The accounting charges associated with Blizzard's reduction in workforce are not anticipated to be material to Activision Blizzard, Inc. and were included in the 2012 financial outlook that was provided on February 9, 2012.
I worked at 2 BigCo's while they went through layoff periods. What people don't know unless they've worked at a BigCo is that a significant number of its employees are interchangable or in some cases just dead weight. For every department of 10-20 people, there are 2 or 3 that have the bulk of the knowledge and do the majority of the work.
There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person.
Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.
I personally worked with two of the people who were layed off today, and am friends of friends with others. This isn't a 85% unsurprising day by any means, it's a serious cut back of the support department (worldwide) because management built up too much capacity while the GMs built tools that allowed serious increases in productivity, the biggest of which was essentially automating the process of recovering hacked accounts (I can't begin to describe how many people have their WoW accounts hacked, and recovery used to take hours in the early days).
Not to say people aren't upset. I'm sure they are. But what you're saying is people are surprised to be laid off when it's clear they were no longer necessary? If how things were done changed significantly (needing far fewer people) isn't that going to obviously lead to layoffs? Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.
I was saying that these weren't people that were just convenient to let go in one batch. It isn't that they were fire-able material, as angrycoder suggests is often the case, in this case the people who I worked with were great team members, knowledgeable and passionate about working for Blizzard. Absolute assets. That there were too many people in the department isn't surprising, or that layoffs were used to correct the overstaffing. I just suggested that from what and who I know, the "Blizzard 600" wasn't the situation angrycoder described, except for some aspects like the timing.
I'm not saying they did it alone, or quickly, but at some point you become good enough at reading WoW logs that you realize you can build programs that could interpret them for you and do a lot of the difficult work of finding out what happened to items the player started with (and which items were actually gained during the hack, as when a character is used for farming until locked out) and so you write a simple script. You show your manager, it gets approved, and now all top tier support staff is able to be more efficient at the job that takes them the most time. Iterate through this process with different GMs writing different tools, some help from the WoW dev team and other teams so that different log files are created which are easier to interpret. I can't give specific inside information, but I'll say it used to take hours to restore a hacked account but last week my wife's account was somehow compromised (we think when we used an Internet cafe to play, or possibly due to a shared password—either way, it took a former account investigator seeing his wife hacked before finally adding Phone Secure to protect himself) and she had an in-game mail with her lost stuff within an hour of reporting the hack.
So yes, the tool building was voluntary (eventually sanctioned and encouraged, even of it was unofficial at first) and that directly led to an increase in productivity (supply) which has come to a head with demand decreasing simultaneously (referring both to drops in subscription levels and, more importantly, even the long tail of WoW players being incentivized and easily able to add forms of multi-factor authentication to protect their accounts and prevent the compromises in the first place). It would be cynical to see any of these advancements (except the lower subscription numbers, of course) as bad things, but also naïve to ignore that they're a large reason why the department finds themselves in a position where they're starving for work (mostly a guess on my part, based on response times to in-game support requests, coupled with interpretations of the layoff and Blizzard's official statement about it, as well as knowledge of who I knew that was affected and who I knew that wasn't).
You seem to be missing the point - Blizzard is running out of steam, and the layoffs reflect this fact. Google has an insane number of people who are more or less building castles in the sky, and it essentially never occurs to anyone that there will be mass layoffs. It is hard to get fired. Google does this because they have the $$$ and are wildly imperialistic.
This means Blizzard management is thinking that they're running out of ideas for developing new areas.
This is the beginning of the end for Blizzard, which is fine with me - WoW is basically electronic crack as far as I'm concerned. I know that's narrow, but they're public enemy #1 in terms of habit-forming online behavior.
This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe.
WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat.
It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat.
As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial.
Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry.
Customer service is emerging from a major generational change at Blizzard. Understand that Blizzard went very quickly from a company of mostly developers to a company whose headcount was overwhelmingly focused on customer support. They had (before these layoffs) about 3,000 customer service employees worldwide. They hired a huge, huge amount of people, put together systems and tools as fast as they could, yet even so have only in the last few years been able to get their head above water. There was a lot of inefficiency, bad solutions, poor procedures and lack of automation. Todd Pawlowski was hired from Virgin America two and a half years ago to be Blizzard's VP of customer service and has been directing a huge amount of much-needed change. This is basically the latest step in Blizzard getting their act together and providing great customer service efficiently. It sucks for all the GMs that got laid off, though.
