Gaming giant, Activision Publishers has fired off a reported five percent of its overall workforce, according to Kotaku, with some of these cuts coming to its corporate office, as well as the coveted Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, Spider-Man and Skylanders developing studio Beenox, and several other internal studios.
These layoffs came on the heel of yesterday’s fourth-quarter financial evaluation, which in turn resulted in “better-than-expected and record” results—despite knowing the fact that the latest Call of Duty release, Infinite Warfare, did not even remotely live up to the company’s expectations.
The source further indicated that roughly 20 employees from Infinity Ward were laid off, while a follow-up statement says that the Beenox Q&A department was completely shut down—a claim that was repeated separately by Gamasutra—although the studio itself was not exactly affected by the ordeal. Blizzard and the Major League Gaming were not impacted at all by these layoffs.
Activision issued a public statement effectively confirming the on going layoffs, though not the actual numbers.
Activision Publishing is realigning our resources to support our upcoming slate and adapt to the accelerating transition to digital, including opportunities for digital add-on content.
Activision has already made the claim to send Call of Duty “back to its roots” in the 2017 installment, with some fans now speculating that this would mean that the franchise will be returning to World War II or another historical war like Vietnam. A member of Sledgehammer Games dev team, that is in charge of the title, then tweeted on Friday that the 2017 CoD game will be set “on the ground,” leading to even more speculation that the well set boost jumps and wall runs introduced to the series with Advanced Warfare could finally be removed in favour of more traditional movement options like before.
