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.
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.
Making shit products is something that affects consumers, and they will complain about that.
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.
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.
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.
They should care, because buying their products is telling the company that they approve of its behavior (whatever that behavior is).
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?
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
> 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.
Giving money to a company is rewarding all of their behaviours, in aggregate. Because that's what a company is.