Activision Blizzard lays off nearly 800 employees

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Activision Blizzard has released its quarterly results for all of 2018 and the last quarter of last year. The company posted record sales, but at the same time 8 percent of its staff is being laid off.

The company said in announcing its quarterly results that it will increasingly focus on its largest franchises, namely Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo. The number of developers working on these series will increase by twenty percent in 2019.

Activision Blizzard will fund this investment by “lowering initiatives that fail to meet expectations and reducing certain administrative costs.” The layoffs were briefly mentioned during an oral explanation of the quarterly figures; this concerns eight percent of the approximately 9600 employees, which amounts to 768 people. According to Kotaku, there will be layoffs at Activision Publishing, Blizzard, King and certain Activision studios such as High Moon.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in announcing the quarterly results that the 2018 financial results are the best in the company’s history, but “the full potential was not realized.” Turnover amounted to $7.5 billion in 2018, compared to just above $7 billion a year earlier. In the past quarter, revenues were $2.38 billion, down from more than $2 billion in the same quarter in 2017. In 2018, it made a profit of $1.8 billion, compared to $273 million in 2017.

A month ago it was announced that Activision and Bungie have split up and that the developer will keep the rights to the game Destiny. That shooter no longer plays a role for the future results of the company, unlike, for example, the Call of Duty series. Activision reports that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is doing significantly better than its predecessor. Activision also calls the releases of Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy successful, with the latter having been delivered more than ten million times since its release in 2017.

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