I cut my teeth on Diablo, and played Diablo II for probably fifteen years after its release off and on as a way to stay connected with a friend who loved it similarly. More recently, I have consistently played Starcraft II since its release and enjoy a sense of mastery over that game unparalleled by my experience in any other.
I haven't purchased new Blizzard products since the Hong Kong censorship debacle[1] and quit playing Hearthstone at that time. However I had still played some of my other old favorites, reasoning that I was not providing them further financial support. The recent announcements about their terrible, sexist culture had challenged that notion for me, and I was not sure what to do.
This news is the straw that breaks my back. That Activision/Blizzard would double down on their despicable behavior and stance in this way is completely beyond the pale, and I for one will never again fire up those games that I loved so much.
I don't really understand this attitude, or line of reasoning, or whatever you want to call it.
Sure, if a company does something that you find reprehensible, not giving them further money (or attention) is certainly a reasonable -- and honorable! -- thing to do.
But if you've already purchased a standalone[0], non-subscription product from that company, and that company doesn't gain any benefit from your further use of that product (or lose anything from you stopping use), I feel like you're only hurting yourself if you stop using it.
I will concede that if the act of playing one of these standalone games makes you think of the bad thing the company did and makes you angry/upset, I guess it makes sense to stop playing them. But unless the bad thing they did is something personally/viscerally important to you, it feels like that's a bit of an odd trigger.
[0] If the game is multiplayer, and connects to a company-run server, I guess you could make the argument that they benefit in some way from their active-users numbers being higher. I personally don't find that argument all that compelling, but everyone can of course decide where the cutoff of benefit is for them.
One of the things that companies rely on these days is engagement and playerbase. If you don't find that compelling, that's up to you, but Blizzard invests millions every year into maintaining their playerbase - so at least they find it compelling.
Just by being a part of the starcraft community, you are providing support to activision blizzard.
If we were talking about offline-only non-community driven content, sure... but this is a company that is almost entirely driven off of multiplayer games.
To play Starcraft II, one must open Battle.net, potentially exposing themselves to ads for the latest shiny game, and may lead them to break their boycott by buying said game. Having to visit the store to use the product changes the dynamic. If I bought a widget from the widget store, then found out the owner sexually harassed their employees, I would continue to use the widget while boycotting the store because I would never have to visit it. But if I had to occasionally bring in the widget for a free cleaning, I'd stop using it.
Some of the best fiction was written by people with absolutely despicable opinions like Francois Céline or Knut Hamsun. You can see it in their art, but their art isn't limited to it, and still holds a lot of value. Friedrich Nietzsche's opinions on women and politics are plain dumb, yet his other thought can be extremely compelling, and he is rightfully one of the most influential thinkers of modern times.
Going back further in time will only make you miserable if you hold the work closely accountable to the person. Terrible people can still say really good things, and I don't believe it is different with games or modern entertainment in general. Old Blizzard games are still good, and old Louis CK sets are still funny.
Celine and Hamsun aren’t getting engagement activity from their in-app analytics. They also can’t respond to all of the legitimate criticisms against them. Activision can and they’ve decided to bring in the Pinkertons.
At the end of the day, another player booting up an Activision game is another (tiny) data point that says whatever activity Activision/Blizzard is engaging in is a-ok with that player. It’s not revenue driving right now, but in 6-12 months, this has blown over and enough of the tiny subset of temporarily outraged players will eventually start to generate revenue. That’s what they’re banking on.
Decide what you care about or don’t, but at least accept/own the impact of your decisions and don’t conflate the situation with century old authors.
>whatever activity Activision/Blizzard is engaging in is a-ok with that player
This is definitely how Activision/Blizzard will interpret it. However, not every single gamer is tuned into these kinds of stories about the game makers. Some will be totally unawares of any of the shenanigans that occur behind the game. Not everybody has the time and/or interest for that. Just like people do/don't care about Amazon, Walmart, Nike, etc. Someone that does care will bring to light something that may garner media attention. Some people will see that, and get worked up about it. However, the majority of people will be just as happy to put their head back in the sand and continue on with their day-to-day.
I also came here to see if anyone else was calling that Activision/Blizzard's next move were to call in the Pinkertons.
I completely agree that you can’t act on what you don’t know. It’s almost impossible to act as an entirely ethical consumer today, who could know if a suppliers, suppliers supplier is doing something dodgy?
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here. This case however is a pretty simple B2C relationship and if a consumer is aware of what Activision is up to and continues to support through revenue or engagement, simply accept that you don’t care about these issues enough to change your behaviour, we all make compromises in life.
What I’d like to avoid is consumers deluding themselves into thinking that playing Starcraft is fine because it’s the same as people buying the books of dead racists.
One small difference between those specific artists and Activison-Blizzard - they're dead. But more importantly, their beliefs are also a product of their times.
ACTI doesn't have that excuse. They're all with us now, and their actions don't have the shield of being reasonable in the society they exist in.
Why should we value greatness more than morality? Should the magnitude of someone's impact overshadow the morality of their impact?
Opinions of celebrities don't exist in some sort of extra-dimensional cloistered thought bubble; they influence other minds and affect society in very real and measurable ways. Amplifying the celebrity status of these individuals by cherry-picking their acceptable works will in turn, unavoidably, also amplify their less-acceptable opinions -- though probably not by the same magnitude. But in general the masses are terrible at sorting out "oh, this is a righteous opinion that I should listen to" vs "this is a despicable one by the same person, but I have the intellectual & emotional maturity to be able to compartmentalize it". We're too tribal a species, on the average, for that. Our brains, societies, and cultures have not evolved to effectively handle multiculturalism well, ivory-tower internet freethinkers notwithstanding.
The flipside of cancel culture is moral nihilism, in which speech has no consequence and exists purely as a form of harmless intellectual exercise. But that's just not how it works in the real world. Speech has consequence, and for those wishing to prevent those consequences, sometimes ignoring the speaker and refusing to amplify their voice is the only realistic option they have, if they have no power to censor them outright or sufficiently amplify contrary opinions of their own. A canceled author isn't really very different from a boycotted company; it's a moral vote by a like-minded mass of humans who together value their version of morality more than that author's impacts. It's really not that difficult to not be an outspoken asshole.
Saying "I don't want to read this book" or "I don't want to play this game" because you don't like the author's values is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's very different from, say, government ban lists. So what if someone doesn't want to read Harry Potter or watch Weinstein movies anymore?
Back to the first question: why ought greatness be the measure of a person, instead of righteousness? Our species is largely full of mediocre apes with mediocre thoughts who nonetheless manage to coexist and thrive to some degree, yet are all too often led astray and into peril and evil by the "great" Machiavellian few among them. How does that help anything at all?
What we're Nietzsche's opinions on politics/women? I'm not surprised based on the bit of his work that I read that he has some unappealing thoughts on women, but am surprised to here his politics may be problematic as well(aside from the whole nazi affiliation thing - which as I understand is a misrepresentation of his work by his sister and her Nazi husband).
Nietzsche was ultimately pro authoritarianism and anti liberalism. His view on women is fairly standard nineteenth century misogyny, like how he "compliments" them by saying they are more clever and wicked than men.
You missed Heidegger being an outright Nazi, and not even a rank-and-file one.
Not being able to relate to an other if they are not pure is a failure in having strong enough ego boundaries. High functioning requires complexification of our boundaries; a confidence in deciding what goes in and what doesn't on the fly without requiring rigid codification of rules, which ultimately requires a confidence in ourselves; what we are and what we are not.
All-or-nothing purity is a way of keeping things simple and reducing the complex calculus the reality demands. Not saying this in a demeaning manner, because we all do this in varying degrees. But if one can't tell if they are being a "bad" person or not for making use of a "bad" person's valid idea/product, that could as well be a shortcoming of their own self-conceptualization than the "badness" of the other.
Terrible people can say good things, but there are a million good people out there saying good things that you could listen to instead.
Why spend the limited time you have in this world on consuming the works of terrible people? There is more out there than you could possibly experience in a lifetime. Why not dedicate that time to people who are not awful?
A problem with privileging "good" is that it is socially constructed, and social constructions of good can sometimes reveal themselves rather painfully to be fads of the time which ironically are anything but good, such as Lysenkoism [1].
On the contrary, real insights tend to stand the test of time, which is why Nietzsche continues to remain relevant and timeless. Lysenkoism, not so much.
You should have a strong moral compass, and you should be able to tell right from wrong, and awful from decent. And you should let that compass guide you in everything you do, including who you give the precious resource that is your attention to.
Framing it as "other people consider awful" makes it sound like you do not actually agree that awful people are all that bad, and that is a moral failing on your part.
Everybody has done and said awful things. If you don't want to read the works of sinners, then you won't be able to learn from anyone.
My example highlighted folks like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, unrepentant slaveholders who happen to be keystones of American democracy. They said and did awful things in life. Do you think therefore that you have nothing to learn from them?
I guess different people draw lines at different levels. And it is a personal decision. One extreme would be to just care about the art and not the artist at all (especially if the artist is long dead and lived in a completely different era) and the other extreme would be to only support artists who we think are nice people. I suppose most people would fall somewhere in between.
We still celebrate conquerers like Genghis Khan after hundreds of years, even though they brought a ton of misery (especially Genghis, who was known for his cruelty) to the people they conquered and often to their own people. The pyramids, great wall of China etc were all built on the death of tens of thousands of workers.
