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Blizzard is Cutting 600 Staff Members
Thu Mar 01, 2012 at 01:30 PM ETTags: Blizzard, Industry Trends, Layoffs, World of Warcraft (all tags)
According to GamesIndustry.biz, only 60 of those jobs are in any way related to gave development.
That's a scary headline, especially considering that the seemingly unstoppable gaming company has been showing signs of slowing. Warcraft subscribers are down since last year and BlizzCon has been cancelled, so it's easy to see doom if you're looking for it.
Now Blizzard is cutting a significant portion of its staff. Before you get too worked up about the future of the company's popular franchises, it should be noted that 90% of those employees are unrelated to internal development. There are a lot of people working at Blizzard, from tech support to cafeteria staff, and while no one is happy about people being laid off it does say something far different if most of the layoffs come from non-development staff. The 'World of Warcraft' team will be completely spared from these layoffs.
"Over the last several years, we've grown our organisation tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community," says CEO Mike Morhaime. " 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."
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
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Blizzard is Cutting 600 Staff Members
Thu Mar 01, 2012 at 01:30 PM ETTags: Blizzard, Industry Trends, Layoffs, World of Warcraft (all tags)
According to GamesIndustry.biz, only 60 of those jobs are in any way related to gave development.
That's a scary headline, especially considering that the seemingly unstoppable gaming company has been showing signs of slowing. Warcraft subscribers are down since last year and BlizzCon has been cancelled, so it's easy to see doom if you're looking for it.
Now Blizzard is cutting a significant portion of its staff. Before you get too worked up about the future of the company's popular franchises, it should be noted that 90% of those employees are unrelated to internal development. There are a lot of people working at Blizzard, from tech support to cafeteria staff, and while no one is happy about people being laid off it does say something far different if most of the layoffs come from non-development staff. The 'World of Warcraft' team will be completely spared from these layoffs.
"Over the last several years, we've grown our organisation tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community," says CEO Mike Morhaime. " 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."
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
See what people are saying about this story in our forums area, or check out other recent discussions.
Netflix Lays Off Employees - Freezes Hiring
Fri Nov 04, 2011 at 01:45 PM ETTags: Netflix, Layoffs (all tags)
Things are on a downturn for the streaming service which was dominating until oh so recently.
The folks at Netflix were used to an upward trend in sales and subscribers. More people kept joining the service and the money kept rolling in - it seemed like there was no end in sight. Then they made some really strange decisions, including a massive price hike, and a quickly scuttled branch-off service called Qwickster.
They've been feeling the hurt on the stock market and it's finally come to some pretty significant layoffs. It's public that the company has laid off 15 or so people in human resources, but according to Hacking Netflix, over 90 employees have been fired from the main call center. Netflix says they hired these new people in anticipation of the Qwickster/Netflix split, but when that didn't happen, they were let go.
This certainly isn't the kind of news that spells doom for the company, but it does reflect further on the company's poor decision making and possible overreach.
Source: Hacking Netflix
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NCsoft Lays Off Employees Across the U.S
Fri Oct 28, 2011 at 11:30 AM ETTags: NCSoft, Guild Wars, MMORPGs, Layoffs (all tags)
Many of the jobs are moving from the states back to the company's home base in Korea.
Things aren't looking great for the folks at NCsoft. The Korean company has produced and published some very popular games, including 'Guild Wars' and 'Aion,' but they've recently had to make some pretty significant layoffs in their U.S. based facilities.
The number of people laid off or given a 60-day notice hasn't been disclosed, but jobs are being eliminated in Austin, Brighton and Seattle. From the sound of things, a lot of those jobs are going to be heading to Seoul.
"In an effort to put a greater focus on the success of the Western-developed games from NCsoft, and the long-term services MMOs require, we announced a global restructuring to our Western publishing team," says NCsoft in a statement to Massively. "As a result, there has been a reduction in force that has impacted less than 2 percent of our global workforce."
Panasonic Will Lay Off 17,000 and Cut Costs on Panels
Mon May 02, 2011 at 01:00 PM ETTags: Panasonic, Layoffs (all tags)
The company is doing a bit of restructuring in order to keep profits high.
Panasonic may have made a tidy profit of 74 billion yen this year, but considering their loss of 103.5 billion last year, they're not taking any chances. The company is restructuring and cutting costs across the board.
Unfortunately, some of those cuts are coming in the form of layoffs. The company will scale back from 366,937 employees to 350,000 by this time in 2013. Panasonic will be purchasing more LCD panels from other manufacturers and move one of its Japan based production lines to China to save on costs.
Panasonic says that the biggest sales decrease was in mobile phones and digital cameras, with Blu-ray recorders doing favorably.
Panasonic also commented on the disaster in Japan, stating "Panasonic continues to extend a helping hand to the people in the affected region, and at the same time, it is accelerating its efforts to restore its operations to normal state and prepare itself for future disaster risks."
Source: TWICE
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