Despite a massive hiring spree in recent years, Blizzard has announced plans to eliminate 600 jobs from their global workforce.  The company currently has over 4000 employees worldwide, and is continuing to hire developers.  The majority of the cuts are most likely being made in the areas of customer support, a byproduct of the decline of their well-known MMORPG World of Warcraft.

During this announcement, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime commented:

Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business. Over the last several years, we’ve grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we’ve also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company. Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today’s announcement, we’re proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward.

Despite recent shortcomings with World of Warcraft and their decision to withdraw from BlizzCon, the “Gamer God” company is still going strong.  Representatives stated that although some of the job cuts will be in the development area, the company’s publishing schedule should not be affected.  Hopefully this includes the release of the next installment of their popular Diablo series, already delayed to an unspecified Quarter 2 launch.

Source:  www.shacknews.com