Mass Layoffs at Blizzard and What It Might Mean For Future Games

Blizzard has worked hard to be a company that people have a certain loyalty to. While WoW has always remained my primary interest with them as a company, I've tried out Diablo, Starcraft, and other titles of theirs largely due to the sense of their commitment to quality.

Eleven years ago, Blizzard merged with Activision, and many worried this would mean the exact sort of thing we've seen recently, with as many as 800 people losing their jobs despite the fact that the company had record profits in the last fiscal year.

I don't pretend to know how to run a game development/publishing company, but that seems backward and does not do much to dispel the sense that there's a mercenary level of corporate greed at work here.

Blizzard's success of course ebbs and flows, and different titles have their days in the sun. My concern for their titles is of course based more in a critical approach rather than raw numbers. They stopped publishing subscriber numbers for WoW after they started to dip from their late-Wrath/early-Cataclysm high, but from a subjective point of view, I think that Legion was the best expansion they ever came out with. As a player, even if I find Battle for Azeroth a lackluster follow-up to Legion (which, to be fair, was a hell of a tough act to follow, and it's still a hell of a lot better than Warlords of Draenor) I have had faith that we'd continue to get interesting stuff that makes the game worth playing.

The staff cuts have been primarily in marketing, it appears, and other "non-developmental" roles. This is admittedly a fuzzy subject for an industry outsider to comment on. But I do think that the identity that Blizzard has built is largely due to the efforts of some very skilled marketers.

It also appears that much of the games' support staff is being cut as well, and that to me is a huge red flag.

One of the reasons for my loyalty with Blizzard has been their fantastic customer support. It might take a while, but when I've had issues with WoW, GMs have always been incredibly helpful and responsive and willing to stick with the problem until it is solved. Beyond the quality of the games, this is one of the things that has always given me a positive impression of Blizzard as a company.

I don't think they're going to be cancelling any of their major titles as a result of this, but I do really worry that one of gaming's legends is putting short-term profits ahead of long-term quality, and that's never a good strategy.

My heart goes out to the people who have lost their jobs. I know for many of them it was probably a dream to work for a company that has earned such good will from its fans, and getting canned for no good reason must feel like an intense betrayal.

This blog started as a WoW blog, and while it has diversified (largely as I've learned to obsess over other games) I still want WoW and Blizzard in general to be something I can root for and enjoy playing. Seeing stuff like this adds a bit of bitterness to that experience.