Games giant Activision Blizzard has revealed that 600 technology jobs are to go at Blizzard Entertainment. This will affect 200 workers at Blizzard’s Cork operations.
The company behind the game World of Warcraft said 90pc of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development. In particular, the World of Warcraft development team will not be affected.
The company is seeking 200 redundancies in Cork, where it employs close to 900 people.
“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business,” CEO Mike Morhaime said.
“Over the last several years, we’ve grown our organisation 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,” Morhaime said.
The company said it is aggressively beta testing for a new game, World of Warcraft: Mists of Padaria and said it is still seeking to recruit software developers.
