There has been some new information about the massive layoffs that happened as part of the Activision Blizzard restructuring. The original news focused primarily on layoffs on Activision’s side of things, while the new report shares more insight into how Blizzard was affected. According to the report, 209 employees that worked at Blizzard were laid off, representing more than a quarter of the roughly 800 people who were expected to get laid off worked for the Irvine-based developer.
The people who were laid off worked in different cities throughout the country. These range from California locations like Irvine, Santa Monica, and Burbank to the east coast like New York City, as well as cities in between such as Austin, Texas and Bloomington, Minnesota.
According to the Worker Adjustment and Restraining Notification that was filed by Blizzard, the employees were given 60 days of compensation and benefits, and none were represented by a union. The employees were also provided with severance, but it isn’t clear if this was on top of the 60 days of compensation.
Activision Blizzard considered a variety of factors on deciding who to lay off, such as business needs, job skills, redundancy, job elimination, and restructuring needs. The biggest department that lost the most amount of employees was the IT department, with about 41 employees fired. Marketing and Live Experiences lost 29 employees each. The rest of the impact was felt on a variety of other departments such as publishing, quality assurance, mobile, marketing, customer service, finance, and Battle.Net.
The layoffs occurred last month where Activision Blizzard laid off 8% of its staff. One of the major reasons was to focus on its core franchises such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Warcraft, and Diablo. According to the company, the investment in these franchises will grow by about 20% over the course of 2019.
This is just more insight into what has been a big year for Activision Blizzard. The former CFO was fired, the company split from developer Bungie, they have been investigated for fraud, and have had to deal with class action lawsuits from some of their investors.