J Brack is a puppet. The CEO role disappeared with Morhaime. The man pulling the strings at Blizzard now is
Basically this. I get being disgusted by how large companies work, but people here are being too dramatic.
Isn't there a cultural difference there? I've heard stories of people being put in a corner with nothing to do, hoping they choose to resign eventually. The biggest thing is how many AAA games are there from Japan? I think most of the game development is in mobile or first party funded by Sony and Nintendo, so the publishers don't have as many huge bets and massive teams compared to the West, and the risk which comes from that.
It depends, honestly. It depends on what they're trying to accomplish. It's not irregular for things to run in the red while they're starting up. eSports stuff is definitely a growing thing.
Maybe to have more clarification about what the company is doing, how early they have to announce these lay-offs so that these workers, these human being with families have time to search for a new job without getting worried about pay.
You know large devs usually start as soon as small devs, right? It's a pretty basic progression.
They are getting severance and I haven't seen anything that would indicate this lay-off is immediate.
There's lots of reasons to lay people off. Roughly 50% of the team I had just joined at a major gaming company was laid off just 2 weeks after I started (I was not laid off) because the company had lowered the hiring bar when their strategy for a particular problem was different, then when the strategy changed and they decided to go a different route with how to handle the work, they did not want to keep people they had lowered the bar for on because it went against the cultural beliefs of the company.
"Blizzard" didn't join Activision. They were founded in 1991 and acquired in 1994 for $6.75M, then that parent company was acquired in 1996, then that parent company merged to form another company in 1997, then that division including Blizzard was acquired by another company in 1998, then also in 1998 that company was acquired by Vivendi, where Blizzard stayed until the Activision-Blizzard merger in 2008.
Japanese development/publishing community has already gone through periods of contraction and shed a lot of jobs and positions. There were probably quite a few mergers when companies like Sega/Sammy and Square/Enix merger.
People are getting told today that they are laid off as of today. Look up the tweets that are coming in.
Fucking disgusting post. You are so desensitized to people getting their lives fucked over by capitalism that it suddenly has to be "special" in order to be noteworthy? I do agree that singling out Activision Blizzard is missing the point but there should be calls for massive societal reform and severe jail time for any and all tax evasion, not calls for things like unionization being pointless.
Microsoft: *opens war chest, puls out giant net made of money, catches many*