As for development, I think this doesn't indicate a whole lot, as you suggested. Maybe Cinematics is wrapping their work for Diablo 3, but the "development-related" jobs could very well be all QA positions. There is more than enough work in development for Blizzard to keep recruiting aggressively at GDC next week. The speculation elsewhere about this meaning something is changing for their future projects is far-out and wrong.
It is always funny reading the hysterics of public perception when you are on the inside, isn't it? You are spot on though. These types of layoffs are the norm in gaming. I can't think of a single game shop that doesn't do semi frequent operational cuts (aka "trimming the fat") for the last 10-15 years. I don't know why this is always a shock to the community.
They've apparently recently automated a big chunk of their customer support [1], which (along with the decrease in WoW subscribers) would probably explain big cuts to the customer service department.
"For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer."
I've been in a situation where the company was laying people off incrementally over the span of 18 months. I hated going to work, didn't give a shit about the company, and I was not unique or alone in that opinion. If you have to lay people off, do it as quickly and with as much dignity as possible.
Morale wise it's probably better to do it in one large chunk instead of smaller servings where people are wondering if they are going to get cut in the next round.
But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one? Layoffs are bad for morale regardless of how it is handled. I've been through both sides of a layoff and it wasn't fun either way.
> But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one?
You can at a minimum guess from the size. Take for example this cut - roughly cutting 600 from 6-7000 means cutting 10%. Unless Blizzard is seriously inefficient, another such cut of 10+% would start doing major damage to operations. Hence, you know there probably won't be such a cut.
A big reason is that it's much easier to do from a legal perspective. Letting go of low performing people in a layoff is way easier than going through all the hoops of giving them warnings, putting them on probation, etc.
Also, a slow trickle of firings is just horrible for everyone. You have no idea if you are next, etc. A big layoff followed by a company meeting of "hey, we did a layoff because of X. There will be no additional layoffs as long as we hit our current goals."
I find these sorts of events fascinating. Blizzard does have quite the money machine with WoW. Even a paltry 10.2M subscribers, assuming the adjusted monthly income per subscriber is $10 that is $102M/month in revenue from that franchise.
The interesting bit is that to make that count they really need a good operational plan with respect to their infrastructure.
I got a peek at their infrastructure early on because the company where I worked (Netapp) was trying to sell them filers for their Oracle instances which were running the game. And the game is essentially a ginormous database being updated constantly based on player actions. What we saw was a very complex (and expensive) infrastructure which was clearly built expediently. I would think that over time they would have been working to refine this to something more manageable (and cost effective).
Ultimately, there is a 'killer' persistent world infrastructure architecture for this sort of traffic. Would be a good research topic for a thesis I suspect.
You forgot to include these services: character name changes, character race changes, character transfers, guild transfers, vanity pets and mounts. I'm not proud to say that I have spent money on all of these except the guild transfer service.
That is true, although as mentioned above the Chinese get their own deal. And Blizzard did get into the 'real gold for virtual goods market' which is quite large. Teasing apart the revenue per subscriber from their reports, talks, and sometimes off hand remarks is very challenging. There is the 'max' rate of $15/month, there are the 'free til level 20' players, there are the 'Yearly Pass' types, and of course there are the pay per hour guys in China and elsewhere in southeast Asia.
So my guesstimate at $10 per was a 'blended' rate. Pessimists seem to put it closer to $7, not sure why though.
That depends on who you consider their competitors. WoW worldwide is about 50% of the MMORPG market. It will be interesting to see how SWTOR fares in that space. Almost up to 2M subs already,
However if you consider the larger online gaming market I would consider WoW's main competitors the likes of Zynga. Farmville alone has 28.4M monthly active users.
