Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

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150 pointsmikestew150 comments

Remarkable, isn't it? Blizzard's knack for consistently managing to misalign their PR strategy with big launch events like Diablo IV is almost as intricate as their game design. There's an unexpected plot twist even George R.R. Martin would be envious of.

It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs. One might argue that the corporate maneuvering is proving to be as engrossing as the impending battle against the Prime Evils.

This debacle could serve as a case study on how not to handle crisis communication during a major product launch. It’s like a redux of the 'Error 37' saga, but this time, the error is not just on the servers, it’s in the boardroom. The irony is almost poetic.

As a community, we should be preparing to discuss the game's groundbreaking mechanics or innovative design, but instead we're going to watch a real-time corporate soap opera unfold. It's a classic example of how mismanagement can detract from a company's core product and innovation. At the end of the day, let's remember to uphold our values and maintain a focus on fairness, diversity, and respect in our industry, as this scenario provides yet another potent reminder of how far we still have to go.

> It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs.

Funny you say that, a writer at Blizzard just got fired for writing a satirical "greedy CEO" character, after a high-level executive played that part of the game: https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1663998815458951168

That seems hard to believe at face value. Maybe there's another side to this story?

Didn't a high-ranking guy sexually harass a woman to the point of suicide at this company? I can believe the company in which a person in leadership sexually harassed another employee to suicide can also have petty executives that demand firing when they feel thin-skinned about their wealth.

And let's not forget the Cosby room - a room dedicated to rape and sexual assault of female employees by ActiBlizz leadership.

You might argue that "those" folks are gone, yet apparently their culture has not really changed.

The height of naming irony, given this was Blizzcon 2013 and the Cosby allegations came out in 2014.

It looks like the naming was likely intentional, allegations about Cosby go back to 2004. Although Hannibal Buress didn't start talking about it in his routine until 2014.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/bill-cosby-trial-comple...

I guess they were into knowing about celebrity sexual assault allegations before it was cool?

Aspirational goal setting by Blizz execs?

There was a bit in 30 Rock about Cosby in 2009, too, written by Tina Fey -- who also took a shot at Cosby on SNL in 2005. Hannibal's routine was just the first to catch the public's attention.

The part where they used it in ads makes it certain there is more to the story.

What makes it hard to believe?

The mustache-twirling cartoon villain implied by the narrative. People aren't that simple, not even tech managers.

It's not mustache-twirling villainy, it's just having a fragile ego and being pissed at a dig at you, which is common across all sorts of people, managers included.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Blizzard used it in an ad campaign "before, during, and after I was separated". It's not like the text was secret.

A simpler explanation is that an aggrieved party is not giving us the whole story. General advice: Be wary taking sides in nasty breakups even if (especially if) you want to like/dislike one or the other.

It's good advice when one person is pissed at another person, it's less good advice when that line of disgruntled people stretches down the block and around the corner.

It's naive to assume good intentions when one party has a well-documented, multi-sourced history of behaving poorly.

And a very simple explanation is that the people who got pissed at it weren't the people who worked on the ads, and even if they ultimately gave high-level approval for them, didn't notice the minutia at the time. Maybe the parts of it they had issue with weren't the parts used in the ad. "Back to the office" and "Another Yacht" could have been the trigger words, and they don't appear there.

You're anthropomorphizing a corporation. Blizzard has almost 10,000 employees and god only knows how many of those are managers. I'm sure some of the managers are great and some of them suck, just like everywhere else.

I'm not anthropomorphising anything, I'm observing trends and patterns in corporate culture. I'd be shocked if the kind of corporate culture that has rotted as much as theirs had would not have any petty, vidictive egoists at the top of the food chain.

'Blizzard' the company doesn't have feelings, but people making decisions in it do. I'm not sure why you're steering us into splitting hairs over this.

Sometimes people really do mean-spirited petty things for petty reasons, and it really is "just" that simple and black/white. It certainly seems to me the story is entirely plausible, although of course I can't judge if it's also true, and I agree it's usually best to ignore these kind of anecdotes, but that's just because you can't easily separate the 'true' from the 'more complicated than that' ones.

All this stuff makes me feel pretty good about boycotting Blizzard games since the starcraft II cheating scandal. WCIII TFT is still my favorite game/game experience of all time because of normal AND custom games, and blizzard will never ever come close to that level of quality again.

