Online games giant to shed 200 Cork jobs

Global online games giant Blizzard Entertainment is to cut 200 jobs from the almost 900-strong workforce at its European customer support centre in Cork.

Blizzard confirmed the Irish losses after announcing plans to axe about 600 jobs worldwide — mostly in customer service — after a global review.

The shock news comes just days after Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton announced 200 pharma jobs and 300 construction jobs in a €300m expansion of drugs giant Lilly’s Kinsale plant.

Blizzard is responsible for some of the world’s biggest-selling games, including blockbuster hits such as Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo.

Its World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, which launched in Dec 2010, sold over 3.3m copies worldwide during its first 24 hours of release and over 4.7m in its first month.

Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime explained the decision on an online forum yesterday.

“In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources,” he said.

“This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. After evaluating our current organisational needs, we determined that while some areas of our business had been operating at the right levels and could benefit from further growth, other areas had become overstaffed.

“As a result, we need to scale down some of our departments and part with some of our colleagues and friends here at Blizzard.”

Blizzard, founded in 1991, is one of the world’s largest developers of video and online games.

It established its European customer support centre at the Blackpool Retail Centre on Cork’s northside in 2007, with the expectation of creating 100 jobs by 2010. The workforce had almost doubled by 2009 as company profits soared.

A spokeswoman for the Cork centre said last night that the company will begin consulting with staff about who will be able to apply for voluntary redundancy.

“For those who are eventually impacted by this, we will help with finding new employment, including in Ireland, if that is their choice,” she said.

“We are providing a comprehensive outplacement support programme for our employees with the help of career transition specialists, Harmonics.”

The Cork office will continue to offer the same level of customer support in eight EU languages. The company plans to recruit Italian language specialists ahead of the launch later this year of a full Italian version of World of Warcraft.

Just last month, Blizzard were one of a number of gaming companies that attended the Games Ireland conference on the hunt for new staff ranging from game design artists to game product marketers.

At around the same time, the Government’s new jobs action plan identified digital games as a key area where Ireland could expand. The prediction was that job numbers in the sector could double to 2,500 in two years.