Activision Blizzard and its studio, Treyarch, will no longer lease offices on Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, and its California employees will work from home until further notice, sources familiar with the decision told Dot Esports.
The news comes after the company’s 10-year lease for both buildings, which was negotiated in December 2010, expired. Both buildings—145,060-square-foot 3100 Ocean Park building, home to Activision, and 69,804-square-foot 3420 Ocean Park office space, which housed Treyarch—became available for lease on Wednesday, according to property management company CBRE Group’s website. Activision Blizzard did not respond to a request for comment.
Employees were asked in December to collect their belongings, with Activision Blizzard arranging drive-thru pickups prior to the Christmas holiday, several employees said.
The company communicated internally on Thursday after Dot Esports reached out for comment that it has narrowed its next office location down to a few properties in Santa Monica.
“We have narrowed down the search for our next office location to several properties in the Santa Monica area and we hope to finalize our plans in the coming weeks,” the company said in an internal memo.
Activision Blizzard laid off 190 employees in early March, 50 of whom focused primarily on esports. The Ocean Park Boulevard offices housed Activision, C-suite executives, other corporate employees, and some of Activision Blizzard Esports, as well as most of Treyarch’s American staff. The company has another campus in Southern California, located in Irvine, which is the primary home to Blizzard Entertainment.
Activision Blizzard previously said internally that it would not be returning back to an office until at least Sept. 1, 2021. On Thursday, the company told employees it’s still on track for that timeline.
Los Angeles County is still the highest county of COVID-19 infections in the entire United States since last March, with more than 1.2 million cases diagnosed, according to Johns Hopkins University & Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center. Officials have slowly begun to lift restrictions as new cases continue to decrease, with cases falling to a 3.7 average cases diagnosed per day on Wednesday.
The triple-A developer moved to work from home in mid-March 2020 as the coronavirus began to spread rapidly across the U.S. In October, the company closed both its Versailles, France, and The Hague, Netherlands, offices, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company, however, is not struggling financially. It exceeded its revenue estimates for Q4 2020 by 10 percent, earning a total of $2.4 billion in GAAP Revenue with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Call of Duty: Warzone and World of Warcraft leading the charge.