Actions to save face describe Blizzard pretty well nowadays. The Vivendi sale announcement on their classic battle.net page really was the beginning of the end. Even me in middle school felt bad reading that garbage.

Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they know the game is terrible, so they do it on purpose so fewer people talk about how terrible it is?

It isn't though. And we are verrrry far away from Diablo 3's state on release. (Even if servers have trouble today and in 4 days.)

I only skimmed a couple reviews but the impression I got it that it is a fun, mechanically solid game, with a pretty good antagonist but a lackluster overall world/plot.

This is 2023 Activision/Blizzard, nobody expects them to revolutionize anything. They’ve got fans already and they/we (I like their games but am not a fan of their corporate culture, so, not sure if I count as a fan anymore—was really hoping they’d managed to root out the shitty behavior) know what the idea of a Diablo game is. A well mechanically decent Diablo is the bar, and it sounds like they’ve probably passed it.

They’ve released two open betas. They’re not keeping anything secret. So yes, tinfoil it is.

While your theory does add an interesting dimension to this conversation, it may not hold up when considering the current state of Diablo IV. As someone who's participated in the beta and server slash events, I can confirm that the game, by all indications, is shaping up to be a solid entry in the franchise.

Given this, it's unfortunate - even tragic - to witness this external drama potentially overshadowing what should be a momentous release. Instead of being able to focus purely on the merits of the game, we find ourselves intertwined in this larger narrative of corporate mismanagement and serious ethical failings.

Isn't there some rule of thumb or "law" that the software an organization writes is a direct mirror of the structure of the organization?

Conway's Law:

> Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. [0]

But I think OP is implying the opposite, sort of a reverse-Conway. That the narrative of their product affected the structure of the company.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Yes, you both are right. The duality of Conway's Law, especially in reverse, is fascinating to consider. This could indeed extend to the realms of the narrative Blizzard perpetuates not only through its products, but also within its internal culture.

As the (slighly modified) quote from Alan Moore suggests "Artists use lies to tell the truth, while (corporate) politicians use them to cover the truth up.", the stories we tell have power. They shape our understanding and, in turn, our reality. In Blizzard's case, the mythology and narratives within their games may have started to mirror the internal dynamics of the company.

It's plausible that the leadership and upper management, continually immersing themselves in the game narratives they produce, might unconsciously influence their hiring and structural decisions. This could result in an organization where individuals who align with these narratives are more likely to rise through the ranks.

This might not be a negative thing, were it not for the obvious issues of thus who seek power in their stories having usually conflicted psychology. Rather than a healthy reflection of the company's product, we're seeing the darker aspects of their game's narrative permeating the company's culture.

It's a strong reminder that life imitates art and vice versa.

I love how Blizzard became a prime example of the effect MBA-ification of a well functioning company has on everything.

I have nothing but disdain for these greedy, incompetent, useless assholes. Just feel bad for the talented, hard-working staff who generate real value.

I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps.

This is not a game dev problem. This is a company that has excellent game dev talent but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers problem.

> but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers

This is going to piss people off, but that's because people who sink huge portions of their spare time and energy into video games do not become CEOs. "Getting high on your own supply" doesn't set you up for professional exceptionalism.

I’ll be charitable and grant that you’re likely talking about a very specific type of CEO who ends up at a very specific type of game studio; usually one that stopped caring about the quality of the games that it produces and instead envisions the studio as a financial engineering play.

Elsewhere, there are plenty of game studios that have product-focused CEOs who are gamers and care deeply about creating memorable experiences, with the playtime to prove it.

thats a very complicated way to say "i dont like young people"

I like young people a lot!

Which is why I think we should massively restrict the amount of digital poison corporations are allowed to pump into their veins.

I'm pretty sure the Gullemot brothers still play their own games, heard that Yves played some rainbow 6 siege or something, and while I hate Ubisoft games quality and only ever bought one, he seems way more professional than whoever the Blizzard CEO is.

Yves covered for Maxime Béland's and Serge Hascoët's sexual abuses for decades.

Rayman Legends is amazing. Such a shame that their stores / launchers / DRM have been among the worst for years...

Gabe Newell

Sales and marketing CEOs pretend they work 24x7, but they spend much of their weekends on leisure activities such as golfing, travel, playing with their children, having expensive dinners with board members and politicians and so on. If you're committed it's really not hard to replace that leisure time with gaming.

