Activision-Blizzard says layoffs "could negatively impact our business"

Last month, during a fourth-quarter results conference call, Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick announced that the company had enjoyed a record year, and also that they were going to lay off hundreds of their employees. Now Activision-Blizzard's annual Form 10-K report, published on February 28, has appeared, and it says that the consequences of these layoffs "could negatively impact our business."

In the fanciful lingo of the newsroom: Well, duh.

That said, textbook cover-your-ass disclaimers are what 10-K filings are all about. The phrase "negatively impact" occurs 48 times within the document in other such painfully obvious statements as: "If we do not consistently deliver popular, high-quality content in a timely manner, or if consumers prefer competing products, our business may be negatively impacted."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.