GAMES COMPANY BLIZZARD Entertainment is to seek around 200 redundancies from its customer support centre in Cork.

The company currently employs 880 people at a customer support centre at Blackpool in the city. Staff were briefed on the cuts yesterday afternoon.

Blizzard has said it will enter discussions with employees on the voluntary redundancy scheme, and said it will support employees to find new work, according to RTE.

The company has been in Cork since 2007.

Blizzard is cutting 600 jobs in total around the globe.  Blizzard said that around 90 per cent of the job cuts will come from departments which are “not related to game development”.

It said that it had conducted a review of its business and that the job cuts were necessary for the long-term health of the business.

The company was founded in 1994 and has grown rapidly creating critically and commercially successful games such as multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft which has more than 10 million subscribers.

Over seven companies collapsed each day in February >

Number on Live Register drops slightly in February >

ESB workers to vote on plan to shed 1,000 jobs by 2015 >

Making a difference

A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.

For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can make sure we can keep reliable, meaningful news open to everyone regardless of their ability to pay.

Support us Learn More