They spend much of the working day on those leisure activities as well.

I've seen execs tell the rest of the company that a four day work week isn't reasonable while working four days themselves.

Did you see Elon Musk's Elden Ring build?

* Announce Overwatch 2

* Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates

* Announce this is necessary for PvE rewrite

* Release Overwatch 2 without PvE with f2p Battlepass monetization model - change to 5v5 instead of 6v6

* Shut down all Overwatch 1 servers with the release of OW2

* Announce PvE is cancelled

What even is the point of balance updates?

Keeps the game fresh. If the game changes it gives people a reason to want to play again to figure out new combinations. Otherwise the meta gets set and it never changes and that gets old quickly.

Not necessarily. For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017. If the base is solid the players can spend their time mastering what they are given and over time it grows on you. Imagine chess buffing up the pawn and nerfing the bishop.

Fair enough, though I'd suggest that rocket league has many fewer gauges to fiddle with than Overwatch. It's always symmetrical fields and 5 different car types, right?

There is steering sensitivity, car speed, ball speed, car mass, car power, boost strength, shooting power, jump height. All those variables have been finalized. What I'm saying is that balance patches are a band aid over the core problem.

What’s Rocket League like nowadays? I only played when it first came out. The impression I got though was that it was more like Counterstrike or something: mechanically simple with lots of depth, designed to be more like a sport than a game.

Overwatch is pretty casual. It is tuned for spectacle, and the abilities work out such that most reasonably non-bad players get a steady trickle of moments where they get to be the “star” for a scene.

It isn’t really a core problem, just a different type of game.

> For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017.

StarCraft 1 has had no balance updates in over 20 years, and the game is doing great.

StarCraft 2 has had no balance updates for like a year or two, and it was slowly killing the joy of the game for everyone who bothered to suffer through it.

StarCraft 2 was designed to be a game where the meta has to be shaken up occasionally; StarCraft 1 ended up more like chess: if you tweak a rule once in a century (or the Internet-equivalent of a century), it's big news.

Different games, different needs.

Nah, Starcraft 1 just ended up pushing balancing to the tournaments and map designers. If you tried playing it on the last Blizzard maps from the original run of Brood War, it's a questionably balanced game.

You are correct. Map design has a dramatic impact on the balance of BW - and as the game develops, and certain matchups become more or less one-sided, tournaments adjust their map pools.

True, but then BW's map pool rotation is also way slower / more conservative than SC2's. We're used to 7 new 1v1 maps every other season by now (personally I preferred the old system where the 2-3 oldest and/or most problematic maps would get phased out every season).

Meanwhile: Fighting Spirit

I think the comparison doesn't work because the composition of the teams doesn't change based on character choice. The interplay of the characters, and inherent strengths and weaknesses of each one create a dynamic metagame that games like MOBAs and Overwatch change to keep things fresh.

For games like Rocket League, CSGO, Overwatch, Apex, etc. The teams are even no matter what (skill aside). Meta still exists however, as anyone who has played multiple years of any of these games sees. Expected attacks, combos, and preferred approaches change over time as people discover weaknesses to the existing metagame and exploit them.

Not to say Rocket League has vastly changed in the last 8 years (I've played for 5 of them), but it's definitely different and a little updated.

Edit: Not to mention Rocket League rotates special game modes regularly for this purpose as well.

For balance updates the problem is that if balance swings too wildly out of whack, it effectively removes content from the game as it gets too underpowered. Especially in a team game like Overwatch, where peer pressure and sometimes outright harrassment will be deployed by your team mates if you pick an underpowered, or perceived to be underpowered, option

> Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates

Cries in StarCraft 2

Kotick didn't go to Harvard, doesn't have an MBA, and in fact dropped out of university.

It's not about MBA vs not. He's just shit.

True, but this is just nitpicking over something that's not really the point being made. The argument behind the OP still stands... the decisions being made by the company aren't ultimately being made by gamers or gamedevs (the workers who make the product / customers who use the product). So everything just turns to shit from a product standpoint...

Lots of 'real gamers' developers make horrible products all the time. For example, star citizen, the game in development for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget and no game to show for it.

Mighty No. 9 Biomutant

The list goes on

Gamers/game devs making the business decisions isn't a panacea. Look what happened to Ion Storm with Daikatana.