I'm not sure I would consider WoW (a game with a monthly subscription and a 20+ GB client) to be a direct competitor with Farmville (a free-to-play game with a browser-based client). I suspect that they appeal to very different audiences.
About 5 million of those people are in Asia, where they're paying less money.
Also, in China for example, Blizzard licenced WOW to some other company (The9 ?). I'd be interested to know how much money Blizzard gets from WOW china.
Here's a very old (2005) link with some interesting financials.
I know it's naive, but it wasn't until I read this article that I started to think of the WoW programmers as human beings, as opposed to some universal geometric constant about the WoW universe.
I would like to see a documentary filmed inside of the WoW studio, if it's at all possible. Like, it could be really Serious Business, which would be hilarious, or it could be a more relaxed-artists type of story, which could be a fun romp. And maybe we get to see a sysadmin saying, "those are the Legacy Systems, they're from the Early Days, basically the entire World of Warcraft is held together with duct tape and a prayer." It would be great, man.
I assume that if Blizz kept 90% of its employees it likely kept most or all of the employees that would otherwise do kickass startups. If it didn't, then there is something very wrong with its layoff process!
Red 5 Studios is beta testing their AAA title Firefall right now. Many ex-blizzard folks (WoW Lead Mark Kern, etc.) are at the core of Red 5 and it's rumored that Blizzard's big unannounced MMO project Titan may share some of the core gameplay elements of Firefall ("skill based" TF2 style gameplay with MMO persistent world effects).
Trine was a fun little fantasy arcade scroller. Side to side action. A platformer.
Torchlight is a dungeon crawler in the vein of diablo. Lots of equipment dropping, items to get, etc, as opposed to the more platformer-style of Trine.
Very, very different games that happen to be set in the same fantasy genre.
Torchlight is a highly overrated Diablo 1 clone. The game has barely any story. The side quest system literally repeats "Kill the monster on level 5" "Kill the monster on level 10" "Kill the monster on level 15" etc.
The game has some okay graphics and the loot system is decent. If you enjoy looting corpses for a slightly upgraded item over and over in a noxiously repetitive manner then I say go for it.
Five people in my office bough the game. I played it on very hard and beat it. I was the only person to reach the end despite everyone else playing on normal difficulty.
I beat the game out of spite. I never felt so angry at a game before but my sheer hatred of it drove me to finish.
I guarantee most positive reviews come from people who did not finish the game. It's just not fun after the first 10, 20, 30, 40, infinite floors in the same dungeon.
I enjoyed it a lot. Sure it's not a AAA title - but it's good, mindless fun. Especially given its extremely appealing price point. (And, yes, I haven't finished it.)
Only to a point, if someone is good enough a smart company will reshuffle someone truly exceptional into another part of the company. Though one would have to be REALLY stand out in such a large company to get that treatment.
I think you're right -- I don't think this is more than a blip on the radar. However, when layoffs start happening, others start to think about leaving too, so it's far more than 60 developers in the end.
Not really sure what to make of this…been a Blizzard fan since ToD, saw Blizz growing, merging, corporated, massive growth…
3 Major Projects in the Pipeline, 1 Untitled Project, and it lays off 600 people? It's a money printing machine with it's stranglehold on subscription based MMO (as opposed to freemium), I'd hate to think they're laying off people to appease the shareholders and maximize profit.
Maybe they have been successful year after year and there are a some people that should have been let go or became redundant over the years and this partially being used to clean house? Seen it plenty of times before and wouldn't be surprised.
Technically, it's 2 major projects: Diablo 3 and the new MMO Titan.
Starcraft 2 and WoW are in more of a maintenance cycle with the expansions coming out this year. Neither probably need as many developers as the new projects at this point.
The layoffs are probably due to WoW losing subscriptions over the last few years, and Diablo 3 nearing completion. The majority of the 540 non-developer positions are probably level 1 support or low level IT related positions because they don't need as much support personnel. The developer positions are most likely contract employees for Diablo 3 that aren't getting their contracts renewed.
