<story><title>Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers</title><url>http://www.gamespot.com/news/blizzard-laying-off-600-6360584</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>angrycoder</author><text>The key is the last line of the press release.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      The accounting charges associated with Blizzard&apos;s reduction in workforce are not anticipated to be material to Activision Blizzard, Inc. and were included in the 2012 financial outlook that was provided on February 9, 2012.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I worked at 2 BigCo&apos;s while they went through layoff periods. What  people don&apos;t know unless they&apos;ve worked at a BigCo is that a significant number of its employees are interchangable or in some cases just dead weight. For every department of 10-20 people, there are 2 or 3 that have the bulk of the knowledge and do the majority of the work.&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even  if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person.&lt;p&gt;Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.</text></comment>
<story><title>Blizzard Lays Off 600, Including About 60 Developers</title><url>http://www.gamespot.com/news/blizzard-laying-off-600-6360584</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I find these sorts of events fascinating. Blizzard does have quite the money machine with WoW. Even a paltry 10.2M subscribers, assuming the adjusted monthly income per subscriber is $10 that is $102M/month in revenue from that franchise.&lt;p&gt;The interesting bit is that to make that count they really need a good operational plan with respect to their infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;I got a peek at their infrastructure early on because the company where I worked (Netapp) was trying to sell them filers for their Oracle instances which were running the game. And the game is essentially a ginormous database being updated constantly based on player actions. What we saw was a very complex (and expensive) infrastructure which was clearly built expediently. I would think that over time they would have been working to refine this to something more manageable (and cost effective).&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, there is a &apos;killer&apos; persistent world infrastructure architecture for this sort of traffic. Would be a good research topic for a thesis I suspect.</text></comment>