Top Story: A Historic Box Office Weekend: Five Of The Top Ten Films Are Animated Features

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.

Over the last year, the company’s shares have dropped over 36% as the company struggled with a thin slate of new titles and flat or declining user growth for key franchises such as Overwatch, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft. For further reading about the company’s corporate challenges and its restructuring efforts, see Wall Street Journal and Variety.

Still, it can’t be denied that the company just bragged about having its best year ever financially, and the company is cash-rich. Last month, it offered a $15 million signing bonus to Dennis Durkin, its new chief financial officer. In light of the company’s strong financials, news of mass layoffs is not going over well on social media. Here’s a sampling of the reactions this afternoon on Twitter:

Amid Amidi

Amid Amidi is Cartoon Brew's Publisher and Editor-at-large.

Latest News from Cartoon Brew