Sometimes the more we learn, the more depressing it gets (Ignorance is bliss? lol)
Maybe it’s just a normal thing as you get older, but knowing the company mistreated people sucks the fun out of it for me. I’m not completely against playing the stuff I’ve already paid for, but they won’t get another penny from me.
I’d like to have a database that tracks the C-Suite employees. I’d personally boycott any company that hires any of them. Their careers should be over IMO. I wish we could take away Bobby’s money too, but that’ll never happen.
We should totally not give our money to shitty companies. But global commerce is so intertwined that it would quickly become very difficult to buy anything if we start closely looking at every company we give money to.
I don't know what the solution is. Boycotting is a start.
Yeah, it really sucks and points to problems with our weak UN and world governments.
Sure, we may have somewhat high manufacturing standards in the US, but take a step into foreign soil and all the sudden all the rules are out the window. With companies specifically using countries with the weakest safety regs to cut costs.
It's why walmart keeps getting busted for using slave/child labor.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to feel weird about watching old DVDs of the Cosby Show, for example. With the "benefit" of context, the vibes are sort of irrevocably off.
Better comparison would be R. Kelly who, like Cosby, was actually convicted of what he was accused of, and did end up having a lot of radio stations (and other media contexts) stop using his music. Not all, but a good number.
I googled around, and ... has R. Kelly been convicted? Searching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Kelly for the string "convict" yields only the sentence saying "R. Kelly had not ever actually been convicted of any crime", quoting a news article from 2019. There is mention of a "sentencing trial", but the cited article (from Dec 2020) says he has pled not guilty and that evidence will be presented, which also sounds like it hasn't reached the conviction stage. And recent news results don't mention convictions (other than "If convicted") either.
Uh, damn, you're right. Honestly, he's been in jail for so long now- 2.5 years and 22 counts against him- that I wrongly assumed/forgot he wasn't/Mandela effected it.
At the time of this writing I had 13 upvotes for a mostly wrong take. Still maintain that the jail time puts Kelly closer to Cosby than Jackson.
Aside, but there seems to be a much higher level of collective cognitive dissonance with Michael Jackson, perhaps because of his stature in popular culture. I'm guilty of this myself - my brain sets a higher bar for evidence, perhaps unreasonably.
Yeah, his music is so deeply ingrained in my mind that the "new" information doesn't stick. I have to many fond memories associated with his music and art that it always takes a few seconds for my mind to change course.
Yeah, same. As a lifelong fan of the genre, I think R. Kelly's work is boring pastiche, almost entirely forgettable (notable exception, "I believe I can fly" does have some nostalgic value). So it's never been a challenge to put his music away...
I think for many people, but certainly not all, the wider culture of an escapist work is important. Looking at a fanciful image doesn't automagically distract you, there needs to be some amount of collaboration between your mind and the media you're consuming. You need to accept what it offers as an alternative. That can be harder for people when they learn about how things were really made. It would be hard to take a work arguing against slavery seriously, for instance, if it used slavery to produce it.
I also think that these kinds of products, because they are indivisible creative works, suffer from rotting from within. Where you might be able to use the "reasonable" parts of Facebook or Google, once you start to think about a core element of a narrative as being in-geunine or compromised, that can undermine the other elements of the story.
Especially in this golden age of game development, I think there are many other alternatives to Blizzard's games that allow people to think less and escape more.
You buy a game not just to play it but also to support developers. If you don't give a shit about this part you can always pirate it. By telling the company you will no longer use their product you are sending a clear cut message about that you a paying customer will no longer use their product.
The thing that gets me about “virtue signalling” is this built-in assumption that no one does anything earnestly, and that every action is performed according to how it’ll be received.
I just don’t believe that’s how the vast majority of people live their lives. OP did what they did because the status quo made them uncomfortable. People don’t have to be soldiers in a mythical cultural war, sometimes they’re just people. Whenever anyone invokes “virtual signalling” I think they’re inadvertently explaining a lot more of their own world view than they are anyone else’s.
> The thing that gets me about “virtue signalling” is this built-in assumption that no one does anything earnestly, and that every action is performed according to how it’ll be received.
This is because the people who use the term 'virtue signalling' consider morality to be transactional and cannot comprehend the idea that someone might actually be virtuous or have moral standards beyond which they will not tread. The term itself has now become its own 'virtue signal' to people who hold a particular viewpoint.
No one here said that not a single person in the world doesn't do it just to feel good inside but any person that shares this stuff on any kind social platform clearly does it because they crave approval from others.
Aren't you simply signalling your own moral purity by projecting the accusation back onto an accuser, as though it were a league table of moral status?
There was a time when one had to actually do things to be virtuous.
Feelings alone do not make a rational standpoint. This ex-pressing (pressing outwards) of our feelings was the problem of romanticism, and it has to be balanced with what the reality tells back at us.
In other words, people don't seem to be saying they shouldn't have shared their feelings, but when they did they should have been ready to receive the criticism especially on logical results of their reasoning.
Not using products you've already purchased and enjoyed is most likely not an act of virtue, it probably changes nothing materially in the world to make it a better place. However, it is a display of purity in protest, which might inspire others to take action to the extent they are impressed by it, but it mostly feels egosyntonic for the person who does this demonstration.
Hence the criticism of virtue signaling; it is not the virtue bit, it is the signaling bit, divorced from the essence of being virtuous.
Definitely not - rationality is about a realistic view on the world and effective, perhaps even optimal, acts to achieve your goals, but it's completely, absolutely orthogonal to the nature of these goals. The goals, or perhaps "utility function" in formal terminology are essentially arbitrary from the perspective of rationality; it's generally rational to better understanding of your goals is very useful to effectively meet them, but a key principle is that "the utility function is not up for grabs", rationality is about effectiveness in obtaining what you want, but it does not and cannot constrain what is it that you want.
So IMHO games are a really good example - buying and playing games is a rational allocation of time and money if and only if the outcome (or, to be accurate, the sum of outcomes over long term) of playing games is more fulfilling than the alternatives; and it seems quite plausible that the enjoyment gaining from playing games may be very different for two completely rational actors and thus even from a completely rational standpoint they should make different decisions on whether playing games is a waste of time and money or a great use of them.
Exactly my point: if the current behavior of a company reduces the enjoyment you get from products that you previously bought from that company, you are both justified and rational not to want to use those products, and even to say "I do not want to use these products anymore."
No rational argument can change the original non-rational utility function. And no, there's no "virtue signalling" involved.
I don't understand this at all. You think it's rational to avoid things that one finds fun and interesting? That seems like an extremely suboptimal way to navigate through life.
I feel like any debate over the term “virtual signaling“ is missing the meta game (along with people who virtue signal or accuse others of virtue signalling).
Like there’s an evil genius(es) with ulterior motives behind it all.
> Like there’s an evil genius(es) with ulterior motives behind it all.
In a sense, I think there is. Instead of a cabal, it is just our collective intelligence getting lost in attractive pockets of irrationality.
I think virtue signaling could be as old as humans, because there are social and psychological benefits to being seen virtuous, without paying the costs of being virtuous.
The more it is demonstrated that people can get away with it, the more we are trained to consider that as an alternative, that we can get away with it too, and collectively we converge to a pit of empty appearances.
That said calling out something as virtue signaling also has failure modes; it is ultimately an accusation of duplicitousness and we can't really be sure of people's intentions. It can also have a chilling effect on genuine enactments of virtue.
That's because it is. The question to ask, of any argument, is "so what?": what do you want to do about it. The "so what" for an accusation of "virtue signalling" is to dismiss the original statement without any further consideration.
In recursive irony, those who use the phrase "virtue signaling" are also virtue signaling, and the it is, in itself a shibboleth for people of a certain political persuasion.
Calling out virtue signalling is useful to make people realize that judging a situation or person without having all the facts is damaging to society all around the world. This contributes a lot to the hipocrisy we see in the west nowadays which influences the entire world because of technology.
The outrage generated by all the mass media is not good as far as I'm concerned and it's good to remind people of that.
I was sexually abused as a child, and having learned in the last week that Blizzard management has actively protected and covered up the sexual abuse and harassment that some of their high level employees have enacted on others, I have felt extremely sick to my stomach and it has been highly triggering for me.
Seeing that they're making literally no changes at all to management or executive leadership, I'm having a hard time describing the rage that I feel inside. These people who knew and covered up the harm deserve prison, not just being fired.
I've been a huge fan of Blizzard games since I was a child. When I see Blizzard pushing back by aiming to crush internal protest, these feelings I have about this corrupt anything good I ever felt for these games. These people in leadership positions and the HR department that covered this up are criminals and should be seen as such.
I hear you. We need a better way of society to punish the individuals. The company is made up of mostly innocent people. Interns new to the industry, people that just got promoted and had dinner with their family last night to celebrate, and the actual victims of this behavior.
I never feel good about boycotting a company. I certainly understand the people that do though.
This is a really awesome point, and one that I hadn't considered before.