Never said it was a panacea. Just that without product focused people having say in decisions, the product will inevitably turn to shit. That is not the same as saying: having them make decisions guarantees you a good product.

I said “Harvard MBA types” not “Harvard MBAs” since you’re nitpicking

The "harvard mba types" brings a certain kind of distaste to my mouth. Using it to describe someone who is in fact nothing of the sort feels a little too sloppy.

Sloppy enough to be “Harvard MBA type”? /jk

> Harvard MBA Types

Steve Jobs:

"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.

nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric.

since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living" - to increase audience size/TAM to maximum)

> nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric.

Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO.

(Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.

Product Marketing continues to exist, especially in the B2B space.

That said, the function has increasingly merged with Product Management because GTM is critical to Product Strategy.

In the B2C space, it's hard to drive product lead growth simply because the economics are much more difficult (eg. Selling a product vision to an enterprise who will sign a multi-year contract is easier than changing the mind of millions of consumers).

As such, it's much more cost efficient to concentrate on Growth Marketing because product input and stakeholdership is simply too diffused.

Story of our time. Contrary to popular belief, market capitalism isn’t inherently good. It needs competition for the magic to work, ideally a lot of it. Otherwise you get Comcast.

But ActiBlizz doesn't have any monopolies ? (Unlike, say, Steam, or Microsoft.) If their games are bad, quickly enough nobody will buy them any more (regardless of how much they invested in marketing).

IP goes such a long way, though. To overtake ActiBlizz on MMO's, for example, you would have to build something 10x better than WoW. And any Diablo game is going to sell a shit ton, even if it isn't good.

There's no need to overtake, for instance Eve Online can exist in parallel with WoW.

I feel you could write a book about what that games dev process must have been, it's beyond parody what they did.

I believe in business when it's defined as a large group of people coordinating incentives to achieve huge things that can't be achieved by small groups, I understand that aligning these incentives, and fund raising, and leadership are real and important jobs. I'm in awe that we can pull off the global shipping infrastructure, and that we can build power plants, and offshore oil wells, and these AAA games with so much art and technical innovation that the mind spins. But it is inarguable that there is a ubiquitous layer of parasitical filth lying and manipulating and strategizing how to capture value out of this system while systematically destroying the health of many of these organizations and pretending they are actually making them better.

The director came out and said it wasn't an MBA-types problem, but their attachment to their original vision of Overwatch.

Remember that Overwatch came from Project Titan, the megaproject designed to be the MMO successor to World of Warcraft. When their design goals failed, they shipped a modified PVP portion as Overwatch, and they intended to ship the MMO in pieces, with the story mode and skills system as massive components.

Overwatch 2 was them trying Titan again, and failing.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-...

> This is a company that has excellent game dev talent

I'm inclined to believe that the incredible talent that used to be at Blizzard is long gone by now. Most of the original devs have their own studios or work at other companies by now.

This is what I was thinking too (more or less since 2004, I was effectively blaming it on Activision and Kotick !), but Diablo 4 seems to prove the opposite ! (I'll be only sure of it only once my honeymoon phase with it is over I guess.)

What I don't understand then is this.

If the Harvard MBA types are so detrimental to a gaming company, why don't we see any or many widely successful gaming companies who are run by dev types rather than MBA types?

MBA types make the company more money quarter over quarter, dev types make the company more money decade after decade.

Publicly traded companies tend to use greedy algorithms when making decisions.

There are plenty of dev (or really, artist driven) type companies, some may argue with my choices, but I would say Bethesda, Epic Games, id Software, and Double Fine. Bethesda and id are now owned by Microsoft, so there is a possibility that market forces will seep in over time.

The successful companies get bought out by the giants after the make something popular eg. Mojang and Minecraft.

Only yesterday did a WoW dev speak out about getting fired because an exec was triggered by some NPC text: https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1663998815458951168

Can't be blaming unions for that one...

Frustrating when a CEO blames a nebulous "bogeyman" for their problems. What a low-effort deflection. Do you even root-cause analysis bro? gitgud

After reading the title a couple times, I was able to parse it to mean that the blame is placed such, because the company problem is seen as the exposure of, rather than actual happenings. If so, they are the problem.

Seems he is setting himself up for a 100 million dollar severance package to spend more time with family

He's been at the helm for years, but yes, I agree. When the Microsoft-Activision deal was on the skids with the EU, Blizzard was quiet about this problem. However, both when the deal was announced and now that the EU has agreed to allow the sale, the harassment topic is back in the news.

