Early in 2019, Activision Blizzard dropped more than 800 employees, despite record-breaking revenue for the year previous. The company underwent a major consolidation and restructuring effort after the profits and losses “missed expectations”, which is just corporate speak for “we’re greedy and need to stud our golden parachutes with diamonds.” Don’t believe me? The final total for 2018 was $7.5 Billion in sales and $1.8 Billion profit.
And now Activision Blizzard just wants to dig the hole deeper and jump further into a PR grave. That’s because some people paid enough attention to notice that Blizzard had posted job offers for community managers. Specifically the company is now looking for community managers for its popular card game Hearthstone.
Hearthstone has been incredibly popular these last few years. With a dozen different expansions that introduced more and more cards and different mechanics to the CCG. The Rise of Shadows expansion just dropped in April, and will be followed by Saviors of Uldum this August. But for some reason, the company thought it was a good idea to let experienced community staff go during those aforementioned mass layoffs. And now with them hiring for those same positions within the team for the game, a lot of people are wondering why the developer just didn’t shuffle some folks around for the sake of the higher priority projects.
According to some sources, the Hearthstone CM team was left virtually non-existent in terms of staffing levels. This is made even worse by the fact that some people affected by these layoffs are still out of work. That’s a pretty bad look there Blizzard.
Blizzard may simply be hiring for a Community Manager position that continued to exist after the layoffs but saw the employee leave in the time since, which can be surprisingly common in the games industry. Both with the lack of job security and overall low morale, the games industry has a history of high turnover.
