On January 25 2014 13:09 Slasher wrote: Ting has now confirmed to me he will indeed be leaving Blizzard, as there as relocation requests for a majority of the SF team to move to Irvine.
Multiple anonymous sources close to the situation confirmed early this morning that a large portion of the Blizzard Entertainment employees operating out Blizzard's San Francisco office have been laid off. This includes many of the former IGN Pro League team that came on board in April of last year when the league's technology and assets were acquired by the developer. At the time of the acquisition GameSpot reported that a total of twenty-three employees had come over from IPL.
The most well known of those laid off include former General Manager and Senior Vice President, eSports at IGN Entertainment David Ting and Kevin Knocke, who had held multiple positions at IGN eSports over the course of his two year stint at IGN. Ting had been working as Head of Online Publishing for Blizzard while Knocke worked as Manager of Online Broadcasting.
NASL, hire Kevin Knocke! Always one of the most underrated casters IMO. Now that OGN is out of SC2 also I'd love to see NASL re-team KK and Doa. They had such great chemistry.
Had to see this coming. One cannot help but feel great sympathy for the employees who have not only lost their livelihood, but the medium through which they could show their passion for a game we all so dearly love. All the best for those employees. Hopefully they'll get picked up by other companies speedily.
Kevin will likely be bouncing between Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Starcraft. Not too surprising to be honest about the rest of the crew. Good luck to them!
I know I wasn't the only person excited about the prospect of certain developers being laid off the SC2 project... . Not that I want to see them lose their employment totally, just that I would like to see them on another project...
This bit looked like save IPL crew from the start.
the e-gymnastics needs much more fans to support a full crew for a non-tournament show - only thing blizzard could have seriously done to fully use the talent of those guys would have been a proper proleague/gsl style team league, but there isnt a cool esports hub with 6+ teams in any NA city yet - nor enough spectators - so its logical not to support a huge crew.
Still - esports in general is still growing so i guess for the best of them, there are still jobs - and perhaps even starcraft will stabilize and grow with the more well thought out WCS system, free arcade, starbow and who knows - perhaps one of the next balance patches in will hit the sweet spot to help increasing vanilla SC2 viewership to levels of supporting more content producers.
On January 25 2014 09:12 BigFan wrote: I think there are currently a lot of people working on starcraft projects so it makes sense albeit it is said that they were laid off
The center point of this is what direction Blizzard will take regarding media production other than WCS casts which is now handled by NASL in America, tbh the former IPL crew didn't put out enough content other than casting some Challenger league matches and some highlights, which makes sense that they are laid off
Well considering we never saw any content from them besides kevin knocke voiceovers this isn't too unexpected. Sucks for the people losing their jobs ofc.
Well according to the updates nobody has been laid off? Or atleast Kevin Knocke still has a job? Everyone you seemed to comment on this thread either commented before the OP updates or didn't bother to read the whole post? I'd be interested to hear if there were any other updates.
EPT
. Not that I want to see them lose their employment totally, just that I would like to see them on another project...
