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.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever actually been a software developer at a place where someone you worked with was fired on a regular basis?

Have you ever been a team manager where you'd get an email from the higher-ups saying "give me someone's head" on a regular basis?