In a Wednesday announcement, video game publisher Activision Blizzard revealed that it was slashing 600 ‘non-development positions’ worldwide in the company’s division which develops Internet games.

According to the details shared by Activision, the units which will be affected by the announced job-cuts will include World of Warcraft (WoW) which, despite being the most profitable property for the company, has been losing users in the last few quarters. With the WoW player base having witnessed a plunge of nearly 900,000 subscribers in 2011 second-half, it was quite foreseeable that the unit would be downsized.

Activision said that the lay-offs – 90 percent of which will be in the Blizzard unit – will have no impact at all in the company’s game-development ambitions; and that the move will not affect any of the WoW developers. Most of the jobs to be axed will be in the customer service department.

The video publisher further added that the 2012 results of the company will also remain unaffected by the announced job-cuts because they had already been included in its projections for the earnings this year.

Defending Activision’s job-cut move, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said in a public statement posted on the official WOW forums that the company decided to “scale down some of our departments” after a comprehensive evaluation of its present organizational needs which showed that some of its areas of business “had become overstaffed.”