What if the layoff is a good thing?

[Mead]

How is it lost on so many people that the 8% of people laid off were not all Blizzard employees, and that on top of that the people who were Blizzard employees were just people in support roles who had no impact on game development? This changes nothing. The same people who were making bad decisions are still making bad decisions. This move was done solely to appease shareholders while the stock tanks. It's not very complicated. You still have every reason in the world to continue to be pessimistic about Blizzard's future based on the writing on the wall.



Not trying to derail this thread completely or anything but what you've mentioned is not new. They clearly haven't had the resources to listen to feedback during any beta ever, because I can remember going as far back as Wrath that they'd blatantly ignore major issues that multitudes of players would complain about. It was by far the most egregious during WoD; the beta test is nothing more than a song and dance to build good faith among the community to fool people into believing that they actually care about your suggestions and feedback when in reality they are the most stubborn developers on the planet who think they know way better than the people who actually play their game (because they sure as hell don't). They don't address these things until they become an obvious problem that starts affecting the bottom line, like when they start bleeding subs.

Thats not how software works. AT ALL. you can have software that in your scaled down test environment work, but until other use it live, you will not find bugs that you find otherwise. Beta is an absolute necessity when it comes to any software development. They dont put up a beta just say behind closed doors "hahaha we fooled them they think we care". Do you have any idea how much money goes into a beta? Bandwidth costs, server costs, development costs, moderation costs, research costs. Its there to serve a developmental purpose, to have testing on a larger scale, to reduce bugs that occur on live at even a larger scale. Thats called business, and in software business, that business 101.

[Drungan]

lets put aside that those that lost there job are all pretty unhappy with it and think about this purely as a consumer.


what upcoming title from Blizzard / Activision are you just a bit hyped for ?

mobile Diablo ? ( i know i am not )

the next CoD title ? .... no

The next Destiny ? .... no

Warcraft remastered ? .. yes likely if it is not a full 60 USD + loot boxes or some season pass BS

The next WoW expansion ? ... errhh not likely tho i might play again a few months

so ofc. they need to cut some staff.

[korijenkins]

Sounds perfectly plausible across their many titles.

They listed the titles getting the "20% boost"

Not every title they have is getting it, otherwise they might actually be close to that number.

[Softbottom]

As up and arms as upset that people seem to be over these layoffs they really don't affect any of us personally in any way what so ever. People get laid off all the time.

[Queen of Hamsters]

lets put aside that those that lost there job are all pretty unhappy with it and think about this purely as a consumer.


what upcoming title from Blizzard / Activision are you just a bit hyped for ?

mobile Diablo ? ( i know i am not )

the next CoD title ? .... no

The next Destiny ? .... no

Warcraft remastered ? .. yes likely if it is not a full 60 USD + loot boxes or some season pass BS

The next WoW expansion ? ... errhh not likely tho i might play again a few months

so ofc. they need to cut some staff.

Yes, I'm sure they tailor their hirings after how you feel.

There's always plenty of hype surrounding a new WoW title. Warcraft Remastered = highly requested, Classic servers...
Blizzard layoffs were of non-essential people, not developers.

People like to pretend that BfA is somehow WoW at its worst and once more fall into the "can it be saved??"-narrative which is just plain pathetic at this point.
Look at Cata. Look at MoP. Look at WoD. Hell, even WOTLK was a time where online philosophers reckoned that WoW was soon to be put into maintenance mode and die off. Based in nothing but their own feels, obviously, because that's what online philosophers are.

- - - Updated - - -

As up and arms as upset that people seem to be over these layoffs they really don't affect any of us personally in any way what so ever. People get laid off all the time.

People are only outraged because they want to be angry at Blizzard/Activision/The Gaming industry rather than out of real concern for the people.
Just check the thread that had to be locked because people were displaying no sympathy for either party, especially not for the laid off people.

[Freshouttajail]

lets put aside that those that lost there job are all pretty unhappy with it and think about this purely as a consumer.


what upcoming title from Blizzard / Activision are you just a bit hyped for ?

mobile Diablo ? ( i know i am not )

the next CoD title ? .... no

The next Destiny ? .... no

Warcraft remastered ? .. yes likely if it is not a full 60 USD + loot boxes or some season pass BS

The next WoW expansion ? ... errhh not likely tho i might play again a few months

so ofc. they need to cut some staff.