This is how I normally find new books to read (by following authors) for some reason it just hadn't occurred to me to follow individuals in the gaming space. (Except for the Mode 7 Games, which put out Frozen Synapse, the awesome turn-based RTS [0] )
I'm curious how you follow people when so many games are made by teams of people - how do you find them, how do you decide which ones to follow, etc. I'd love to hear more
Western gamedevs are almost universally on twitter. Pick the ones whose contributions to the games you enjoy you think mattered most (narrative designer of a story you liked, or combat designer of a gameplay loop you liked, or lead programmer of a technically robust complex game, 3D artist of a game with beautiful environments, etc). Follow them and their recommendations! Ditch them when they turn out to be predatory/abusive assholes.
I'm leaning the same direction although I can't bring myself to leave Starcraft. But who knows. For those unaware there's a new company Frost Giant Studios founded by some of the best game developers from Blizzard and they're devoted to creating the next big RTS [0]. One can speculate about their choice to depart from Blizzard and their reasons are probably myriad but it can't be unrelated to the horrible culture there. Here's an interview with some of them on The Pylon Show hosted by Artosis [1].
I've slowly stopped playing video games after college... but I deleted my Blizzard account after Blizzard doubled down on Blitzchung. Banning the casters for six months... that still gets me riled up. It makes zero sense to ban the casters for the player's conduct.
I deleted my blizzard account at the time as well and I had most of the products they had ever offered. Aside from missing playing starcraft2 occasionally, I’m not sorry.
These companies are organizations who can change rapidly as management and staff turn over. Blizzard from last year isn’t the same as blizzard from 5 years ago isn’t the same as blizzard from 20 years ago.
The veneration of brands based on their inheritance from what the brand used to be distorts people’s view of reality, and leads to brands that feel they don’t have to continue in terms of excellence.
Personally I think the start of WoW was the end of an age for Blizzard. Similarly the release of Fallout Shelter was the end of an age for Bethesda. Beyond those points the organizations were distorted by the success and profit they encountered there, and basically shifted to new companies with different priorities yet still holding the brand name.
It's a great game, but if you are concerned about Freedom in Hong Kong, Grinding Gear Games is owned by Tencent, so you are still sending money to support an authoritarian regime that is still finishing up their latest installment of ethnic cleansing and re-education camps.
No they’re very easy to avoid. Just don’t play games by ten cent owned companies. There are a lot of companies out there and a lot of games - more than you or I could conceivably have time to play.
And almost none of them is any good. I like story heavy games and can tolerate some pretty bad art and graphics for a good story. Unfortunately most games these days seem to be terrible on both counts.
Path of Exile 2 is still in development, you probably meant Path of Exile? By the way, they just released a new free expansion so it's a great time to check the game out. It's considered by many as the greatest ARPG.
Hades is a better Diablo than any of the Diablo games imo. I feel like it's the perfection of the mechanics that diablo's dungeon runs were supposed to be.
Hades definitely has more interesting game mechanics, but it's more of a Roguelike ARPG than a classic ARPG.
I also find its enemy design and atmosphere lacking in consistency and quality. It just doesn't have the dark, dangerous, and foreboding feel that Diablo 1 and 2 have mastered.
Yes, i agree but then again i still feel it nailed down what the addictive parts of diablo were and put them into a far better game and context. That's why I maintain it's a better Diablo than any diablo or POE.
I got hooked on Diablo, and the memory of anticipating Diablo II (for which I built a computer) is almost tangible. WoW was the next drug/escape, and Hearthstone my last Blizzard slot-machine until I became a parent. I never thought I’d move away from games, and now I don’t miss them, turning instead to gardening and exploring with my kid. I still have a lot of emotion bound up in that game time, and perhaps they were useful in the absence of a counselor (in person or through books) who could help me cultivate a sense of purpose.
I still play a couple games (Hell Let Loose as a 3-person tank crew is great) but only as a way to spend time with distant friends.
One thing about the non-rts Blizzard games, is they're basically all loot piñatas. Diablo 1/2/3, WoW, even Hearthstone to some extent are basically loot piñatas that prey on addictive behaviors in very much the same way that loot boxes and freemium mobile games do. Personally, I prefer a well crafted single player story over that sort of 'game'. And if you have your ear to the ground it's clear that they're going to make Diablo 4 a real Genshin Impact loot box nightmare as well. I don't know what demographic they think they're selling to anymore but it's sad.
I just discovered Genshin Impact and enjoying the story line and combat system quite a bit. The artwork and voice acting is some of the prettiest I've ever seen in a game. What makes it a loot box nightmare? TBH Diablo 2 was a lot worse, the rarest boss drops had the ability to give a player orders of magnitude more power. GI loot scattered around the world is completely unremarkable kind of like the coins dropped by regular mobs.
I know about the wishing system but that seems to be a completely optional mechanic that allows people to gamble with money, which seems fair for a F2P game. But can be skipped and is not essential to the gameplay.
The Blizzard that made Diablo and Diablo 2 is not the same as the Blizzard of the today, the key people have moved, so I don’t see the issue with playing their older offline games.
Ironic, the mention of those two. They've both been (or are about to be) re-released (and - as I've heard - have replaced the originals in the launchers). As such, they are both still revenue generating products for ACTI.
They don’t really care that much about the American market anymore really. Something like 90% of League of Legends players are in China. The mobile gaming market is massive over there, hence Diablo Immortal.
China does not care about the West’s uproar over most things. Blizzard does not care if you buy Diablo 4, they care if the East buys Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal.
Less tongue-in-cheek, I'm really not sure it's China's responsibility to ensure good working conditions in the foreign companies that produce the goods they want to buy, and I'm not sure it's the west's responsibility to ensure good working conditions for the Chinese workers who produce the goods we buy either. I feel I may be in the minority with that view though.
I don't entirely disagree, pointing out that their workers are at least the producing country's responsibility is fair, since some seem to forget.
But the consuming country is still participating in the exploitation knowingly. It's not like we're unaware, so it's definitely a conscious choice being made to ignore it. It's worth considering the weight of that, since being loud about it has been cause for quite a lot of positive change over the decades.
It's not like I think someone who buys something made with exploitation is a monster, or even shares much of the blame at all, but it is a choice you can make to support less exploitation here and there and I think that's worth doing.
I think it's important to add that with China t's not simply poor working conditions (happens in other countries too, but CCP on a vast scale and what we're talking about).
It's forced labor and genocide, which I think we have a fundamental human obligation to do the smallest bare minimum of trying to avoid those goods (like cotton). That should rise above states and politics.
Though tougher action that could make a difference of course has big consequences and a big ethical dilemma for sure. But a boycot seems like the most basic bare minimum.
Of course it is. My god, there have been like 100+ documentaries and an uncountable number of news articles and literature written about this exact topic for like the last 30 years.
Can you explain why you chose «dystopian» here? Did you maybe mean to indicate a sick irony?
I want to lead off with saying I don't want __anyone__ exploited, but this more or less is what US consumers have and continue to do world wide, and I'm not sure that dystopian is the most accurate word for it.
I'm not fully convinced that the original comment that Blizzard wants to sell in China is entirely accurate (there is truth of course, but somehow I think they'd really feel if the American market lost confidence), but dystopian is a pretty specific word for me, and just curious what you are meaning to communicate.
I can lend some color to that. Blizzard created a modestly successful MOBA to compete with League of Legends and it just couldn’t make a dent in LoL’s Asia numbers, so they slowly put the game into maintenance mode (effectively given up on it).
Diablo Immortal is them outsourcing development of a flagship franchise to a Chinese company Netease to develop a mobile version. Netease mobile games are really big overseas. That to me is similar to Facebook outsourcing to Bytedance to make a social network with China in mind first. There’s a world of difference between having an office China and literally handing over your IP to a Chinese company. It’s a big deal.
It’s not they don’t want American’s money, everything adds to the bottom line, but China is showing itself to be bigger markets for video games (just as Hollywood is seeing that they are becoming a bigger market for movies).
It’s a very real thing, and forward decisions are being heavily influenced with that market in mind first and foremost.
Edit:
To put a final stamp on my main point, if the Chinese people were to be offended by these allegations, I can promise you Blizzard would turn the world over and rectify it over night. The same way they got John Cena to apologize in Mandarin to not fuck with the Fast and Furious release in China.
We matter very little at this point to these industries.
>Blizzard created a modestly successful MOBA to compete with League of Legends and it just couldn’t make a dent in LoL’s Asia numbers, so they slowly put the game into maintenance mode (effectively given up on it).
Are you talking about DOTA2? It was hugely successful, both from a gamer's perspective, as well as in the eSports world.
How are Chinese people benefiting from Blizzard hiding sexual harassment allegations? From a pure workload perspective, most Chinese people would probably consider Blizzard to be relatively lax.
Same - I was a heavy Hearthstone player since beta, and was ranked within the top 500 for about six months towards the end when I was pushing to compete. But the Blitzchung incident left such a bad taste in my mouth that I quit the game and haven't returned to it. They didn't just penalize him for what he did, they BURIED him and effectively ended his career.
If he'd held up a sign for ending apartheid in another country he probably would have gotten some small penalty, it was clearly motivated by Blizzard's relationship with China. And it was so over the top and unprecedented that a ton of casters and pro players spoke out against it.
I also haven't purchased any new Blizzard products since Blitzchung. I uninstalled the Activision Blizzard game launcher last night, hopefully others are doing the same and adding to the dent in their KPI scores and financial bottom line.
>Ie why would Blizzard be okay with workers unionizing for better work conditions? It seems unlikely that would favor Blizzard in the short term[1].
