Hearthstone Team Gets Hit With Layoffs

Hearthstone has been one of the most popular digital collectible card games. It’s a free-to-play title as well and easily accessible to players through mobile devices to the PC platform. Since this game launched in 2014, the gameplay experience has continued to thrive, with players logging in daily and picking up the various launch expansions. However, while the game is apparently doing well, several cuts have been made to the team behind the game project.

This news comes from VGC, who credits Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach. Apparently, there is a restructuring going on right now within Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone team. Several employees walked into work without notice being let go from the game development studio. One of the individuals to comment on the layoff was a Tools Engineer who noted that the team was recently shown just how well the game was doing in a recent team meeting. So it must have been quite a shock for some of the team to walk in and find their jobs were removed.

According to Ethan Gach, it looks like a total of ten people were impacted by this restructuring. A statement was also provided to Ethan from an Activision Blizzard spokesperson who stated that these roles were redundant and it was a small number of individuals that were affected by the decision to restructure the development team. We’re not given any insight into what the future holds for Hearthstone with this new move being made internally. At any rate, we’ll likely see Hearthstone continue to turn out new expansions and content for players to enjoy.

In other news for Activision Blizzard, it looks like they are one step closer to being purchased by Microsoft. It was a battle for Microsoft to acquire the company as they fought through different regulators to ensure this purchase wouldn’t harm the competition. However, one of the main regulators to stop this move was the CMA. Now, after answering their concerns, it looks like we are going to see an official approval announcement from the UK regulator soon. The Xbox Game Pass subscription service should also be boosted with several new games. The main reason behind CMA’s decision against the Activision Blizzard acquisition was due to fears Microsoft would become too dominant of a force for cloud gaming. Microsoft’s solution to this concern was to make a deal with Ubisoft, a company that is betting big on the future of cloud-streaming video games.