Today Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard announced during the quarterly meeting that they will be laying off 8% of their workforce (around 780 employees), this announcement happened on the same call where they reported record earnings for their 2018 fiscal year nearing almost 8 billion dollars in profits and they gave their newest CTO a small bonus of 15 million dollars.
This announcement has pit the whole Blizzard community against them, fans are mad because multiple fan favorite community managers where laid off without warnings on a year with massive gains, this is a huge blow to confidence in the company especially when the community as a whole desires more interacting and constant communication. Seems like they are committing one misstep after the other and I wouldn't be surprised if their stock continues to plunge, from an all time high 6 months ago @ around 83$ to today's 41$ and you guys thought only Bitcoin could lose value this fast.
Activision Blizzard has been losing a lot of confidence from their community in these last few years, especially with the mess that was Blizzcon 2018, that when their stock started to plummet but this actions seem like a punch in the face to their community and things will probably keep going south from here.
I've been really invested in Blizzard as a company since I was a kid and I started playing Warcraft but it's hard to deny that in the last few years things have been getting worse and worse and I'm afraid to say that I sort of saw this coming last year when Mike Morhaime stepped down from his spot as CEO and gave it to J. Allen Brack, a guy that has never been that popular among the community, especially for his bad treatment of fans on the conventions.
Even the corporate apologist that defended the Activision - Blizzard merger when it happened are starting to realize how bad this has turned out for Blizzard, this is really sad for me because I've been playing Blizzard games for as long as I can remember but I can no longer deny that the company is not what it used to be and they seem to be getting worse by the hour... I really hope that they survive all of this and continue making amazing games but I fear the worst and Activision may drag them down along, hopefully we are still not in a point of no return and the ship can be saved.