Activision Blizzard has just announced that 2018 has financially been one of the best years for the company on record. The obvious response, of course, is for them to fire hundreds of employees due to their positions becoming redundant.
Activision Blizzard firings come with citations of streamlining and restructuring the company, and are likely spurred by the fact that a substantial number of previously active projects are no longer ongoing (for example, Destiny 2).
Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said that "currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization." He also promised severance packages, continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance to those who've lost their jobs.
"There’s no way to make this transition easy for impacted employees, but we are doing what we can to support our colleagues," said Brack.
On the Activision side of things, a more sobering announcement was made to investors: "While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential," said Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. "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."
The silver lining here is that at least there are severance packages prepared, which means that the former Acti-Blizz employees aren't being left out in the proverbial rain.
