Blizzard Lays Off 600 Employees due to financial problems?

[HI5]

According to sticky message from Mike Morhaime on Blizzard Forum and other sources Blizzard is letting go 600 employees.
Exact reason of layoff's wasn't given but it seem pretty obvious that blizzard is not in the best financial situation because of upcoming WoW: Mists of Pandaria Expansion which provoked very mixed reactions.
Hundreds of thousands players already stop playing World of Warcraft and many more announced that they will stop playing on Mists of Pandaria Release, this clearly couldn't remain unnoticed by Blizzard - even if they won't admit it.

Everyone,

We announced today that we’re in the process of cutting a number of active positions, mostly non-development, throughout the company. I'm sure this announcement has sparked some questions from all of you, so I want take this opportunity to address those as best I can. Over the past several years, the company has grown rapidly and evolved to better serve you and the rest of our global community. Thanks to all of your support, we continue to serve by far the biggest subscription-based MMO community, as well as the most passionate eSports and online gaming communities, in the world.

In order to keep making epic game content while serving players effectively, we have to be smart about how we manage our resources. This means we sometimes have to make difficult decisions about how to best maintain the health of the company. We’re in the process of making some of those hard decisions now.

After evaluating our current organizational 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. I know that you all understand how difficult this type of situation can be for anyone who might be affected, so I want to assure you that we'll be offering each impacted employee a severance package and other benefits.

I also want to emphasize that we remain committed to shipping multiple games this year, and that our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today's announcement. We're continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects. We'll have exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding Diablo III's release date, and will soon be holding a private media event to showcase the latest work on Mists of Pandaria. It goes without saying that we're working hard to get all of these games in your hands as soon as possible.

You've all come to expect Blizzard to live up to our mission statement with every game, and deliver the most epic entertainment experiences ever. You can continue to expect that and nothing less from us as we move forward.

-Mike Morhaime

As you can see Blizzard want to assure us that layoff's won't hit development departments and it won't affect upcoming releases, but it's hard to believe that they are just letting go some "useless" employees for no bigger reason. More likely layoff's are caused by lost of WoW subscribers, and Blizzard financial problems.
Is that means Blizzard is falling apart? Probably no, even if WoW new expansion will turn out to be the biggest blizzard mistake, there is still HUGE fan base for Diablo and Starcraft games.
Either it will slow upcoming releases or not, bad decisions clearly struck Blizzard hard where it hurts the most - in their wallets.

[Confucius]

Sad for employees, but less GMs to get my bots now.

Still bad for all the people who were fired, hopefully they can find jobs at a new place like ArenaNet, having Blizzard on their resume will certainly help!

[Nyarly]

Blizzard financial problems.

I don't know if you can say that, they still earn millions every months. Not as much as they thought but still, they're doing great

I'm sad for GMs (even more as i wanted to send them my resume again this summer ..) but i'm really happy that there are enough players leaving or considering leaving to make them do some changes.
Hopefully it won't be only layoffs, but a new way of thinking for the future. Thinking about the player's experience rather than thinking about how to gain moar money.
Like less stuff given to everybody, more work in the lore, no more RealID privacy issues, no facebook integration, ...

[Duplicity]

They said non-developers.

Most likely a few Phone Support, Tech Support, and in game support.

They also may have laid off QA testers they don't need. For example: Diablo III (speculation. It might release soon?) SC2 expansion and etc.

[phantom325]

Blizzard doesn't have financial problems. Like Duplicity said, they are probably just laying off extra workers that aren't really benefiting them anyways

[KuRIoS]

it may go hand in hand with going F2P like in asia.. half of the wow subs are in asia, but they do not have monthly subs - they pay for their time played.. New Blizzard game 'to be free-to-play' | Game Development | News by Develop

[Duplicity]

it may go hand in hand with going F2P like in asia.. half of the wow subs are in asia, but they do not have monthly subs - they pay for their time played.. New Blizzard game 'to be free-to-play' | Game Development | News by Develop

AFIAK, the new F2P game is Blizzard DOTA. They announced it some where, read it on MMO-Champion.

[KuRIoS]

AFIAK, the new F2P game is Blizzard DOTA. They announced it some where, read it on MMO-Champion.

AFAIK, they are looking to do this for more than just one game