Activision Blizzard Layoffs Included 209 Employees From Blizzard

According a recently discovered report, 209 of the around 800 employees who were laid off as part of the Activision Blizzard restructuring worked on the Blizzard side of the gaming company.

As reported by Variety, records were obtained from California's Employment Development Department that stated that these 209 Blizzard layoffs impacted those around the U.S., including Irvine, Santa Monica, and Burbank in California, New York City, Austin (Texas), and Bloomington (Minnesota).

These employees were given 60 days of compensation and benefits and "none were represented by a union, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the state by Blizzard on Feb. 12."

The report indicated that the employees were given a severance package that may or may not have been in addition to the 60 days of compensation.

Blizzard's IT department saw the biggest hit with 41 employees being laid off, Marketing and Live Experiences each lost 29 employees, and a global insight department, publishing, quality assurance, mobile, marketing, customer service, finance, and Battle.Net also saw layoffs.

As for how Activision Blizzard decided who to layoff, the report claims the company "considered multiple factors when deciding who to layoff, including business needs, job skills, redundancy, job elimination, and restructuring needs."

The rest of the layoffs at Activision Blizzard haven't been spelled out as clearly, but we do know that King-Owned mobile game studio Z2Live was shut down, impacting its 78 employees. In addition, Vicarious Visions laid off "a dozen people," 15 people were laid off from Activision's Mexico City offices and Blizzard's Versailles office in France " will be losing 134 people.

These layoffs, which accounted for 8% of its around 9,900 full and part-time employees, will obviously have many ramifications for those affected and for Activision Blizzard, who understands that these moves could "negatively impact [its] business."

The layoffs arrived just ahead of Activision Blizzard's Q4 earnings call last month, in which the developer of such titles as Call of Duty and Overwatch cited "record net revenues."

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who wishes all the best for those impacted by these layoffs. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst.

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