Last week's report of forthcoming layoffs at Activision-Blizzard have unfortunately today been confirmed.

Ahead of this afternoon's Activision-Blizzard earnings call, the news was handed down to the staff at Blizzard via a letter from company president J. Allen Brack. Kotaku was able to obtain a copy of the letter which included the following statement from Brack:

“Over the last few years, many of our non-development teams expanded to support various needs. Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I’m sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today. In our regional offices, we anticipate similar evaluations, subject to local requirements.”

These layoffs are the result of Activision-Blizzard missing out on its projections for the 2018 year. Despite boasting successes across the board and being an overall financially positive year for the publishing giant, sales for games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 fell off much quicker this year than expected and ended up resulting with lower-than-expected lines.

During the earnings call itself, it was confirmed that roughly 8% of the staff across Activision-Blizzard will be affected by these layoffs, which will result is somewhere around 800 lost jobs. Many of these positions are expected to stem from non-development pipelines and will deal more with the company's publishing and esports wings. Activision-Blizzard as a whole will also drastically be restructuring throughout 2019 to more appropriately prepare itself for the future.

Perhaps the lone positive in all of this terrible news is that Activision-Blizzard has confirmed that the employees affected here will be receiving severance packages. On the Blizzard side specifically, Kotaku also reports that profit-sharing bonuses will also be handed out.

This entire situation has been a sad one to see play out throughout today although it likely doesn't come as a surprise after some of the recent executive changes and other shakeups that have transpired at Activision-Blizzard over the past few months.

Our absolute best goes out to all of those affected by today's layoffs.