Redundancies are a nasty business, but strict French labour laws require companies to negotiate good compensation for staff involved in mass layoffs. Bloomberg say the Versailles office handles things like marketing, customer support and localisation for ActiBliz’s games in Europe. The site’s sources claim that the company had originally planned to move half of the office to London, but that plan fell through due to Brexit and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. So, the decision to close it was made instead. “Over the past year we have been exploring how we might best integrate our capabilities across the business, enabling us to better leverage talent, expertise and scale as we adapt to the needs of a fast-paced, highly-competitive, digitally focused industry,” Activision Blizzard told Bloomberg. “In the context of our Versailles office, the management of Blizzard France has informed its employee representatives of a proposed project to reorganize its activities,” they told GamesIndustry.biz. “Supporting our employees through this process is our number one priority. We are working through various processes related to this and a CSE meeting is scheduled for October 13th and 14th.” This isn’t the first time the Versailles office will have been hit with layoffs. Last year, the company got rid of 134 of its 400 jobs, while Activision Blizzard was in the process of laying off around 800 employees across their business.