I suppose I could easily see many of these coming from support as that department has been running more an more like a separate entity since Blizzard more or less moved support to Austin, TX from Irvine (keeping only a small, but eventually growing staff around in Irvine). With support wait times dropping as much as they have, it seems they would have reached a point where efficiencies and lower subscriptions in the US could mean making the hard decision to reduce support staff. UPDATE: I know one of those affected, and he was a trailer in the support staff, and one of the best guys around who really fit the company culture. He knew everything there was to know about WoW, and was constantly learning so he could make sure that our new hires, some of whom had never played the game, could learn all there was to know. Guys like him were what made the support staff special at Blizzard, even as things became more corporate and removed from the "cool" entertainment side of the business.
Testers are technically development, so some of the "60 development staff" may have been from that department, but they tend to be very overworked (I'm not sure they would consider that to be the same thing as understaffed) so unless they realized there is no way they will have new products nearing completion for a good long time I find it hard to imagine this is testers.
I'm not sure that the Diablo team really uses contracted developers rather than proper employees. It doesn't feel like the Blizzard way of doing things where developers have a very low churn and company loyalty is well rewarded.
All guesses and speculation on my part. I was shocked to see this news because it isn't something the Blizzard I know would have done except as a last resort, and it's hard to imagine the company being near any "last resort" situations—the worst case scenario right now seems to be lower profit sharing for the higher ups, and I've never seen any of those guys as in it for the money rather live of the games. I know the company line at Blizzard is that Activision has no control or say in operations. I hope that's still the case, but this move, lacking any specific details, does smell like Activision all the way.
SC2 and WoW expansions are still major, MAJOR projects, believe me. Calling it just maintenance really does a disservice to the amount of work that goes into these things. For Blizzard, this applies doubly so. I expect that Heart of the Swarm is a bigger project that most studios can dream of, in all manners - technology, art and design, production, distribution, marketing, and all the other attendant features that go with modern game development.
Not to mention the sick cinematics that Blizzard is renowned for. Definitely not 'maintenance' work.
Patches for WoW – maybe – but expansions are huge effort!
Not to mention Blizzard aim for global simultaneous release for its games whenever it can. (Asia used to lag behind WoW's expansion up to a whole year compared to NA/Europe) Can't imagine the effort and coordination required for that task.
I'm not arguing that the WoW and SC2 expansions not major projects.
I'm saying that compared to the new projects(D3 and Titan), the overall personnel allocation is smaller for Heart of the Swarm and Mists of Pandaria.
The development effort on those isn't on a new codebase(unlike D3 or Titan). They're adding new features and reworking game systems in the expansions(especially with the WoW expansion, where they're completely rewriting basically every class), but the overall effort required to complete those isn't nearly as much as what they need for the new MMO.
Oh sure, the new MMO will definitely be their biggest current project, and D3 is a little bigger than HotS, but probably not by as much as you think.
In fact, when you've got a game as big as WoW, making sure that everything you add plays well with all the existing pieces is a mammoth undertaking - it would probably be easier if it was a new game! As you pointed out, these aren't simple 'Here's 4 new areas with some new enemy models expansions, these are major reworkings of large game features.
Although I've never worked on an expansion, from all the games I have worked on those kinds of things are definitely not simple.
The spin in the article was that this was just a routine culling of the employee base.
And to be fair, an ideally managed company would actually have this happen every once in a while. A company like Blizz that has no problems hiring really should drop the bottom 10% of employees periodically and find replacements if needed. I doubt that's the real motivator here, but cutting 10% of employees isn't a bad thing at all as long as the people were picked properly.
I see it a little differently, I wouldn't feel good about keeping people around doing nothing of worth for the company. I guess they could have thought of other projects for them but that could put stress on other parts of the company. At least some of these people can now work for companies that do need them.
It might be because I never want to work for a company that thinks of me as dead weight. It wouldn't be a good environment to work in.
In this case the shareholders outside the multi-layered conglomerate are fairly distant, so I'd guess internal bean-counting is a more proximal pressure on Blizzard. They're owned by a holding company, Activision Blizzard, which is public, but has the majority of its shares owned by yet another holding company, Vivendi SA. So Vivendi's shareholders are the main ultimate shareholders, but those individuals control Blizzard in only a very convoluted and indirect way.