Destiny is gone anyway, Bungie left Activision and got their IP back.

You can already pre-order Warcraft Remastered, we already know it's not a 60$ game. I don't think they'll add lootboxes to it. Even if they do it would be just cosmetic, I don't know why people buy or care about them AT ALL.

They already stated they have other Disblo projectS. As in more than one. Don't know exactly what these projects will be but there's more than Diablo Immoral.

CoD of course is bleh but people still buy it so whatever, not my thing.

WoW is perfectly salvageable. Doesn't mean they will be able to save it, but if they managed to save Diablo 3 I don't see why they wouldn't be able to make WoW great again.

EDIT: No mention of OW, hearthstone, Starcraft? Who knows wtf they gonna do? It's possible to have some nice surprise down the road. We just don't know.

[Canderous1]

i know one thing, the layoffs certainly won't make blizzards communication skills any worse.

[Topornic]

It's their business and they decide how to roll it. By their be it shareholders or owners of a private company - it doesn't matter. If they can resolve any contracts then they can. If you don't want a contract that allows them to fire you without a notice then don't fucking sign it and find someone who will cater to you. Maybe become better and irreplacable (or at least hardly replacable or really valuable to the company).
People die in this world. We are not supposed to care for some anonymous people that live in another end of the world, if you try to you will 100% get miserable in the end because you just can't physically care for that many people what's been proved by science. All you do is virtue signal. You probably never ran a business and never employed people and you think yourself a goddamn oracle in terms of business and morals.

If the changes turn out to be bad decisions then they are going to feel it, but that's how free will, decisions and resposibility work.

[Gadzooks]

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.

I got a chance to listen to the actual call last night, instead of going off the highlights posted everywhere. It changes the impression I got somewhat, as far as their tone and the actual comments they made.

I still don't really know what to think, except that they decided to do this now because the stock price is so low, might as well take the hit now. I'm not going to relisten to the whole thing right now, but I might look for a transcript to pull out the comment that pretty much says as much.

ON PAPER, what they're doing sounds focused, they see the problem, they're doing something about it. Re-invest in their existing IPs, get more content out faster (and hopefully with less bugs/issues), and get the Next Big Thing out the door. The words "players" was used a LOT in the call. They didn't flat out say "Yeah, we fucked up, we need players to get MAUs and money, but people just don't like our games", but it was close enough that I feel they admitted that, a bit.

But like any company, they have to show they mean it. I've heard all kinds of things like this from companies I've worked for, who had big layoffs, and the problems didn't get fixed. If you take a neutral position on this, they have to balance the needs/demands of the player/customer with the needs/demands of the investors/parent company. Their goals are to make everyone happy, like in the past, and they seem to recognize their current offerings - across the board at Activision, Blizzard and King - aren't cutting it. So they're reinvesting in their IPs. (They shouldn't have lowered their investment in, but that's a different issue)

I'm taking a big "prove it" position here. And the layoffs just feel dirty, when the company is making huge stock buybacks, paying off debt, and paying the top executives millions a year.

[qwerty123456]

Being constantly fearful of losing your job is really going to help productivity and quality I bet.

[prwraith]

I mean maybe but If there's not a diablo 4 announcement as blizzcon 2019, I see the largest nerd moshpit in history forming. Nerds appearing out of the shadows everywhere to join in.

[SpiffyGriffy]

Amazing how for years people have been complaining about Blizzard CM team not listening to the community and what we have to say. Then when those same people get laid off they freak out and get worried we wont have enough community interaction. Then you furthermore try to act like you have compassion for them when you've been ripping them for the pass couple years.

It's very plausible that the people who were laid off were the ones who were doing a poor job with community interaction and were deemed not worth the cost. Seems very hypocritical for people to be upset about this and act like they feel bad for these employees.

[Gadzooks]

There is such a thing as cutting out the bloat, but not like this. This is a clear-cut case of a class of corporate cunts trying to squeeze just a little more profit margin out next year for their shareholders.

Don't be stupid. This is a company that made billions of dollars in profit. If you assume an average salary of 50k per person laid off (this isn't high level workers, and I'm being generous because Blizzard notoriously pays lower than industry average), that's 40 million. That's a drop in the bucket in terms of profit margins.

