Blizzard Announces 600 Layoffs

Blizzard, the award-winning company behind World of Warcraft and Diablo, has today announced they'll be reducing their staff by 600 people. 90% of those (540, if you don't want to do the math) will come from non-gaming related areas of the company and the World of Warcraft staff will remain unaffected.

From the press release:

“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,” CEO, Mike Morhaime said. “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 this announcement, Blizzard are still looking to fill certain positions and said so in the press release announcing 600 fired staff.