I would guess that you might see different kinds of decisions from an independent Blizzard, even if it were public (though it would also have more risks in that case).
The company's massively popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game has struggled in the past year, slipping to 10.2 million subscribers through the end of December.
I'm not sure "struggled" is the word they were looking for there.
If you have a look at how player numbers have declined for any other mmo, their numbers are amazing. Can't forget that WoW come out in 2004, the life span of most games is measured in months.
The game doesn't hold people's interest indefinitely, even of it is a lot longer than most games and probably most people who would want to try the game already have. Also competition is way higher than it was in 2004.
I imagine the implied turn of phrase was actually "struggled to make the numbers". As TheCapn pointed out, an unaccounted for 20% drop in plans is bound to shake things up a little.
Well, you can only play a game for so long before getting tired of it. Sure, it's a huge world. But every world dies at one point, and WoW is no different.
they will come back eventually. the last expansion came out in late 2010 and the next is due this fall(not exactly sure). thats the way wow works. people get fed up afeter some time without enw content and then rush back when theres something new.
"scary" depends on your perspective. The way I look at it, the fact that they still have ~10 million customers for WoW is damn near a miracle -- this is a game that came out in 2004!
Surely they know nothing lasts forever, which is why they are working on that other MMO. I have to believe they are smart enough there that this eventual dropoff was too expected to be "scary".
Also, it isn't like WoW is the only thing they have going on. Starcraft 2 was a big hit, and Diablo 3 likely will be too.
Actually Starcraft 2 failed in its target group: South Korea, the original is still king in The Land of The Morning Calm. Blizzard screwed themselves over with the requirement of being online to play.
The original and Warcraft 3 are still very heavily played in the ubiquitous PC방 (an internet cafe but darker, allows smoking, 24 hour and focused on gaming). Recently, Starcraft 2 is getting even less love from Koreans because Blizzard either opened up the login process or merged servers which has allowed far more Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese players onto the servers (which is affecting pings and causing more games to lag out). I saw one other guy in a 300 seat PC방 playing Starcraft 2 while I saw about 50% of people playing Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3.
Those 10% are related to game development, but that doesn't mean they're developers. I would guess that it's more likely to be slightly more "disposable" roles like testers.
It still sucks though. It seemed like Blizzard was just printing money.
They're presumably winding down some parts of Diablo 3 development and maybe even Heart of the Swarm, so it could just be that they don't expect to be doing as much in the near future rather than simple cost-cutting.
I was under the impression that this sort of churn happened at all game dev companies when projects were nearing completion. Typically they are roles like QA, writers, and designers that may move to other projects or not.
This seems like an appropriate enough place to put this: The Diablo 3 beta? Not that good. I put thousands of hours into D1 and D2 but have zero desire to keep playing the D3 beta.
That's not really very surprising. You probably wouldn't have played D2 for very long if it was only normal difficulty, and only the section before Blood Raven.
Personally I quite enjoyed the beta, a lot more than I enjoyed the same period of the D2 game. I'm anticipate spending many, many hours enjoying D3.
It's not even the length or difficulty, I just didn't feel motivated to get through it. Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.
In a game that is so progression based, knowing that all the power you accumulate will go to no useful end can be a real motivation killer. The point of Diablo games has always been to get nice stuff so you can murder progressively more difficult enemies. When there isn't going to be a progressively more difficult enemy, why get nice stuff?
I didn't have any problem with the pacing, somewhat agree on the problem of corridor level design, and again I had no problem with the art style. But some of that is a taste issue where our priorities just don't align.
Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.
Blizzard CM Bashiok basically came out last week and said don't expect too much of Diablo 3, keep your expectations low and you'll be pleasantly surprised but if you're expectations are too high you might be disappointed.
Major buzzkill for a lot of people but the handwriting was on the wall with the release delays, the annual pass giveaway, word of mouth on the beta, etc.
The reference to my time spent with D1/D2 was to make the point that I like Diablo. I've put about 2 hours with the D3 beta and had to force myself to finish it.
