After reporting a record year of $7.5 billion in net revenue, game publisher Activision Blizzard revealed this afternoon that it would lay off approximately 8% of its staff, or 775 employees.
“While our financial results for 2018 were the best in our history, we didn’t realize our full potential,” CEO Bobby Kotick said in the earnings report. “To help us reach our full potential, we have made a number of important leadership changes. These changes should enable us to achieve the many opportunities our industry affords us, especially with our powerful owned franchises, our strong commercial capabilities, our direct digital connections to hundreds of millions of players, and our extraordinarily talented employees.”
The game maker, one of the industry’s largest, says that it will increase development investment in its biggest franchises, such as Call of Duty, Candycrush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo, while “de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations” and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business (i.e. laying off workers). As part of its restructuring actions, the company expects to incur a pre-tax charge of approximately $150 million.