The layoffs are bad, but it's not to pocket the salaries as profit. That's just idiotic.

[Freshouttajail]

I got a chance to listen to the actual call last night, instead of going off the highlights posted everywhere. It changes the impression I got somewhat, as far as their tone and the actual comments they made.

I still don't really know what to think, except that they decided to do this now because the stock price is so low, might as well take the hit now. I'm not going to relisten to the whole thing right now, but I might look for a transcript to pull out the comment that pretty much says as much.

ON PAPER, what they're doing sounds focused, they see the problem, they're doing something about it. Re-invest in their existing IPs, get more content out faster (and hopefully with less bugs/issues), and get the Next Big Thing out the door. The words "players" was used a LOT in the call. They didn't flat out say "Yeah, we fucked up, we need players to get MAUs and money, but people just don't like our games", but it was close enough that I feel they admitted that, a bit.

But like any company, they have to show they mean it. I've heard all kinds of things like this from companies I've worked for, who had big layoffs, and the problems didn't get fixed. If you take a neutral position on this, they have to balance the needs/demands of the player/customer with the needs/demands of the investors/parent company. Their goals are to make everyone happy, like in the past, and they seem to recognize their current offerings - across the board at Activision, Blizzard and King - aren't cutting it. So they're reinvesting in their IPs. (They shouldn't have lowered their investment in, but that's a different issue)

I'm taking a big "prove it" position here. And the layoffs just feel dirty, when the company is making huge stock buybacks, paying off debt, and paying the top executives millions a year.

Yeah, how things are said, what happens next etc isn't always the same.

They can say the right thing and do the right thing or say the right thing but not back it up. At this point in time we don't really know and in this echo chamber there's a lot of people who quickly say "whatever man you'll make shit games anyway lolz u suk".

I think the "prove it" position is perfectly justifiable.

[prwraith]

ON PAPER, what they're doing sounds focused, they see the problem, they're doing something about it. Re-invest in their existing IPs, get more content out faster (and hopefully with less bugs/issues), and get the Next Big Thing out the door. The words "players" was used a LOT in the call. They didn't flat out say "Yeah, we fucked up, we need players to get MAUs and money, but people just don't like our games", but it was close enough that I feel they admitted that, a bit.

Can you imagine the amount of respect a company would get if they came out and said hey sorry guys we fucked up. Here's what we're doing to course correct.

[huanjia]

Thats not how software works. AT ALL. you can have software that in your scaled down test environment work, but until other use it live, you will not find bugs that you find otherwise. Beta is an absolute necessity when it comes to any software development. They dont put up a beta just say behind closed doors "hahaha we fooled them they think we care". Do you have any idea how much money goes into a beta? Bandwidth costs, server costs, development costs, moderation costs, research costs. Its there to serve a developmental purpose, to have testing on a larger scale, to reduce bugs that occur on live at even a larger scale. Thats called business, and in software business, that business 101.

Thanks for spelling that out for me. It still refutes nothing that I said because you blatantly misunderstood the point I was making, which is they do not listen to meaningful feedback during the beta tests in which players participate. Speaking of the money it costs Blizzard to run a beta... why don't you go ahead and break down the operating costs for me as well? You think there's major overhead for Blizzard to run a beta test on infrastructure they already have (and have had) in place for over 15 years? We're not talking about some small startup who is taking a gamble with putting their new product on the market. World of Warcraft betas primarily exist for stress testing and squashing bugs, but they also sell it as a platform for players to provide feedback for every facet of the game. If you're disagreeing with that, you've clearly never participated in a WoW beta.

[Acidz]

No matter how people try to spin it, this company has proven itself to be disgusting as shit

[Vineri]

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.

You have alot of nerve. Many Black men in power control highly successful enterprises. Including the news media.

I find this statement rather insulting, and racist.

[Drungan]

EDIT: No mention of OW, hearthstone, Starcraft? Who knows wtf they gonna do? It's possible to have some nice surprise down the road. We just don't know.

You got good points ... i was tired when i did reply to this and a bit grumpy.

i did play a fair bit of OW, HS and SC and might be tempted to put money into those games again ... maybe there is still hope !

Lets hope the next Blizzcon brings good news !

[lolpve]

I don't even know what anti-white racism has to do with business discussion.