How many more employees does Activision Blizzard have than Xbox Game Studios?
While we are almost live watching court drama around the Activision Blizzard and Microsoft deal, it will be interesting to see what this combined company will look like if the deal eventually goes through.
A year ago, Reddit user u/eclipsisme created a chart showing all Activision Blizzard, Xbox Game Studios and ZeniMax Media studios by number of employees. The chart is really impressive because Activision Blizzard is at least twice as big as Xbox Game Studios and ZeniMax Media combined.
This data is a bit out of date, but it doesn’t seem to favor Microsoft. Recently it became known that total number of Activision Blizzard employees is over 17,000. While the largest Xbox Game Studios, Mojang Studios has approximately 600 employees. Bethesda Game Studios has about 420. Obsidian Entertainment has over 200.
It is interesting that the individual Activision studios seem to be no more: Infinity Ward (~450 employees), Sledgehammer Games (~450), Treyarch (200), Raven Software (350), but together they somehow run into… more than 9,000 people. Another 4,700 (2012 data, so actually a lot more) at Blizzard Entertainment. Another 2,000 in King.
Almost all Activision Blizzard games are game-services that require a large staff of developers. For example, you can see in the credits of Diablo IV… 9,166 names! On the other hand Forza Horizon 5 is also game service, Minecraft – too, Halo – too, The Elder Scrolls Online – MMOPRG in general.
So something tells us that after the merger, if it does happen, Activision Blizzard should lose some weight.