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Hundreds of Activision Blizzard employees cut following successful earnings report

Activision Blizzard had its best year ever as regards earnings but that seemingly isn’t enough for the gaming behemoth with chief executive officer Bobby Kotick remarking, “we didn’t realize our full potential.”

As such the firm also announced that eight percent of its staff would be let go. In numbers that amount to 775 employees who are now out of a job despite financial results being the best in Activision Blizzard’s history.

So why then is Activision Blizzard saying goodbye to staffers? It says it needs to be leaner.

“While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential. To help us reach our full potential, we have made a number of important leadership changes. These changes should enable us to achieve the many opportunities our industry affords us, especially with our powerful owned franchises, our strong commercial capabilities, our direct digital connections to hundreds of millions of players, and our extraordinarily talented employees,” Kotick said.

During its earnings presentation the firm noted that to reinforce its growth it needs to reduce admin expenses and underperforming initiatives. Ars Technica reports that a large number of the staffers being let go are not a part of game development but areas such as publishing.

That having been said, Z2Live, a mobile game studio in Seattle has been effectively shut down as 78 employees lose their jobs.

As a matter of interest, net bookings for Activision Blizzard in Q4 2018 amounted to $2.84 billion while net bookings throughout the year came in at $7.26 billion.

The big earners for the firm were Call of Duty, Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy, Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush Friends Saga.

Moving forward those games will be the focus for the firm and given the reluctance to pursue new initiatives we doubt that any new games will be forthcoming aside from updates to the existing stable.

It’s worth remembering that Bungie recently parted ways with Activision Blizzard and one has to wonder whether the dev saw these cuts coming. It’s a matter of speculation at this point but one that has our minds rushing.

With all of this said it does make us sad to know that 775 passionate employees are now without a job and we can’t help but think that they’re a bit angry given that they performed better than they ever have, just not well enough for the suits that run the firm.

[Source – Activision Blizzard]

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