I think it's deliberate.

Not sure if a less surprising statement can be expected from a CEO.

Wake me up when "CEO loves unions, claims to harass employees for fun and profit"

BTW, I'm not commenting about this specific CEO or Blizzard, merely pointing out that the headline is semantically empty.

CEOs should realize that firing and paying a settlement to bad apples is cheaper than letting them pollute the atmosphere

Bad attitudes are way more contagious than a lot of people realize. Just having one person with a bad attitude and resentment to their employer can spread to 5-10 people if they're influential enough.

When a company breeds those baditudes faster than they cycle out, they are doomed. From my discussions with people at large tech companies, most of the big players are sitting on a huge toxic morass that they won't be able to escape. MBAs have taken over at all the large tech companies.

Maybe people wouldn't resent their employer if their employer did something about the people stealing breast milk, or if they actually took action against the managers sexually assaulting women in the "Cosby Suite".

Taking about normal companies not whatever insanity is going on at blizzard.

But if there's no actual basis for the person to have a bad attitude, the coworkers are more likely to resent, shun, and/or ridicule them than to adopt a similar attitude.

They know. A pretty basic part of any sort of management course I’ve ever encountered is getting to know everyone is expendable. It’s simply down to a matter of cost. What you do with that information, however, is very individual.

That being said, and this is me talking about something I don’t know too much about, but hasn’t part of the many Blizzard controversies been that their CEO himself is sort of what you describe as a bad apple?

A CEO who defends bad apples and attacks whistleblowers is a bad apple.

I assume the motivation of this CEO to do a "good job" for their employees is ambiguous.

I speculate this CEO could burn down the company and still be RICH.

You're telling me that the company that created WoW, that hosts one of the most racist and misogynistic player bases that I have ever seen, has a corporate culture of harassment, misogyny, and racism? Wow, wonder why? If they refuse to take responsibility for their own corporate culture, why would they police their players?

An example of what I'm talking about - you can spam the n word in public chat, either 1) nothing at all happens or 2) you receive a 1-3 day ban, if that. IF you're even suspected of botting, which they get wrong all the time, you'll catch a 2+ week ban. Funny enough, bots still run rampant.

It's a topic where a company can't win but if you look at the numbers from the report it's somewhat interesting to see that, among other, women are paid more and promoted earlier than men while they hire more minorities than expected. 98% of the employee agree with "My manager treats me with respect". They had 36 substantiated cases on 17 000 employees.

Naturally, this is their version but at the same time I think it's important to discuss the topic beyond anecdotes. Similar to how I think working from home often gets a black and white veil. Would love to see some more in-depth articles.

The title should be changed, it's Activision Blizzard not Blizzard CEO.

This is not just a pedantic argument, Blizzard CEO on its own will lead to a significant number of people assuming a different person, Mike Ybarra, Blizzard's President.

Agreed, I thought it was Ybarra who had made these statements based on the headline “Blizzard CEO”, not Kotick.

Making a distinction between "Activision" and "Blizzard" is a distraction. It's "Activision Blizzard". Has been legally for 15 years, and in practice for at least 5 years now.

It doesn't matter if it's Ybarra or Kotik speaking now - they're playing by the same book on the same field.

> It's "Activision Blizzard". Has been legally for 15 years, and in practice for at least 5 years now.

So call it Activision Blizzard? The difference between Ybarra and Kotick speaking is both one of recency and personal culpability (Ybarra was hired as the cleanup lead, so a reversal on the stance that it happened would be notable in its own right), and of abuses that have gone in other non-Blizzard Activision studios (I seem to recall some controversies about Raven software also?).

I'm fine with that. My beef is with trying to take Blizzard out of it entirely.

Make it fit within 80 chars, and I'll see if I can still edit the title. But your suggestion won't fit, and I'm too lazy to have another go.

It's to note that Michael Morhaime, one of the founder of the company who was CEO for decades isnt involved with the company anymore. He was one of the geniuses that made blizzard what blizzard was.

For good or ill. Morhaime was also head of the company when a lot of the harassment went down.

When this happened and it happened late in the history of the company, they were hoarded by Activision's people already. Morhaime kept the company from the usual bosos for as long as he could, but he had sold shares in the early days so it was only a matter of time before his dream haven would fall to evil.