Well, if everyone reading about Blizzard's malfeasance decides to not do business with them, as some commenters in this thread are doing, then they will suffer a problem in the short term as well.
AFAICT, this is one of those counter-intuitive cases. Mission-driven companies tend to (AFAIK) do better than pure profit-driven companies; similarly, AFAIK, companies that take morality seriously tend to do better. A significant aspect of this (IMHO) is employee empowerment, which relates to the common theories as to why Silicon Valley happened rather than the Boston corridor (legal situation advantageous to employees).
So it makes "logical sense" IFF short-term improvements/non-losses of control, power, and position lead to profit, and that's not something that's logically provable. Rather, that's something that's got to be observed experimentally, and AFAIK it ...isn't.
If your goal-metric is money, you run into both what SMBC is pointing out, and Goodhart's law. If your goal-metric is something else, money is an "easy" by-product.
> how can we work to promote moral behavior?
IMHO sociological studies examining this. "Seek money, make nothing. Seek to make, get money twice", or something.
> Mission-driven companies tend to (AFAIK) do better than pure profit-driven companies; similarly, AFAIK, companies that take morality seriously tend to do better.
Do you have links to any studies backing this up? The idealist in me really wants this to be true, but the cynic in me believes capitalism is set up to reward the most ruthless, unscrupulous people.
My hope is that I can contribute in my small way to making moral behavior more profitable than immoral. IE voting with my wallet.
I'll also vote for policies and representatives to enact sensible (opinions will differ, obviously) legislation to enforce better morality and better safeguarding of the commons, especially with respect to externalities -- as I see those as a major source of the failings of capitalism.
Beyond that, I don't really know. And I'll readily admit that looking around at where we as a society are and where we seem to be headed, especially with respect to things like climate change, those seem like very small measures. I just don't know what else to do.
> I for one will never again fire up those games that I loved so much
That is a very confusing argument to me.
Not only you’ve already given your money to them and received your end of the transaction, whether you make use of it or not, is this the most robust way to conceptualize the identity of a corporation? No temporal limitations, no account for the actual people that make up the corporation at a given time?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying keep buying their games or give support to what they do but if the people who made your beloved Diablo aren’t the same people responsible for today’s shitshow, what’s the point of your gesture?
The inverse concern applies too, VW, IBM, Hugo Boss among many other had affiliations with Nazi Germany. Should they be condemned today, if so for how long more? What determines the cutoff?
This is a classic Theseus’s ship problem, if you change every board of a ship one board at a time, is it still the same ship, how do you define the identity functions.
Sounds like this is less about the identity of the corporation you affiliated with and more about identity of you through what you choose to/not to affiliate with.
> Sounds like this is less about the identity of the corporation you affiliated with and more about identity of you through what you choose to/not to affiliate with.
There is certainly an element of this, I am sure. But frankly it is that I don't want to give them even the millionth-of-a-cent of value that they could derive from my +1 to their active player numbers. I don't want to contribute anything to their advantage.
I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with demonstrations of purity in protest, for the record, as long as we’re honest about what they are.
The Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] strikes again. The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.
This effort seems like it's part of the ruthless approach to controlling costs that slowly strangle a company from within.
I believe WoW is the #2 property (after CoD) at Acti-Blizzard and it's clearly changed from one of delivering a game to simply extracting as much money as possible from each customer much like how almost all mobile games do.
The state of California's complaint is bad. I mean really bad. The fact that 3-4 different people from AB all released different statements in the last week should tell you exactly how bad it is. That's classic panic mode. There should only be one.
This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits.
Honestly, the heads of J Allen Brack and Bobby Kotick in particular should roll over this lawsuit.
EDIT: commenters have noted (correctly) that I overlooked Overwatch. This was a significant release but it seems to also have waned in popularity and Overwatch 2 is inextricably going in some weird PVE direction.
Other than that you have a poor received Diablo sequel, a series of lackluster to bad WoW expansions, a disastrous Warcraft 3 remaster and complete abandonment of the RTS genre that propelled them to success in the first place.
WC3 Reforged ("Refunded") was significant in that it was not only underwhelming and plagued with problems it made the original game worse with a forced download and loss of functionality.
The most significant change however was Blizzard not wanting a repeat of missing the MOBA boat with Dota 2 by adding a condition that all the IP for third-party maps belong to Blizzard, completely killing that ecosystem.
A note that Jeff Kaplan the director of the title resigned in May. He was heavily involved from its inception and throughout the development of Overwatch 2, and was a huge part of the community.
As a former Overwatch player, you're right. But my (so far glad to say mostly unfounded) fear is that Jeff "Tigole Bitties" Kaplan was part of the problem we're seeing play out the past few weeks.
So far Kaplan hasn't shown up as even an incidental participant in any of the photos or group chats, and hasn't been named as someone who brushed off requests for help. The Titan team that he lead prior to it turning into OW was by all reports a toxic mess for totally unrelated reasons, though.
At 19? Getting an engineering degree and all the hours of work that entailed while avoiding getting roped into MMOs by classmates as if it was Corrupted Blood.
- you give someone shit for their nickname they adopted as an 18-19 year old kid
- you boast about how much of a hard working kid you were (no mention of the less pleasant things I'm pretty sure you did)
- your best idea of a comeback to all this was to randomly dig up an abandoned side project of mine from like seven years ago and threaten me not to support it.
Haven't played Overwatch myself, but isn't it very similar to the other games that came before it?
From a layman's perspective, it seems like a copy of Paladins, TF2, etc.
Upon it's release, it didn't seem like something original (at least not to me), but rather something to compete with the unique games other studios had already created.
As a 500hr+ Overwatch player and 1000hr+ TF2 plater, I also thought this at first. While Overwatch was certainly heavily inspired by TF2, it plays considerably differently. Overwatch has six players per team each playing one of 32 different unique heroes. TF2 has 12 players playing one of 9 classes. The abilities feel much more impactful in Overwatch. TF2 was all about supporting your engineer and racing for Uber, while Overwatch is much more about positioning and mechanics (though ult economy matters too). Removing the ammo mechanic entirely was brilliant IMO as well. Anyway, just a few cents from someone who has played a lot of both of those games.
That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.
It's a bit like Paladins. It has elements of TF2.
Regardless, compared to games in genres like battle royale or real time strategy, or more traditional first person shooter, Overwatch is pretty lonely. I don't want to sound like I'm frothing at the mouth over their product, but I feel that it's well beyond any other first person game in terms of the variety of heroes to play and the huge scope of the balancing act that entails. The 30-some pickable heroes all play like their own game to some extent.
2D top-down MOBA games have huge numbers of heroes and a lot of variety, but I think that's an easier lift to balance in that type of game and with that type of control scheme. Other 3D "hero shooters" opt for less variety between heroes or a smaller number of them, or rely on other gameplay elements to help balance things.
I think that the design effort that it took to produce Overwatch is tremendous, and it isn't easily replaced or replicated, though it will be eventually as long as game design keeps on marching forward.
I'd say that the hero variety wasn't a good thing honestly, they never did a great job of balancing it. They shut down duplicate heros, then the game lurched from one overpowered unpopular meta to another until it got stuck on goats meta and they gave up and forced 222 team comps, which is when I stopped playing. There's a good reason other hero shooters kept the scope low, noone knows how to balance a high scope game for all levels of competitive play, and it's likely that you can't.
They perfected and introduced a lot of concepts that are now part of the genre of competitive FPSs. As much as I thought it was just a me-too kind of game before playing it, once I did manage to play it, I had to admit they went beyond what would be expected. They tried a lot of novel things.
I do think Activision-Blizzard is a shell of what it once was, but that game was definitely a positive, not something they just phoned in.
> The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.
Hearthstone was release March 11, 2014. Overwatch was released May 24, 2016. Both of these were hugely popular titles.
Damn, I'm not an Apple fanboy but that soundclip by Jobs makes so much sense; I've seen that play out like a hundred times. Here's a related one by a former IBM CEO:
> hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.
Let's talk about Heroes of the Storm. Not as a counter to your argument, but as a perfect illustration of your points.
First thing to know is that HotS started out as a Starcraft II arcade game. It uses the Starcraft II engine. Nothing new there.
Next, for those who don't know, HotS is a MOBA. Just like DotA (and DOTA 2), and League of Legends. DotA was a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, created by the community. League of Legends is a standalone game inspired by DotA.
In HotS, all the player heroes are Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo heroes. It's free-to-play. After a brief legal spat with Valve over rights to the name DotA and Blizzard trademarks, the two companies settled.
It's a decent game, but it's just repackaging Blizzard assets for a type of game that emerged out of Blizzard in the first place. To me, HotS is exactly the sort of thing a company coasting on its franchise would release.
Epitaph: AB completely abandoned the game three years after release, to the complete surprise of the small esports community that had grown up.
>This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits.
it doesn't unless you know the exact peopel hired are the union busting ones. It sounds like this is their HR consultants.
People really need to read past their title. This is a century old firm that has been on all sides of the fence for a signifigant part of American history. They don't have an agenda to regress society (no more than the legal system does).
If the adults in the room have 'taken over' Acti-Blizzard, it wouldn't have been ran like a frathouse.
