THE BUZZ: World of Warcraft developer Blizzard has announced that around 600 employees have been made redundant.

It added that around 90% of these were ”not related to game development” and that the World of Warcraft team is unaffected.

“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business,” said CEO Mike Morhaime. ”Over the last several years, we’ve grown our organisation tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we’ve also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company.

“Knowing that, it still does not make letting go of some of our team members any easier. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the people impacted by today’s announcement, we’re proud of the contributions they made here at Blizzard, and we wish them well as they move forward,” he added.

EGM’s TAKE: While it’s always sad to see people out of a job it’s good news for fans that only a small percentage of the redundancies were actual game development staff. This may simply be an ebb and flow of staff levels more than for financial reasons, with Diablo 3 and the next World of Warcraft expansion still a way off, there’s no real need for large amounts of support staff. Expect the staff levels to increase again once these titles release.