Originally Posted by
Thage
Important things to keep in mind:
What I've been able to find shows 9,200 as the employees at Activision-Blizzard as a whole, which is different from employees working at Blizzard's offices. Even going on the 2012 numbers (which may well be higher than what is current given the mass layoffs that have happened over the last few years, but it's a good number to work with for the sake of this discussion), having that many employees for a studio Blizzard's size strongly suggests personnel management needs to be significantly streamlined. That makes it no surprise Activision-Blizzard has seemingly stepped in and begun eliminating non-essential customer service and QA positions in the hundreds; a company that brings in over 78 million a year and can't even cover salaries is almost nightmarishly bloated.
Now, again, I must note, 78 million is an extreme lowball. To the tune of around 4-5 million players' worth, as I believe the subscriber count probably hovers around 4.5-6 million with most players just running the monthly sub on their credit card, since a fifteen-dollar monthly payment doesn't make many people bat an eyelid alongside things like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, DashPass, and other monthly subscription services. My purpose in using only 500k players, and assuming everyone paid the lowest sum possible to maintain subscriptions, was twofold: to illustrate just what kind of money Blizzard pulls in sans any other revenue stream, and to outline that Blizzard is bloated and needs to significantly reorganize their staff. Ultimately, if the cash shop were removed tomorrow and every mount, pet, and now transmog set in it put ingame instead, Blizzard would still remain wildly profitable thanks to Hearthstone booster packs, Overwatch loot boxes, and WoW subscriptions/tokens/box sales.