The reality is that over the years, Activision has kept their hands off their golden goose, and that the company's rot originates with the original management team. Notice how most of the harassment, and the retaliation that followed took place under the leadership of Mike Morheim (And that he's been personally called out for the latter.)
Clickbait title for a highly opinonated piece that would never see the light of day in a respectable publication like the Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, Economist, etc. WilmerHale is a well-known top-100 law firm with a long history -- it's definitely not a "notorious union-busting firm." I'm flagging this story because it doesn't belong on the front page of HN, IMHO.
A quote from the article: '"Wilmerhale’s own site advertises its expertise as "union awareness and avoidance."'
Therefore, yes, it is accurate to define them as a "union-busting firm". They fulfill other roles than just that, but they do act as union-busters, and they even describe themselves as such.
Maybe it's accurate. But isn't it irrelevant? Based on my read of the article, WilmerHale was almost certainly brought in to review Activision Blizzard's policies relating to sexual harassment and discrimination with a view towards tightening them up. This is a common thing for a big firm like WilmerHale to be hired to do. If so, the headline and the article's description of WilmerHale's "union busting" is just a gratuitous attempt to bias readers.
It's not a "union busting" law firm tho. They do so much more than that, and it's specified who and what they hired from the firm (it's not the people at amazon).
And no, it's no coincidence when the state sues them that they hire the best firm they can find.
It's as accurate as calling Walmart "an expert on firearms", just because SOME stores sell firearms in certain cities.
WilliamHale covers just about every area of law you can think of. Saying they are here to purely union-bust is a huge exaggeration (and outright wrong once you see who they _actually_ hired).
I am unable to make the connection between WilmerHale, Pinkerton, and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre (a la 1929) as there seems to be none. Are you implying WilmerHale has a connection to the type of notoriety of a gang slaying?
While WilmerHale may not have a direct connection to actually cracking heads open, their current methods were picked directly from the Pinkertons in the 1970s.
There's nothing "notorious" about a maintstream legal practice representing corporations against unions, and "busting" is pejorative. It's opinion click-bait.
yes... and there's no proof that this is what they were hired for. The people they hired aren't in that sector.
I'm actually starting to doubt how many people here hold jobs in specializations. We should understand already that prgramming isn't equivalent to IT fixing a friend's computer. You're doing the equivalent here with lawyers.
Union busting is mostly discussed from a sociological/historical perspective not a legal one. (The wikipedia article provided mentions that it encompasses both legal and illegal activities as well as subtle and overt practices)
Not sure what "I am doing the equivalent of" to lawyers. (Other than legalistic ones; those that adhere to western legalism)
"Union awareness and avoidance" does not sound like representing corporations against unions. Rather it sounds like representing corporations against their own workforce to "avoid" their forming of a union. I.e. union busting.
With all due respect, this view is conversely weak willed, and complacently takes the side of Acti-Blizzard.
The firm directly states they help companies with "union avoidance."
Even charitable interpretations here support "busting" the aims of the union. This isn't an issue where "both sides" are equal in moral standing when one is advocating for better working conditions and the other is legally fighting for more profit
and this view takes the side of someone who hasn't read the article
> Activision has called in the experts to put down the claims of sexual harassment and discrimination and stop the protests by workers. Activision has hired WilmerHale. WilmerHale has been hired to “review” Activision’s policies.
and if you look further
>An email to Bloomberg Law, also revealed that the firm has appointed its anti-discrimination practice chair, Brenda Lee, and special counsel Tania Faransso to work on the probe with the company citing that it has “extensive experience assessing workplace culture and helping organisations strengthen their workplace environments”.
if you care enough to find the people who did the union busting at amazong you'll see they are different people. Trying to compare one lawyer to another is like comparing an anesthesiologist to a cardiologist Just because they are both "doctors" doesn't mean they understand or work on the same stuff.
I'm not sympathetic of Activision, but I don't appreciate yellow journalism full stop.
WilmerHale is not a notorious union-busting firm. The older set might know their work from A Civil Action, and their grandparents might remember the phrase that turned the red scare, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"[1]
The marketing material is unfortunate, though, and the connection with Amazon labor work is notable.
What does any of that have to do with whether or not the firm is notorious for union-busting? Representing a polluting corporation against citizens suing it for making them sick is 100% compatible with busting unions.
[Originally I had gotten this backwards and stated that WilmerHale represented the citizens]
Whoops, I got that 100% wrong. I skimmed the section in wikipedia too fast. Perhaps I could make an argument that, as currently worded, it's a bit too easy to misparse.
Their Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about union-busting. If you are "notorious" for something in this day and age, it should at least show up in ten paragraphs of Wikipedia.
The main controversy mentioned there is them representing people who are held in Guantanamo under suspicion of terrorism. It seems more like Wilmer Hale is a huge bunch of lawyers doing all sorts of things, than some union-busting hacks.
Anybody can edit the page to add citations and info. I checked the last year of edits and nobody has done it except for someone, probably based on this news cycle, simply adding the word “anti-union” with no citations, which was of course rightfully reverted.
10 paragraphs? That's your standard? What a joke! The Exxon Valdez only gets three sentences on Exxon's wikipedia page. It costs peanuts to bribe a wikipedian editor to manage your corporation's reputation and suppress controversies on wikipedia. This is standard practice. How anybody thinks a corporation's wikipedia page is neutral territory is beyond me.
I read their statement as “there should be some mention of the notoriety within 10 paragraphs,” not that there should be 10 paragraphs that explain it.
You can also look at the edit history of a page. Are there unethical removals of information there, in your opinion? You can even link to the edit that removed them, like this one that removed some juvenile vandalism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/102148089...
That paragraph calls it "one of the worst oil spills in American history," and links to an entire article about it. What underhanded editing do you think has happened here?
The decision to only have three sentences about it. The decision to hide those three sentences under the "History" heading so there is no hint of it in the table of contents. The decision to not even have a "Controversies" section to the page. The decision to not have any photographs of the aftermath. Don't be so credulous. Wikipedians have been caught selling their PR services numerous times before, and doubtlessly get away with it even more often than that.
Contrast this with what BP's page looks like and it's obvious Exxon payed top dollar while BP's PR team cheaped out (gave up?). BP's page has a paragraph dedicated to the Deepwater spill in the introduction section, has a "Violations and accidents" section in the table of contents, and has "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill" in the table of contents as well. And that section? It has a dozen or so paragraphs, not just three lame sentences. The page has several photographs of the aftermath. BP's page looks like an authentic wikipedia page, while Exxon's page was obviously bought and paid for by Exxon's PR. Exxon's page should look like BP's, but doesn't.
And since you mention the article dedicated to the spill, lets compare those too. The Deep Water Horizon page is 4 times as long. The Deep Water Horizon page gets prominent links from BP's main page, at the top of the section titled "Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill"
> Main article: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
> See also: Deepwater Horizon explosion, Deepwater Horizon litigation, and Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust
BP's page also has an infobox all about the spill: "This article is part of a series about the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill"
Exxon's page? The link for the spill's dedicated page is hidden as the 4th link in one of the three sentences that page has about the spill:
> On March 24, 1989, in what is regarded as one of the worst oil spills in American history,[9] a tanker owned by Exxon, the Exxon Valdez, crashed into Bligh Reef, [[Exxon Valdez oil spill|spilling]] its cargo of over ten million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska
What an absolute fucking joke. I can't believe you defend this.
I remain unconvinced. You didn't actually provide any examples of the Exxon article being edited nefariously. And the reason the BP article is better is because their PR people gave up? Nah.
They're both awful companies doing terrible things to the earth. I don't need to believe in your wikipedia conspiracy to have a low opinion of them.
The BP and Exxon pages are like night and day. If you don't see a fundamental difference between the two, you have your head buried firmly in the sand.
If you're someone who craves moral certainty at the expense of honest inquiry, a person/company/historical figure cannot be both virtuous and flawed. They must be all one or all the other.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, I guess that the primary reason they were hired were their connection to government. When you are sued by the government, it useful to have lawyers that has experienced from working inside the government (and possible have political connections). The connection with Amazon labor work could be part of the decision, but I wonder if there aren't then more optimal choices if that was blizzards primary concern.
Contextually, ActiBlizz is responding to the DFEH situation with a new biglaw firm.
Will ActiBlizz use WH's union-response services? I would be surprised if they don't. WH will likely sell guidance about what can be legally done to chill early unionization pressures. If unionization efforts really get rolling at ActiBlizz, no doubt they will spend more at WH.
What is good: WH's tactics at Amazon, AL were monitored and reported as disgusting. If they repeat those at ActiBlizz, there may be pressures for regulators to increase protections against corporate interference of unionization efforts.
I heard the union also tried to get 400+ ballots thrown out. Does anyone know anything more about that - were they ever counted? Or was it Amazon that protested ballots?
yup. Unfortunately I think the clickbait headline did its job. Even here on HN where I'd expect better. I guess no site is immune to kneejerk reactions.
The problem I see with them is the brain drain if the influential people leave. They have options at other companies, and if enough people leave Blizzard they may be stuck. But this is just me looking from the outside in. This also signals they are scared of them unionizing.
I know we don't want to say this but there might be a possibility some of the talent secretly are indeed sexist (wouldn't surprise me in the gaming world) and thus actually prefer to stay at a place that preserves the male dominated culture. That might be part of the strategy behind activisions anti walkout move here. Just a thought (I don't know).
