Bad news everyone. After Activision Blizzard announced in October that the office in Versailles, France with several hundred employees will be closed and the Dutch office in The Hague was also cut, there is now bitter news for employees at Activision Blizzard in the Pacific APAC. In an effort to consolidate parts of the staff in the Sydney office, around 100 more employees have been laid off, according to reports from MCVUK. These figures are based on a report from an anonymous source.
A spokesperson for Activision Blizzard has commented to MCVUK, saying, "We have been exploring how best to integrate our capabilities across the business and develop efficiently to take advantage of growth opportunities and remain competitive in the Asia Pacific region. To this end, we have begun discussions with employees about a plan to centralise some functions across the region in our Sydney office. Decisions of this nature are never easy, and supporting our employees through this process is our top priority."
Of course, as usual in redundancy situations, this sounds a bit wishy-washy to be honest. Customer support and localization teams are said to be unaffected by these plans, and the employees slated to leave for redundancy would be no more than 30. Whether you want to believe the words of the anonymous source or Activision Blizzard's official spokesperson, we'll leave that up to you.
At the very least, it looks like the company's bosses are continuing to work on reducing marketing, press relations, publishing, customer support, and localization teams within the company as much as possible. As mentioned in our community article, there are already no German community managers for WoW anymore - and other games haven't had them for quite some time either. The MCVUK quote from the anonymous source fits this like a glove: "Activision's part of the company doesn't believe in community management and fandom," the source said. "There is a belief that the games will sell themselves. People would rather give Beyonce millions of dollars to tweet about Call of Duty once than hire decent people." Bitter words. And there may even be a grain of truth in there.
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