I think this line of thinking, assuming the rock stars can do no wrong, is what lead Blizzard down the way it did. Morhaime has acknowledged that he was leader when much of this stuff went down and that he bore responsibility. Alex Afrasiabi was hired in 2004 so we can't just blame this on Activision's people, he was part of the old Blizzard guard.

Most of the problem people that have since been fired were not 'late in the history of the company'. They've been doing this crap since the early '0s, which was completely under his watch. He turned a blind eye to it.

It's not like Bobby Kotick was getting on a little red telephone, to let Mike know that Afrasiabi is a major rainmaker and creative genius that shouldn't be messed with.

It's one thing if the problem happened a few months before Mike's retirement, it's quite another thing when he sat around and did nothing about it for a decade. Which is what he did.

No, I'm sorry. People want to assume the people that made the games they like aren't responsible for the harrassment, and the people who made changes to the games they didn't like are responsible, but there's plenty of the classic blizzard people who have been involved in the abuse, yet at the same time I haven't heard anything bad about the behaviour of the likes of Ion, lead designer for BFA/Shadowlands, or the "Do you not have phones?" guy, as poorly received as their game design decisions have been.

The thing is that the vast majority people just don't care about the culture of harassment in the company. And honestly, I don't see why they should, as it does not affect them as consumers.

Making shit products is something that affects consumers, and they will complain about that.

It's one thing if they don't care about the abuse, but they should be honest (including with themselves) on that. It's another to reassign the abuse to people they have different reasons to dislike.

That's a fair take.

A lot of things I love were made my people that I find personally despicable. If I have to weight how much I like the creators and companies behind everything I consume, that will be recipe for a very tiresome and frustrating life.

This is not to give a pass to Blizzard. The scandals there are pretty bad. But it's up to the employees (and perhaps to the judicial system) to do something about it.

Some of the employees were the perpetrators, some were the victims, and some decided putting food on the table was more important than making the moral stand.

Management will do as much about this as the market incentivizes them to.

Ultimately the ability to produce incentives is in the hands of consumers most directly, and through the judicial system, (so, pretty indirectly) voters.

I dunno. I like classic rock and movies. So I probably consume some art created by assholes. But it isn’t something I’m proud of.

I buy things produced by companies know to make use of slave labor and pollute the environment. I enjoy art made by people that honestly deserve to be punched in the face everyday.

It's not about being proud or ashamed about anything there. If the powers that be refuse to punish people and corporations that deserve to be punished, I think it's ultimately unfair to offload that responsibility onto consumers.

> And honestly, I don't see why they should, as it does not affect them as consumers.

They should care, because buying their products is telling the company that they approve of its behavior (whatever that behavior is).

I vehemently disagree with this notion.

In the case of Blizzard, I won't play Diablo 4 because I really think they have been making shit games for more than a decade. But I don't fault anyone that will play Diablo 4. People like what they like.

The cases of abuse and harassment at Blizzard are known and well documented. If the powers that be refuse to act in order to punish the people and corporation involved, why do we offload that responsibility onto consumers?

Diablo Immortal makes more than any other game they've made.

So, the shittier something is (ethically, substantively), the more money it makes. Money really is the root of all evil.

Therefore, boycotting something because it's bad makes less sense than buying it because it's bad.

QED

I don't fault anyone for making choices different from mine.

> why do we offload that responsibility onto consumers?

I don't view it as offloading anything onto customers. I view it as me deciding what sort of company I'm willing to keep and what sort of behavior I'm willing to support.

> why do we offload that responsibility onto consumers?

Giving money to a company is rewarding all of their behaviours, in aggregate. Because that's what a company is.

In other words, the Blizzard CEO provides another confirmation of what pretty much everyone knows: Blizzard is an irredeemably awful company.

Oh, Bobby. I actually worked for this guy once, long ago. (The company was International Consumer Technologies and the product was DeluxeWrite. Not mentioned in the Wikipedia page, but AFAICT it would have been between Arktronics and Leisure Concepts.) Even then, by the standards of that time, he - and even more so his partner-in-crime Howard - had notably little regard for work/life balance or other aspects of employee well-being.

I happened to be near that building in Ann Arbor recently. Even though it was an important stepping stone in my career, without which I wouldn't be where I am now, I was still tempted to raise one finger in salute. BK seems to have a knack for impressing money types and mistreating just about everyone else, which IMO says a lot about both him and the money types.

