As part of its quarterly earnings call to investors, Activision Blizzard has confirmed it will be laying off “approximately eight per cent” of staff.
Reports over the weekend suggested that the publisher was set to announce “hundreds” of layoffs this week, and today’s news offers further clarity on that figure. Eight per cent of Activision’s workforce, which equalled around 9600 employees in 2018, means that approximately 770 members of staff will be affected by job losses.
In today’s fourth-quarter 2018 earnings report, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick wrote that while the company’s financial results for 2018 “were the best in our history, we didn’t realise our full potential”. As a result, it will be increasing the size of development teams on key franchises – including Call of Duty, CandyCrush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo – by around 20 per cent, in order to “accelerate the pace and quality of content for their communities and [to support] a number of new product initiatives”.
