In case anyone is interested, the WoW subreddit has put together a list of former and current female employees confirming and commenting on these allegations: https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/op1t7m/activision_bliz...
I hope these individuals will be able to find good work elsewhere when blizzard inevitably ousts them. California should be fining Blizzard into the ground, but given Blizzards response they've calculated out how much it'll cost and figured it's cheaper to do this.
Nah, I think the tone of their response shows that they think that a PR strategy based in rolling the dice on getting culture-war attachment and hoping that the upcoming recall succeeds before the case is resolved, resulting in an Administration from the faction whose rhetoric they are mirroring, who might then be inclined to dismiss the case.
Since the PR strategy doesn't really constrain their substantive legal strategy, and there is some chance of that PR strategy actually working (though it seems remote), its maybe not a bad idea, ignoring moral and ethical considerations.
Assuming rational actors, it must look pretty bad from the top of the inside to yolo this kind of hail mary.
I wonder what this looked like passing by legal? I mean if PR let this out, assuming they even have that kind of throttle, surely the lawyers would want to take a long look. This will definitely come up in court, wont it?
Given the sexual harassment and exploitation of women in other industries like Hollywood and how often this is either encouraged, actively ignored or swept under the rug by the executive level of other gaming industry companies I believe that giving this the label of "gamer culture" is just dishonest at this point because it implies that the people playing games are the "true root of the problem". I'm not accusing you of doing that, don't get me wrong.
Enforcing the image of the "evil gamer" is of course an easy way to diffuse responsibility and push it off to some imaginary group (it's not 1995 anymore, gaming is no longer some sub- or monoculture) so that the poor big executives never catch too much negative PR.
I'm sure the people in charge love the "it's a large scale problem of society or gaming culture" narrative.
They would still buy their games though, they buy everything...
Then you don't know gamer culture, they only attack apparent wrongdoings, these accusations are far from baseless so there is nothing to rise up against. Instead you should expect the gamer culture to attack the Blizzard employees suspected of wrongdoing in that manner. Which, if you look around is what you will find in most forums, people are really angry at Blizzard about this, nobody is calling for attacks on these women.
There's a lot of value in polling the wisdom of crowds. Pending discrimination litigation is almost certainly not a good use case.
I also hope we're not watching the Next Horrible Thing to come from the Internet unfold before our eyes.
I have yet to see reddit takes on this as awful as the ones right here.