Thank you for reminding me, Bobby, why I will never buy ActiBliz games again. Making addictive games rife with microtransactions is no reason to overlook the rest of ActiBliz' history.

I can't even imagine the gall necessary to tell your secretary you were "going to have her killed", then state that there's no culture problem.

Kotick was listed in Epstein's flight logs.

This has basically become an empty statement at this point, unfortunately. Epstein made a habit of flying around public figures. Presumably this was intentional.

Looks like Satya is going to be making a replacement soon.

Or not, because DEI was never actually more important than money.

Will be interesting to see

Blizzard as a company sucks though. As in, even if you’re a brutal capitalist and don’t care at all about people stealing and drinking their coworkers breast milk, they just keep failing spectacularly at actually shipping games and getting people to play them. If you’re Microsoft, I’m not sure why you’d keep most of their exec team _even if you don’t care about the culture_

Diablo IV is shaping up to be very successful, though.

It'll probably be successful but not still-played-in-25-years successful.

Well all of their game are being played 15+ years later on, there is no reason why it won't be the case with d4.

Online-only requirement. Such a shame and wasted long-term potential for D2R, D3 and likely especially D4. Compare with Diablo 2 legacy where mods like Median XL are still going strong !

(I guess that they are stuck in a bad place with their games being so popular that they attract a lot of unwelcome attention, but IMHO still not worth it for a game that is much more cooperative than competitive.)

All Blizzard game have online features, they never shutdown an online game, never, Diablo 1 is still running since 1996.

I don't see issues with online only tbh.

No, the Lost Vikings for instance don't.

And last I checked they seem to have given up on supporting Diablo 1, and let GoG deal with it instead ? (Its online MP has security flaws.)

And Blizzard cannot run a game if Blizzard doesn't exist.

But even before that happens, you can already see the wasted potential : D3 (and D4) has no modding whatsoever, compare with D2R (though mods there are still heavily restricted and they have also removed normal MP from it) and especially D2LoD legacy !

https://median-xl.com/

lost vikings is not a blizzard game, and they still run diablo 1 matchmaking it's not gog.

Broodwar, SC:R, and D2R seems to be telling a different story. Hell, WoW is close to 20 years old at this point.

So their old games. What of OW(2), D3/D4, whatever mobile abomination they made for Diablo, Hearthstone or HoTS will be played for that long? Any? I would wager D2 is played more than D3 by a mile. OW1 was already killed. OW2 is dying. I'm not even sure the OW franchise will be around in four years, letalone 15.

Huh? This thread is about their old games that are still being played.

Yes, and someone pointed out that their new games aren’t of the same caliber as their old games, as in, their new games won’t be played in 15 years. My comment is that you didn’t list any new game as having the same staying power.

Well, we'll find out any day now where D4 sits, right? I know where I'd put my money if I were a betting man.

Since it is a partially offline game, there doesn’t seem to be any way to calculate the Diablo 2 population. But I’d be shocked if there were more D2 players than D3.

It took them 11 years and 2-3 tries at making the game before they could ship it, though.

I wonder why.

I don't really care about the scandals, but man, Blizzard games have been shit for a long, long time. Gone are the days of Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3.

I mean, their track record is fine.

Starcraft 2: The age of Blizzard RTS is over now, but it was the best RTS ever made and the devs left a final patch with a massively expanded community tooling.

Overwatch: Was absurdly successful and then decided to shoot themselves in the foot canning development, but the weakness there was hardly the game itself.

Hearthstone: I do not respect the design choices the game makes, but I admit it's practically defined Digital Card Games as a genre ever since it's come out.

World of Warcraft: Questionable storytelling aside, I've only heard good things about this from my MMO playing friends. I have never had the time to play an MMO myself, but I'll defer to them on this.

%s/Blizzard CEO/Jeffery Epstein associate Bobby Kotick/g [1]

Hard to believe these two facts aren't related.

[1] - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1508273-jeffrey-epst...

I really appreciate how right before Blizzard releases something that might pull you back in they completely shit the bed once again.

Looking forward to Microsoft acquiring this mess. Can only get better.

For those of you who don't want so support a terrible company like Blizzard but still want to play a fantastic ARPG - go check out Path of Exile.

There's no way D4 will ever have 1/10 of the content PoE already has.

Bobby at it again

I really should sell my Blizzard account.

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