .
New people on the team caused LESS content during WOD

They din't lay off people because they were a problem. They were laid off because they weren't needed. People really need to get this through their heads.

[Freshouttajail]

the game does suck ass now. i don't know why they changed it. i subscribed to the game for nostalgic reasons.

They saw that it was getting popular and thought they could hit a homerun by making this popularity more accessible. So they dumbed down the game to appeal to the people who were originally NOT the target audience. This created a shift in production goal which made the game more casual friendly and not appeal the original target audience. However, this was just a long shot, a guess, and it didn't pay off. Because casuals were already in the game and enjoying whatever part of it they had the time/skills to do. The game had reached the maximum amount of players it could attract already and in changing the core philosophy of it they lost the original target audience completely. (by lost I don't mean they all stopped playing, many of them are still around but not happy with the game)

[korijenkins]

The moral over there has been shit for a while. At least ever since the BfA PTR feedbacks. Any employees can see the feedback, then they also see the decision to not change things for the better, keep things fuckign shitty and release it instead of deleting it to increase the quality of the game. We end up with fucking shit and these people are powerless because they don't make the decisions but they see the bad decisions go through.

Kinda happened where I work too, not to this extend but still, it sucks.

It doesn't help much either that if they quit they're stuck with "Battle for Azeroth" on their resume, which might be a good way to ensure you don't get hired.

The only person they could've fired that would've pleased me is Nevalistis (Diablo CM). She hasn't posted or responded to anything on the Diablo forums since November.

She literally hasn't done her job in 4 months and is still employed. Unbelievable.

[Simca]

It's not a good thing.

It's a maximization of profits for the stake of shareholders at the expense of the actual welfare of its employees or its players.

They cut people in basically every role that doesn't produce immediate visible results. This has no short-term impact, but over the long term, less CM engagement means players think their concerns are being heard even less. Less data analysts means that they have less insight into the mistakes they've made or consequences of decisions. Less support staff means longer wait times for players.

It's the type of thing that you do when you think a company's influence is declining, so you 'refocus' by cutting everyone who isn't directly making you money in order to transition the company into a position where you can effectively strip-mine it for money before dumping it.

Not saying that's what AB will do here in the long-term, but that is what this move is very similar to.

[korijenkins]

Yeah, likely. If you think mobile games and microtransactions is the same as quality I guess.

20% increased development resources for a team of 10 is like, 2 people.

I don't realistically believe WoW has a team of 10, but let's be real, they gave percentages because 20% isn't that many people.

[MoanaLisa]

The layoffs didn't touch WoW in any significant way. Don't thank that is going to cause them to re-think anything.

Thank you for more or less repeating what I wrote.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Whe wall of waaaaaaaaaaah will never crumble and fall. No matter what the expansion is. Just look at the people so desperate to hate the present that they'd even praise WoD.

Some people simply need to realize that there is such a thing as moving on with life.

And the layoffs weren't exactly WoW developers. Ythisens, as much as I liked him, was a non-essential part of the development process. It's really just the usual conspiracy theories of "they say it's because of X but WE ALL KNOW IT'S CUZ OF Y!!!"...

[Mead]

20% increased development resources for a team of 10 is like, 2 people.

I don't realistically believe WoW has a team of 10, but let's be real, they gave percentages because 20% isn't that many people.

8% of their staff was 800 people roughly, so while 20% of 10 is not that much, 1600+ people is a lot of resources.

[korijenkins]

8% of their staff was 800 people roughly, so while 20% of 10 is not that much, 1600+ people is a lot of resources.

There's no way they have 1600 devs.

[Queen of Hamsters]

There's no way they have 1600 devs.

Sounds perfectly plausible across their many titles.