I'm really interested to see what happens here. Amazon busted the efforts of people with few options, people who could be threatened with bullshit/propaganda. I wonder if big law is sufficiently aware of the substantial impact that the recent years of ethical discussion have had on the gamer and game dev psyche. No matter the individual ethical stance of an employee, this sub-culture has had practice critiquing words and ideas.
It looks like the employees are almost universally on the equality end of the ethical spectrum (given how widespread the walkout was), which is even worse news for union busting.
You don't have to be the recipient of bad behavior to sympathize. I, for example, have never worked for Blizzard, yet I find these allegations to be appalling, and would not want to work with Blizzard until I knew the allegations were false or that the problem was properly dealt with.
Influential people can dislike the culture, and leave so their reputation is not besmirched by the much Blizzard is currently being dragged through.
Yes. I'm extremely influential at setting technical direction where I work (not Blizzard) but I'm not a manager so I can't discipline people. I can only attempt to advocate for the culture I want to see, or vote with my feet.
I'm a software developer, not trying to brag because I have serious doubts about my skills but right now I'm in a great job and have a few serious offers with great pay and benefits.
I've done some research and the claims people are making about the bad environment at Blizz are not without merit - can't say they are real because IDK but too strong to just dismiss. I would not even consider a job there without real and verifiable proof that my worries are unfounded. I'm probably not going to consider them over the many other viable offers I have.
To what extent are the people acting out the same people who command enough respect to leave and take an elite team with them?
I would be surprised if there was more than, say, 30% overlap. IME people who act out generally aren't the most productive and generally don't command the most respect from the most productive people.
Because they wouldn't want to work for a company that tries to cover up and ignore culture that is sexist? It might lead to trying to find other jobs and seeing Blizzard on a resume in a negative connotation. Oh you worked for Blizzard? We need to do a check to see if you were one of the people supporting the Bill Cosby hotel room.
I've never heard of this news group before, all they offer for contact is a Gmail address with no names, and this domain doesn't even show up when I search Promethean News. I have my doubts about this website.
Or is the issue more with the claim they're a union-busting law firm? Because they even basically claim that on their website.[3] That said they otherwise look like not a terrible choice though as with all things like this the optics to something like this are incredibly sensitive.
"Throughout the United States we offer a wide range of customized training programs and workshops at our clients’ premises, as well as seminars and innovative programs adapted to clients’ specific needs. Our training programs include: providing a legal-psychological perspective on managing employees through effective communication; preventing, identifying and dealing with sexual and other unlawful harassment; *advising on union awareness and avoidance*; dealing with violence in the workplace; managing the interaction between the FMLA, ADA and workers compensation; enhancing interviewing skills and hiring while minimizing legal risks; and understanding restrictive covenants (e.g. non-competition agreements). "
yes, Bloomberg is quite a bit better than some random fly by night website. Also its reporting paints a wildly different picture:
"Activision Blizzard Inc., a video game maker coping with an employee revolt over claims of sexual harassment and discrimination, has hired Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr to investigate its corporate culture"
Did you want AB to get through this without hiring any lawyers? Because that isn't how the business world works. Lawyers are in charge of this country and they have a way of making themselves necessary.
Sure, but that doesn't mean they are on the side of the victims. As we've seen many times in the past 4+ years, "dealing with" can mean throwing money at the victim in exchange for signing an NDA and leaving quietly. That's sort of the default corporate response, and doesn't seem to really ever lead to a change in the behavior of the abusers. Sometimes the person at fault doesn't even lose their job.
NetOPs has an annoying set of firewall rules. Something like < 3 months registered cannot be accessed, along with a chunk of 'cheap' or 'scammy' TLDs like '.xyz' and the like
I am usually against unions in tech because the free market tends to allow a proper balance of supply and demand. However, gaming might just be the perfect sub-domain of tech to benefit from unionization.
The supply is massively saturated, with dreamy eyed programmers ready to give their lives to work in gaming. On the other hand, a very small group actually gets to make any of the creative decisions that every gamer has dreamt of making. The wages are below what the market pays, hours are exploitative and the companies are making massive profits. It is really difficult to compete with the AAA studios, because Indie games take years to make and working without a wage for a decade isn't possible for many. On the other hand, medium sized and successful indie studios get acquired before they can grow to a decent enough size to serve as any real competition. There is also a lot of shady practices with monetization, where the employees do not get a say if the company should or shouldn't indulge in said practices.
We've already seen soft-unionization of this type in a similar industry : media production. It works.
AAA game development in the US has been quite stale for the last decade. The big EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft have not come up with a single quality game in this time. Even Bethesda, Bioware seems to be on a decline. Rockstar,Valve and Id software seem to be doing fine, but no where close to the hit-after-hit that certain japanese studios are producing. Naughty Dog and Super giant would be the only 2 American studios creating 10/10s consistently, but both have an order of magnitude fewer employees than standard AAA studios.
The industry is in dire need of shake up. I hope this goes the employee's way this time around. It's about time.
Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market." It's just a smarter way to negotiate (more power collectively) and the end result is a contract between a company and a group of workers. It's not like, say, a minimum wage where government sets a price.
I actually elaborated on that in another comment in this thread.
Unions are bureaucracy. Adding politics, people and power to any structure inherently adds inefficiencies.
If individual bargaining is working just fine in an industry, then I would not push for collective bargaining. Because, it is tradeoff is between 'bridging the information asymmetry between how much power you think you command, vs what you actually command' and 'inefficiencies added by bureaucracy'.
Gaming has clearly crossed that tradeoff threshold. IMO, big tech has not.
Efficiency, for example, is often the opposite of robustness. Many companies have learned that the hard way when COVID hit, even though they had an efficient supply chain and production pipeline, it was not robust.
I'd go further: many people died because the healthcare industry has embraced efficiency (likely not the precisely right word) at the expense of robustness.
The healthcare industry used exactly that argument to bottleneck the economy and create a lot of inefficiencies so healthcare can't be provided to everyone. Lots of lives would be saved if it got a lot easier for immigrant doctors to practice, but that would be too efficient and not "robust" enough so they can't do it.
I agree that immigrant doctors should have an easier time practicing (and that we should be producing more doctors regardless of their origin). I think that the overall lack of qualified medical workers did lead to unnecessary deaths during the worst of the pandemic.
I think a robustness/efficiency dichotomy isn't the right way to look at this. One doesn't preclude the other. A medical system that is both efficient and robust is certainly possible. This discussion deserves its own thread.
I guess part of it is just personal anecdotes. India was (democratically elected, but single party monopoly) socialist from 1945-1991. It is still pseudo-socialist in many senses.
Watching how deeply these inefficiencies from bureaucracies plague us, has been genuinely angering.
So yeah, I do come into it with personal priors which lead to be deeply suspicious of any unnecessary inefficiency. (emphasis on unnecessary. Your covid example clearly shows that the word necessary itself is subjectively evaluated)
You're getting downvoted but you raise a fair point. Sometimes, the inefficiencies from bureaucracies don't trade off and create more robustness or greater scale. Sometimes they are purely extractive or arguably corrupt.
With that said, is it really fair to call India pseudo-socialist? For all intents and purposes, India is closer to the EU and a region/confederation of nations than it is to a single country. One can say that inefficiencies from Indian bureaucracy plague the country, but that would be to treat India like a monolith, which it certainly is not.
India is a panoply of genetic, cultural, and linguistic diversity -- a plurality, and one of the world's oldest democracies. Even so, India's growth remains blistering in real terms. Perhaps we see things a certain way because our finite lives exist in a certain point in history; but could our children or grandchildren see India the same way we see China today?
It's personally hard to fathom that the answer is yes, but it's equally hard for me to fathom that the answer is no. In a way, I almost expect to be surprised.
>>Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market.">>
For what it's worth, collective bargaining is, from an economic perspective, a monopoly. In anti trust terms it would constitute an illegal combination in trade if it weren't for statutory exemptions that explicitly give it a pass.
It's not really any more a monopoly than the business itself is.
The business/management is a group of people acting under a common umbrella seeking (naïvely, and oversimplifiedly) to trade the least money possible for the most production possible.
The employees/union are a group of people acting under a common umbrella seeking (naïvely, and oversimplifiedly) to trade the least production possible for the most money possible.
A union seeks to even the playing field between management and labor. It's not a monopoly unless the local union is affiliated with a global union that includes the vast majority of all workers in that particular field.
If I cannot work for a company without joining a union, it is a monopoly.
What if I'm a junior worker on a labour market that is saturated by more experienced and skilled workers, and lowering my rate is the only chance to make it in the industry that I have? Existing union and it's members are my natural competitors.
If you're a junior worker in a field dominated by unions, I'm not sure how you can have "rate" to lower that hasn't already been set based on the market rate—which is already taking those unions into account.
And the evidence is overwhelming that unionized workers make more than non-union workers of equivalent skills/qualifications. So it sounds like this boils down, once again, to the argument, "I am amazing and exceptional, and I'm afraid that if there were unions, I wouldn't be able to get more money for being amazing and exceptional."
First of all, this argument cannot be true for the majority of workers—by definition, most people in any given field are not exceptional. So even if it would benefit you to not have a union, it would not benefit most people.
