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Activision Blizzard cuts nearly 800 jobs amid ‘record results in 2018’

Activision Blizzard cuts nearly 800 jobs amid ‘record results in 2018’

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Eight percent of the company’s staff has been laid off

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Activision Blizzard has announced that it’s laying off 8 percent of its employees — roughly 770 people — as part of the company “de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations.”

The news came on the heels of announcement of Activision Blizzard’s Q4 and 2018 earnings, where CEO Bobby Kotick gave the company’s “record results in 2018.” Kotick went on to comment that, “While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential.”

As such, Activision Blizzard says that it’ll be focusing more on its biggest franchises: Call of DutyCandy CrushOverwatchWarcraftHearthstone, and Diablo, with plans to increase developers across those titles by “approximately 20% over the course of 2019.” (Destiny, another one of Activision’s marquee titles, parted ways with the publisher in January and is now back in the hands of developer Bungie.)

On the flip side, Activision Blizzard said that it’ll fund those increases “by de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business,” resulting in the nearly 800 laid off employees.

According to Variety, the job cuts will be coming from support staff as Activision Blizzard reworks some of its commercial and marketing teams. A Kotaku report elaborates that employees were cut across most of the company, noting that “layoffs have affected Activision, Blizzard, King, and some of Activision’s studios, including High Moon,” although Blizzard itself largely saw cuts only to “non-game-development departments.”