I was in the D2 beta back in the day, and I had a similar feeling I did now in the D3 beta. It was kind of tiring that the best thing that could be done in the game was killing the countess I think it was (fairly early in act 1) and getting the best low level items and using the first couple tiers of skills. I think there was even less to do in that one, even. Both games are definitely fun in the beta, but lacking something. I think D3 will be pretty fun when it's actually released and we can do everything in the game.
Damn, I hate hearing about layoffs. I work in a close-knit team of developers and testers, where each of one us is an important contributor to our company's goal, and it impacts our productivity tremendously when someone leaves.
Maybe I'm naive, but I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep a fellow teammate from being laid off.
I'm sure not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, and there must be some legal mumbo jumbo out there that prevents this from happening... Anyways, I'm sure those laid off developers are talented, and hope they'll rebound quickly to a greater opportunity.
There was a time where a company I worked for was having to downsize for a second time. They were planning to keep me on, but cancel the software project I'd been leading.
I talked them into letting me the severance package and I went looking around elsewhere. I relocated for a better salary in a bigger city and the company I left was able to retain a couple of other staff (including a single mom!)
I don't want to make it sound like I was more noble than I really was -- it was the right move for me at the time.
I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and
possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single
guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep
a fellow teammate from being laid off.
Assuming the company isn't really hurting for cash you lay off people that don't contribute more than what they cost.
You can either let them go or I guess cut their salaries, but cutting someone else's salary doesn't really solve the problem that you're paying someone more than what you're getting from them.
This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Blizzard took on millions of new customers fast, so they went on a hiring spree for support staff. 5+ years ago it was not unusual to take 2-3 days and even over a week to get an issue resolved. Now even more than 12 hours is a busy day. I'm sure they have streamlined their support systems behind the scenes and just don't require as many employees, even if they kept their peek subscriber levels.
(Diablo 3 has already deviated from that, of course) However, even if the cuts are not going to cause schedule changes, that doesn't mean they do not reflect scope changes.
It is ironic that the same big companies who are laying off hundreds of people, actually are hiring constantly - they have hundreds of open job postings, even with the similar titles.
This is interesting, I knew one of their main sources of revenue (World of Warcraft) wasn't doing as hot, but still had over 10million people, which at 15$ a month subscription, is nothing to scoff at. The 60 developers is the most interesting, they have a lot of in the queue for them (D3, Starcraft 2: expansion, and Titan (their next MMO), Im guessing they either weren't pulling their weight or this has something to do with Diablo 3 being almost complete.
I believe less than half the 10 million pay the $15 a month typically charged in North America. Many accounts in China are linked to internet cafes, which charge peanuts by the hour to their customers.
Still, the 4 million or so North American and European monthly accounts still makes it huge.
I wouldn't be so sure. First off, they list 10.2M as the current subscriber base, taken times a conservative estimate of $13/mo (the every 3 months plan, IIRC) and that's over one and a half billion dollars a year. Second, they are rumored have a new MMO in the pipeline - suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket. I think that, on the contrary, the era of Blizzard printing money is still going strong.
I don't know if $13 is conservative. $9/mo is the most expensive plan available to me. Presumably in places like China people pay by the hour and therefore way less than that.
suppose everyone that ever tried WoW returns to dip into that bucket
Not a reasonable way to estimate potential demand.
Maybe something closer to "Some percentage of established MMO gamers who now play WoW or Star Wars Online will try it according to how appealing it looks and how well it's marketed and priced."
I think I've met people who've committed to do that, but for every one of them I've probably met many more who just got bored with it or wandered off to another game.
Sure not claiming it's a majority, but I could imagine it being 5-10%, which is still enough people to invalidate the original argument of "they'll get everyone who tried WoW" back.
There is a lot of hassle with firing a single employee at a BigCo, even if that person contributes very little, is a detriment to the team, or is abusing corporate policy. There is however an upside to getting rid of a bunch of people at once, especially when it is around the time of the anual report, and it mitigates a lot of the downsides you have when firing just one person.
Except in the cases where an entire department was eliminated, I would say about 85% of the people who were let go during a large layoff were not really a surprise.