In 2020, Activision Blizzard closed its Versailles location. A former employee reports that in the previous months they had been looking for reasons to lay off employees. One such excuse for termination is said to have been the playing time in WoW.
Where does the information come from? The information comes from former Blizzard employees who were guests on the current episode 7 of the “Tobis Gaming Café” podcast. Benedikt Oehmen was at Blizzard for almost 17 years, most recently working in the localization team until 2022.
In the podcast, Oehmen reports on the beginning and end of the Blizzard branch in Versailles, France. The location closed in October 2020. The closure was seen at the time as a sign of Activision’s growing corporate influence.
Mass layoffs had already occurred in the months before the closure as part of a restructuring of Activision Blizzard.
You can find the whole episode on the Tobis Gaming Café website.
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Battlenet data was fatal for employees
What does the ex-employee report? As Oehmen reports, people in Versailles could already sense in 2019 that it was slowly coming to an end. At that time, people were apparently looking for excuses to fire employees.
This is how the data from the in-house Battlenet launcher was evaluated: Anyone who played too much during working hours was fired.
The Blizzard veteran remembers that it hit Oehmen’s manager at the time – one of the best he ever had. His boss was fired because of his playing time in World of Warcraft.
However, Oehmen explains that although his supervisor usually took a two-hour lunch break and played games during this time, he also regularly stayed in the office for two hours longer to have discussions with employees in the USA.
Due to the time difference, the manager had to stay at work longer anyway and probably took a longer break to do so. In general, he always did his job very well. But that didn’t matter to those responsible. Other employees were demoted.
If you played on Steam, you were lucky
This was behind it: According to Oehmen, the whole thing was preparation for a larger wave of layoffs, in which around a third of the workforce was ultimately laid off. The handling by Activision Blizzard felt “very dirty and wrong”.
According to Oehmen, this approach also led to many HR employees leaving the company voluntarily. As a result, employees from other areas had to be “promoted” to the human resources department in order to coordinate further layoffs.
Oehmen remembers that the “old Blizzard” also had rules about not gaming too much during working hours. At that time you were only taken aside for a short time.
Oehmen particularly regrets that the layoffs affected employees who “loved their own games too much”. Because Activision Blizzard only had access to Battlenet data. Anyone who played via Steam was at least safe in this respect.
Other former Blizzard employees have also reported questionable procedures when it came to layoffs. Jason T. Hall, now an indie developer and Twitch streamer, said in early 2024 that his time at Blizzard included some of the best and worst experiences of his career. At that time, psychological games were played with employees – whoever lost was fired.