Second of all, there is absolutely no requirement for unions to prevent compensation from being increased based on actual performance. Some unions may have strict seniority-based pay schedules, but not all that currently exist do, and if we were to create a brand new union for tech workers (or just for game devs), then the people actually forming that union would be the ones to decide what its priorities would be.
Collective bargaining is more of a cartel (a labor cartel in this particular instance) than a monopoly. As one of the gp's pointed out, collective bargaining is not per se anti-free market (e.g. health insurance). Neither for that matter are cartels or monopolies so long as government interference remains absent. After all, free association is a right endowed to every market participants and it is a person's right to do as he/she will with it. I think the issue in this case relates more to national labor law creating uneven advantages for labor contra capital.
There are limits on the contracts that I could engage with, with another mutually interested party, is the point.
If there were no limits, then, almost by definition, it would not be a union.
So yes, a union puts limits on the contracts that mutually interested parties can engage in.
Were you not aware that unions put limits on the contracts that mutually interested parties can engage in?
Did you think that a company, and an interested worker, could just completely ignore union rules, and create their own contract, that conflicts with the rules of the union?
In the US, unions fight hard to take that choice away from people. "Right to work" laws in many states allow people to opt out of union membership and fees. Unions hate these laws and fight relentlessly to get them overturned.
> The truth is that no one is forcing you to work a union job.
That's pretty disingenuous. Try working for government at any level without also working for a union. I could turn your argument around and say, "if you want a union job just go find one!"
Regardless, that choice you speak of represents a profound injustice according to union leaders. The ultimate goal of mainstream political labor movements is universal unionization. They would very much like to make it so that everyone is forced to pay union dues, no matter where they work.
A union is free to negotiate a contract that only applies to their own members, they just prefer not to so they can prevent non-members from competing using more favorable terms.
These limits are in your favor, you are free to negotiate contracts within the limits. I fail to see how the right to work for less pay than what others see as the absolute minimum fair pay is a right that's worth keeping.
This is a bit like saying that criminal law takes away your right to be mugged, beaten, and murdered.
Minimum pay was an example, collectively bargained contracts offer other protections as well, but these differ more from case to case, so I didn't bring them up.
I have also negotiated my pay up, but under the umbrella of collective bargaining agreements. As far as I know, you are always able to negotiate your pay up. This has worked pretty well for me as well.
Ok... and thats my point. Certain union provisions are bad, for many people, and you cannot pretend that they are a universal good.
> you are always able to negotiate your pay up
Non-union jobs in tech pay way way more, than most union tech jobs though, and union provisions prevent certain contracts that many workers would prefer.
So the actual, measurable facts show that I and many others, in non-union jobs, are doing way better than most unionized tech workers.
Unions are a part of the free market, unless you'd like to remove people's freedom to associate just because they all happen to work at the same place.
The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.
Also the EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft studios do consistently deliver quality games: COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc. Formulaic, perhaps, but it's tough to claim that these aren't quality and popular games. Valve, on the other hand, have only produced Half Life: Alyx in the last decade (you could include Artifact, but it flopped).
For programmers, sure. But for artists, QA, animators, and game designers (which collectively make up a far greater proportion of game development than programmers) not really. There are other jobs in these fields, but often with about the same compensation and without the allure of working on video games.
> The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.
Wait until you hear about the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA.
It is impossible for the wages at all large companies to be below what large companies pay. What large companies pay is what defines the market rate because most people work for large companies.
If I am unhappy with how Google/big-N tech company works, there are other options. If I feel exploited, I can start my own consultancy and consult with just a couple of clients. I can start a startup and raise money quite easily in this VC market. I can built small POCs for a few customers within a few months and scale up from there. I can switch companies and go to a competitor. Hell, switching is almost always the more lucrative option.
I do not need a huge amount of money to enter or move around in the market, and even if I do, it is readily available. That's a 'free-ish' market.
Getting funding for an unmade indie game is substantially harder. The first demo takes years instead of months. The employee has zero leverage, because their access to the market is artificially limited through only a few hyper competitive AAA channels. There are many such broken markets, gaming is just an extreme case of it in our tech world. SpaceX worked in almost exactly the same manner. The free market doesn't work, because the market is not free.
In such a non-free market, the one who controls the supply (AA dev) can easily set up an almost ponzi scheme-esque revolving door of hyper exploitative setups. (modern academia with post-doctoral adjunct revolving doors is a similar example). The AAA studio is taking advantage of information asymmetry, and massively profiting from this use-n-throw setup.
Unions are a way for the demand side to combat the latent asymmetry of information and power in the non-free market. AAA studios make big promises to starry eyed new-grads who have served their purpose by the time they realize they were lied to and are disillusioned. (ie. Contract workers don't get made permanent. Crunch, hire-n-fire, lack of upwards mobility in the structure are endemic and permanent afflictions in the industry)
Unions can force companies to enforce the promises they make. No more than x% crunch. No un/under-paid interns. Path from contract-> fulltime. Some level of ethical standard for exploitation of school children using gambling techniques. Profit sharing ?
If the union's demands are too unreasonable or not reflective of their leverage in the industry, they will get left to die. (see the political unions at Google) If this was truly an information asymmetry situation, where game devs were paid lower than they were worth, then the union will flourish and sustain itself in the interest of the employees.
The realities of the unfree-market do not change, but the union makes sure that demand side (people who want jobs) can negotiate in a manner that actually reflects the cards they hold.
My opposition to unions in general comes from my general opposition to unnecessary bureaucracy. Bureaucracy should be avoided in don't fix what's not broken situations. Big Tech's free market looks healthy. Don't need unions. Gaming does not. Maybe Unions will help. Simple as that.
Media production such as film, tv, etc. The online world is not indicative of the benefits brought by the media guilds. I am no expert on their benefits but thought it would help to clarify what media has historically had soft power unions.
Funny that WilmerHale has diversity and inclusion as a "principle" while they actively undermine others and are paid to do so.
>"Our commitment to diversity and inclusion starts at the top and cascades throughout the firm. WilmerHale is one of very few AmLaw 100 firms with a woman co-managing partner, and part of an even smaller number of such firms that have had both a woman and a person of color as a co-managing partner. Our diversity and inclusion journey is one of continuous assessment, progress, and partnership with others committed to advancing these principles in the legal profession."
I've spent a lot of time hiring software developers and I usually receive about 25 male applicants for every 1 female applicant.
Achieving equal representation across the entire industry is going to be literally impossible without a huge influx of woman into the industry.
Further, because the big tech companies are pretending this is not the reality and strive to have equal representation in their workforce it means even sub par female developers are able to get jobs at the likes of google and facebook, further depleting the remainder of the workforce and causing wage inflation disincentivizing smaller or less well funded companies from hiring them because they can find better and cheaper male counterparts.
Not defending "bro culture" but I think the industry needs to come to terms with the realities of the situations. Legal action will do nothing to change this.
Oh look, its the hiring manager at Activision! Good job confusing equality for equity. A decent manager could easily achieve gender equity with a "25:1" ratio. Unfortunately it seems that might be beyond your capacity as a sub par hiring manager
Given that their first response to the lawsuit was to complain about “unelected bureaucrats”, I think their response is being driven more by their id than by careful market research.
They're probably more worried about what happens if they have to actually face a unionized workforce than what the public might say about them hiring a union-busting law firm.
I’m actually seeing a lot of rage directed at them from the gaming forums I interact on, including a lot of people claiming that they’ve canceled. Completely anecdotal, I know, but it was not what I expected at all. I think this one is going to hurt more than usual.
There's a decently sized cohort that hasn't forgiven ActiBlizzard for what they did to Warcraft III as well. Nothing like ruining a 20 year old game by forceably replacing it with a broken, partial reimplementation.
Blizzard has been under a lot of bad press because they have screwed game releases lately (mostly because of shitty management?). They've also had bad press on political issues like the hong kong esports things and others iirc.
This article has quite conveniently _lost_ some important words:
>Blizzard also faced widespread criticism and calls for a boycott after banning a player who .
>In lieu of official support, a group of fans began writing their own patches for the game, building a service called that aims to add back missing features.
Don't let this be a confirmation bias type of situation though. The number of people that are vocal in forums rarely outnumbers the silent majority that just aren't bothered.
These messages are quite common. "What terrible PR, what are they thinking."
The truth is? It doesn't matter nearly as much as people think. Companies have caught on - a vocal minority will call them out, but it won't matter. People will still buy the next COD. At the end of the day, that's all anyone cares about top to bottom.
If you're having a bad news cycle, why not just dump the rest of the trash with it. Let it all blend in together instead of clearing one cycle, then creating another. People can only focus on so much at one time. In a few months, people won't remember and order their next release.
Is it something they need to be worried about? I mean Activision Blizzard has been shit all over the years, and kids still buy their games. On the other hand hiring a firm is not a proof of wrongdoing for the ongoing trial.
Any source on that? I always imagined the current Blizzard customer demographics in the 20-40 years old range. Kids definitely don't play WoW, Diablo or StarCraft/Warcraft. Not sure about Overwatch but I'd guess kids prefer Fortnite. So perhaps Hearthstone? You kinda need a credit card to enjoy the game tho.
But you have a point, people still buy their games, expansions, loot boxes, skins, monthly subsriptions and so on.
