Blizzard axing 600 staff worldwide

Blizzard is to axe 600 jobs following an internal review. Around 90 per cent of these reductions will be unrelated to internal development, and the World of Warcraft development team is not affected.

"Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business," said CEO of Blizzard Mike Morhaime.

"Over the last several years, we've grown our organisation tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company.

"Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We're grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today's announcement, we're proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward."

Blizzard's World of Warcraft shed around 1.7 million subscribers between October and September last year, with total numbers as of November 2011 at 10.3 million players.

The publisher said that forthcoming releases, such as Diablo 3, would not be affected by the redundancies.