Does the publisher need money this much to cover the pay and the bonuses of Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard?

We previously wrote about how Activision Blizzard planned to shut down its offices in France, which made the employees go on a strike (as the publisher kept saying they will not do such a thing, only to announce the opposite…), which is quite an inhumane move in the middle of a global pandemic. A few years ago, the publisher laid off eight hundred employees, and now, they say that they require 2000 people to meet production demands. (And they’d get a low wage, as the new employees tend to not have much of experience, and as such, they’d not get paid that much.)

MCV reports that Activision Blizzard wants to fire a hundred employees in the Asia-Pacific region, resulting in office closures. The areas affected would be marketing, PR, publishing, customer care, and localisation. The reason? Activision Blizzard is moving non-development roles into an outsourcing setup, which they have been doing for a while, allegedly.

Then, Activision Blizzard responded to this, saying the number of layoffs is closer to thirty employees, nothing that localisation and customer support staff will not be impacted. „We’ve been exploring how we might best integrate our capabilities across the business and be efficient as we evolve to meet growth opportunities and stay competitive in the Asia Pacific. To that end, we have begun conversations with employees regarding a plan to centralize some roles across the region in our Sydney office. Decisions of this nature are never easy and supporting our employees through this process is our number one priority,” their statement reads.

If we talked about Starbreeze (which took a massive financial hit due to Overkill’s The Walking Dead flopping), or if Activision Blizzard was losing money, it’d make some sense, but – as essentially all the other publishers now – they are highly profitable at the moment. So why pull such a move in the middle of a pandemic? People have enough problems, and getting rid of them would be terrible for them, especially if they had nowhere else to go.

So there will be layoffs, no matter how we look at it. What bad timing.

Source: WCCFTech

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