I don't like Microsoft, but i enjoyed playing elders scrolls, had a char of 300+ lvl, but when Microsoft bought zenimax i just requested to delete my account and licenses/dlc, a friend told me it was not worth giving up entertainment for ideas, nothing can change etc
I refer as kids for those who in general aren't able to sacrifice anything in order to be empathetic to others or true to their ideas
Blizzard might not be targeted at the younger demographic, but teenagers still play CoD, which is made by Activision. ActiBlizz also owns King, which makes games like Candy Crush, which kids also play.
Huge companies like Blizzard benefit from a tremendous inertia, so it can be difficult to see them declining, but I think they started doing so more than a decade ago...
At some point Blizzard was my dream video game studio, but the people did the hard work and built it are long gone.
This makes it much less surprising that they picked WH to represent them. He would know the firm and their specialties, and they would have pitched him for this business.
What's really surprising is that a former BigLaw attorney is now the director of WoW!
I've never understood why people are confused or upset by these kinds of things. It's almost literally not in the companies best interest to just "let it happen" so why wouldn't they fight it?
Not trying to be smart by using your words: I legitimately have never understood why this comment is so common, considering how apparently obvious the fallacy of it is. You didn't imply "the company must do X", you implied "people shouldn't be upset that the company did X". The former is a totally reasonable argument to be made. The latter makes absolutely no sense (without extenuating context). You're not really confused as to why people are upset about something a company does that negatively affects people, either in actuality or only in perception, simply because it is in the company's best interests, are you? It's pretty normal for a human not to care about the hazy future consequences of a company hurting itself by embracing some external morality over its own interests as a company, and, depending on the specifics of the case, it can even be pretty reasonable not to care.
No I am actually confused. What normal CEO _wants_ a union? A few random ones maybe; but the average CEO? zero. I'm not even anti union, just anti "union protection" which is where we are with unions in the US under the current stat of NLRB findings + case law; which is just a fucking disaster.
I'm confused why you're confused. Making it more adversarial when it's obvious the company is in the wrong and has been negligent for so long is a great way to continue to burn your talent and reputation and doesn't sound like a great way to solve the long term problem, either. Being a public facing company a large part of this is public relations. Mediating or looking for good faith resolutions is what I would expect as a consumer or potential employee.
In 1982 someone laced Tylenol with potassium cyanide and seven people died. Johnson & Johnson within 2 months released a triple-sealed package and had a nation-wide recall. Their market share dropped from 35% to 8%, but rebounded within a year. It's often talked about as a great PR response.
I doubt Activision Blizzard feels the need to be as responsive to this situation, but I don't see this as a great reaction.
It probably depends in some part on the replaceability of your workforce: Burning your workers isn't a big deal if they're cashiers. But if they're software engineers, burning the company's reputation with them may not be in the company's best interest: You might end up with a company that has no unionizers but also lost all its key talent.
What world is this where companies hire union-busting mercenaries? Is this the Pinkertons in 2021? What kind of lawless place is the US where you can hire services to stop unionisation?
> What world is this were companies hire union-busting mercenaries? Is this the Pinkertons in 2021?
Excellent example of how this headline can mislead people. They're lawyers "hired to review Activision’s policies", not armed thugs who bust union skulls.
Modern companies rarely use [mercenaries] as you put it.
Instead it's reputation management firms for the alleged perpetrators and investigators that dredge up personal info about the victims who reported abuses.
To folks intimate with the situation: what's the likelihood that they weather this storm like recent, similar industry kerfuffles in companies like Coinbase or Basecamp, that they implode under bad PR, or fundamentally change culture?
> "At WilmerHale 1st year counsel makes $350,000. The 24 year old 1st year summer associate still in law school walks into the office in a $1,500 Burberry suit and makes $202,500 that year. Those Amazon workers they swindled out of higher wages make less than $30,000 a year."
The 200k figure is for a first-year associate who has graduated and passed the bar exam [1].
It's interesting to me that you can only hope to crack 300k at a top law firm after working for five years and going to law school for three. I.e., not until you're over 30.
The majority of SWEs at FAANG companies get there in two years. I.e., at age 24 [2]. Some might say the potential upside of becoming a partner outweighs higher early career SWE income, but I would retort that making director or VP are comparable accomplishments; not everyone makes partner.
Social status hasn't caught up to income, though; family and friends outside my tech circle still respect law and medicine more than engineering.
The majority of SWEs at FAANG companies do not make that. Depending on company and location, they might get a sign-on stock grant that could theoretically get them approaching that, but that doesn’t take into account vesting schedules and cliffs. It’s assuming a best-case scenario and certainly not “the majority.” And even then, a new hire low level SWE straight out of college isn’t often going to get a $500k stock grant on-hire, no matter what levels says. And certainly no matter what Blind says.
Perhaps "majority" wasn't the right word. Other than Levels (see below), I don't have evidence to back that up.
However, you're not comparing apples to apples. The pools of students who are targeted for FAANG or top law firm recruitment go to the same universities. People who would be able to get through law school and get an offer from a top firm can get a solid FAANG offer. I believe that those students get > $200k total comp offers from FAANG right out of college.
Vesting cliffs have been replaced with immediate monthly vesting at many companies, including at least two FAANGs, making that part of your package as similar to cash as stock compensation can get.
I agree that Levels has a data problem: sometimes people report numbers from W-2s (counting stock appreciation), sometimes they report offer letter numbers. Moreover, the numbers there suffer from selection bias; people with high numbers are more likely to report them.
But let me offer some anecdotal evidence: everyone on my team and sister teams received > 200k offers right out of college; we are generalist SWEs at a FAANG. Same for all my friends at similar companies.
I would bet the per hour compensation is much higher, and general quality of life is much higher across similar age groups. Not to mention avoiding expenses of law school.
levels.fyi shows 300k+ salaries for senior engineers at FAANG’s. Senior engineers are typically not 2 years out of college. Some exceptions I’m sure, but certainly not the majority.
Is there any way to break the stranglehold of large studios and enable smaller studios to build high quality games? I loved Blizzard back when they made their OG triad (Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft) now it just seems indistinguishable from…EA. How can we enable more scrappy Blizzards?
There are plenty of high quality games from small studios. Everything Supergiant Games makes is gold, with excellent art direction and sountrack. Klei Entertainment also has a solid track record. If you're looking for the AAA cinematic aesthetic from a small team, let me introduce you to Senua's Sacrifice (back before the team that made it got bought out by Microsoft). And lest we forget, Stardew Valley was unbelievably successful and the passion project of one guy (who's even self-publishing now).
Additionally, between UE, Unity, and Godot, I don't feel like it's a lack of tools holding studios back. If you wanted even more games (but why - we're already drowning in a flood of them), one of the big steps might be to provide a stable funding solution for new developers so they didn't need to play financial Russian Roulette to create their art.
I think it’s easier than ever. They engines are free and even individual developers can build incredible games. The harder part might be getting enough publicity.
Even then, Epic Games will promote the heck out of a small indie launch if it's exclusive for a year. Many of the developers they've worked with are one or two person shops.
The days where being buried in the bottom of Steam listings is gone, as long as you aren't insisting on launching via Steam.
I would like to see why Overwatch is so expensive. They don’t have some cutting-edge tech, it could have been a Quake or Half-Life mod and have the same exact gameplay and marginally worse graphics. Ok, there is the networking and matchmaking.
Ok, they need anti-cheat and perfected loot box drop probabilities.
Still, free to play South Korean shooters achieve that for way less.
You have too narrow a view which seems pigeonholed on technology. The majority of expense is rarely the technical line item or budget unless it’s a pure SaaS or PaaS in the cloud play. The expense is often from headcount, marketing, sales, creative, support, legal, esport, and operational costs. You can make an AAA clone but that won’t make it Overwatch or WoW. Their brand carried them and even back in the day their cinematic trailers carried the hype.
Right, I’ve concentrated on actually making the game instead of the whole business cycle.
I would expect that a small developer would spend less on GR, PR and so on.
Runic Games (https://www.runicgames.com/) was also founded by a bunch of ex-Blizzard folk. The Torchlight series of games are great, and hold well to their Diablo-like roots.
> "Is there any way to break the stranglehold of large studios and enable smaller studios to build high quality games?"
Game engines are now cheap/free but what deep pockets buy are more and better artwork, level design, story writing, voice acting, sound design, background music, motion capture, etc. that are the hallmarks of AAA games. While small studios can (and do!) build great games, they can't replicate that because of the cost and I don't see a way to work around that. There's no way to automate artistry.
Buy indie games, usually in Early Access if the game is something you like or would like.
Phasmophobia has made millions. Gunfire Reborn has made millions. Small game companies are more popular than ever. There's even a game about powerwashing out right now.
Check out TheLazyPeon on YouTube who evaluates new MMORPG games all the time. Lots of great looking games coming out all the time but many of them never attract the critical mass of users to make them interesting.
I haven't purchased new Blizzard products since the Hong Kong censorship debacle[1] and quit playing Hearthstone at that time. However I had still played some of my other old favorites, reasoning that I was not providing them further financial support. The recent announcements about their terrible, sexist culture had challenged that notion for me, and I was not sure what to do.
This news is the straw that breaks my back. That Activision/Blizzard would double down on their despicable behavior and stance in this way is completely beyond the pale, and I for one will never again fire up those games that I loved so much.
Thanks for ruining that for me, Blizzard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy