Overwatch and Call Of Duty maker to cut 800 jobs
Video games publisher Activision Blizzard has announced it will lay off about 800 people, despite reporting record revenue in 2018. The company made $7.5bn (£5.8bn) last year, up from about $7bn in 2017. Its chief executive, Bobby Kotick, said the results were "the best in our history" but did not "realise our full potential".
[...] Most of the job losses would not be in game development departments, the company said. But many roles related to its e-sports business appear to have been cut. King's Seattle-based mobile game studio Z2Live will be closed entirely, with the loss of 78 jobs.
Activision's stock price had plunged in recent months. As part of the restructuring, the company will increase (by hiring?) the number of developers working on several of its franchises:
"The number of developers working on 'Call of Duty,' 'Candy Crush,' 'Overwatch,' 'Warcraft,' 'Hearthstone' and 'Diablo' in aggregate will increase approximately 20% over the course of 2019," Activision said in its release. "The company will fund this greater investment by de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business."
Also at CNBC and The Hollywood Reporter.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:22AM (4 children)
Sorry, c0lo, not sure how it is with the coding contractors and whatnot, but faculty, temporary, part-time, casual hire, faculty, have always been like this. There is a reason "tenure", or from the Latin "holding on", was instituted by more enlightened Universities. But for the most part, throughout my long history as a teacher, it has been touch and go, piece work, as it were, residuals from what students pay, and proportional at that. So it is only by luck that I have managed to scrape enough together in any given epoch to stay alive. Of course, current trends seem to be some of the worst in many millennia. Betsy deVos is one stupid bitch, with financial interest in destroying intellectual endeavors, completely. And Teresa May? May not? The British exercise in "accountability" has been a total attack of the Bruces. And of course, the rest of the EU is too afraid of controversy to allow an "intelligesia" to exist. Might go Marxist, or Janessariat.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday February 14 2019, @06:56AM (1 child)
I seem to remember that your predecessor, Plato, found it easier to start the first higher education institution in the Western civilization (at that time, it wasn't actually that western as the westerners like to boast today, but I digress, that's not the issue at hand).
Are you telling me that this is when all this "teachers scrapping just enough to stay alive" started?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 14 2019, @10:20AM
I blame the Sophist, Protagoras, who said, "pay as much as you think my teaching is worth." Thus, the ancient version of Humble Bundle was born. However, the real problem is not that students freeload, it is that administration skims, controls, and ultimately kills education. Aristotle said:
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:00PM (1 child)
Minor but important [yahoo.com] correction.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 14 2019, @11:10PM
Thank you. I stand corrected.