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Comment by heyyyouu | Hacker News Reader

What is really interesting about this is how completely and utterly horrible a job Blizzard did in anticipating and preparing this very obvious possibility, and thus is so poorly handling every single aspect of this.This so obviously was likely to happen that it easily could have been anticipated and planned for to be dealt with in a much, much more professional way, and yet clearly they didn't, and it's beyond inexcusable for any major company to drop the ball like this. And they just continue to prove their incompetence in how they're (not) responding now -- they should be in crisis PR mode, yet they're just sitting there, paralyzed.

How they've (mis)handled this will be studied by business and PR students for years to come.

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They could have gotten away with it had they not been so severe. They: Banned the player, fired the casters, and took back the player's winnings. They should have just banned the player for a year and left it at that.

(not agreeing with anything that they did, just looking at it from a PR perspective)

I think the details that you mention wouldn't be so important in the media narrative (although maybe they would in the gamers' perception). The ban alone probably speaks to the imagination the most.

I am, for one, moderately optimistic looking at the Western counter-outrage and people ditching Blizzard. We need strong and widely held convictions to defend our basic liberty. Coming from the former Eastern Block, I can easily imagine what is it like to have an unfree government convincing the world that we want to live under its "protection", applying material pressures and pseudo-patriotic propaganda to make it appear so etc. If clumsy Chinese silencing play will trigger more popular defensive reactions, it's good. And in economy, historically totalitarian regimes can be extremely good in catching up (see Stalin's industrialization), not so good in outrunning.

As a single data point, I've uninstalled all my (2) blizzard games and tried to purge what data I could from my account. I submitted a ticket to delete all my data, but they requested a government photo id... and given that I don't trust Blizzard with my game data, I definitely don't trust them with that.

Well, given their record, they might just sell your ID photo to the Chinese.

Which is something I try my best to avoid, yes.

Agreed, they went nuclear without anticipating the world to fire back.

they went nuclear not caring about anything but keeping china's totalitarian government happy.

I hope this really hurts blizzard. To many people value playing the game than protecting rights, let alone rights of other people.

We should all completely boycott Blizzard and never purchase games from it again. Same thing with the NBA. In the long run, we need to fight back in China itself against the dictatorship.

Blizzard has been on a downward spiral for years. They still have awesome teams releasing and maintaining awesome games, (thank you for custom colors in SC Remastered!), but by and large their direction has been towards EA and away from their true fans.

This is because their name is not Blizzard. Their legacy is Blizzard. Their name is Activision Blizzard. They are actively opposed to players' interests in many ways, like lootboxes which many countries seek to outlaw for teaching children to gamble, always-online DRM etc.

Metzen is out, Morhaime is out. Really the soul of the company has departed already. They still have some of the best talent in the industry but the products are not going to be what we used to love anymore. Makes me sad as I've supported them from Warcraft I and Diablo I until about last year (when they killed the competitive scene for HOTS with very little warning).

If anything their perspective seems to be that their "true fans" are mainly Chinese and are playing cheap knock of mobile games.

That does seem to be the case. The "big" announcement at last year's Blizzcon was a Chinese free to play mobile game with a Diablo skin.

It helps if you consider China has millions of little baby whales who will grow up to spend tens of billions of dollars in Activision Blizzard titles that leverage dark patterns that western countries are starting to outlaw.

Lack of big news doesn't mean anything. We know they had teams working on Diablo 4, Overwatch 2, and the next World of Warcraft expansion. But Blizzard has historically preferred to have extended internal development periods and not announce anything until they're close to release.

Heck, Titan was under development for years before getting cancelled without any sort of big announcement.

I can't understand why anyone even expects better PR management from Blizzard after that "you all have mobile phones, right?" fiasco

It's no longer Blizzard, it's Activision-Blizzard, which explains the clusterfuck that the company has become.

Their revenue was growing pretty steadily for years until this past year. What makes you think they were on a downward spiral this whole time?

The "downward spiral" premise I believe refers more to "alienating the players who made the company successful in the first place" and is not at all related to revenue or profit.

I could be wrong -- it's just that this always seems to have been the sentiment on the forums I frequented.

> How they've (mis)handled this will be studied by business and PR students for years to come.

I doubt it. The internet has a very short attention span and online activism is pretty much useless.

Really? “Online activism” is how Trump got elected. It also raised millions for ALS many years ago despite all the naysayers claiming it’ll do nothing.

This kind of online backlash activism is useless.

Trump got elected because his opponent was as weak and unpopular as he was, but unlike her he had the benefit of constant TV news coverage for a year and a half leading up to the election.

And she was going to start a war with Russia. Admittedly, it'd be nice to have a president that tows the line more in the middle of the two, but another war is not what we need.

I wish more voters cared about that sort of thing. Both 3rd-party candidates were anti-war, and they got 3.25% and 1%.

Anyway, it's curious how much this "online chicanery is what got Trump elected" meme appears, despite its obvious falsehood. I wonder whose interests are served by that?

Wait, you think Clinton was going to start a war with Russia?

Did you miss how she sold American uranium interests to Russia?

Did you miss how Russia worked with her campaign to prepare the Steele dossier, i.e. how Russia worked with the Clinton campaign to prevent Trump from being elected?

Did you miss how the Obama administration (in which she was Secretary of State) worked with Russia, how Obama was caught on-mic telling Medvedev to tell Putin that Obama would have more flexibility after Obama was reelected?

These are all widely reported facts.

It's bizarre how people still think Russia wanted Trump to win the election.

That was my thought yesterday when I saw one post on Reddit. But I think things are different this time. Every post to every Blizzard-related subreddit is related to this event. One of the top posts on /r/all is about using an Overwatch character to represent the Hong Kong protests, and it's gaining traction. The NYT and WSJ have articles about the situation. Congresspeople are making statements about it. Streamers that normally play Blizzard games aren't. Designers of Blizzard games are deleting their accounts. Brian Kibler quit his job as a Grandmasters caster.

This has exploded from "a random employee in our China office posted to our blog and social media and the die-hards are mildly upset" to an existential threat. It's a disaster. (Oh what I would give to see those meetings and emails.)

Remember that only 12% of Activision Blizzard's revenue comes from Asia/Pacific, with South Korea a notable member of that group of countries. China isn't actually a big deal for them right now. Although there is huge growth potential there; 1.4 billion potential Blizzard gamers... now might be the best time to walk back, see what happens, and capture that market later. They can afford to.

All of this is still just an online echo chamber doing its thing.

Were you around for Occupy Wall Street? I am for the cause in general. But activists need to figure out a proper strategy.

Long story short: you need to demand congressional action, and lead an actual political change. That includes a plan to vote come next year (who to vote for, who to support, etc. etc.). Anything less will be largely ignored, just like Occupy Wall Street.

I disagree that Occupy Wall Street was a complete failure; it brought "1%" into the popular lingo and with that shaped countless people's ideas on society and class.

There's a political game at play here. I'm trying to point it out, so that future protests can be more fruitful. In the great scheme of things, a bunch of people sat in a park for 3+ months, and then politics moved against them for the next 5+ years.

> and with that shaped countless people's ideas on society and class.

And it doesn't matter unless those people vote in greater numbers than their opposition. Society is moving against the Occupy Wall Street principles that were laid out almost a decade ago.

> What is really interesting about this is how completely and utterly poorly Blizzard anticipated this very obvious possibility and thus is so poorly handling every single aspect of this.

I kind of doubt that. With potential billions on the line, losing a few protesting players and face isn't anything to worry about. They have plenty of people hooked playing their games so they don't have much face to lose.

I'm curious what the reaction to these events has been in South Korea, where Blizzard derives a significant amount of their worth from. I would think South Korea would be particularly incensed, given that they are also a small country near China and are familiar with tyrannical rule. But I've not read up enough to know if these events are making waves there.

If they are, that's a far bigger issue for Blizzard than a handful of angry American players.

> South Korea, where Blizzard derives a significant amount of their worth from

> that's a far bigger issue for Blizzard than a handful of angry American players

In fact Activision Blizzard only has 12% of revenue from Asia-Pacific [0][1]. The vast majority is from the Americas and EMEA [2]. The west should have a bigger say on Activision Blizzard's business, not China or South Korea.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/df2ke8/the_asi...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/df8tmr/the_entire...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/dfezlv/activis...

Additional info: For those wondering why Activision Blizzard kowtows to China while having a small revenue base there, tweets by Mark Kern (team lead of World of Warcraft and former Blizzard employee) may offer an answer.

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1181737774132518912

The whole thread is a gem. Boils down to bribes and subsidies. He's taking a huge risk by making it public.

Only time will tell? Blizzard has not been a hip indie game studio for many years now, and people have incredibly short memories. Will you still be talking about this 3 months from now? Their chinese investors, partners, etc. may have a much longer memory than a bunch of Americans getting outraged at the latest injustice to be outraged about.

French people are outraged too.

What do you mean? Lots of social media activity?

(I’m French)

I agree with you 100%. I would bet that Blizzard's radio silence had been planned from the start. People will forget but the more they apologize the more they dig themselves into a hole that's tough to get out of. Personally, I hope that I can withstand the desire to re-subscribe in two weeks.

I think we'll get a pretty good indication of whether this will blow over in 3 weeks at Blizzcon. I fully expect at least some attendees will bring signs/symbols to troll China - we'll see how Blizzard handles it.

Yes, people have incredibly short memories, they will forget all about Blizzard and never return.

I think it is called the benefit of hindsight. Everyone is smart after it happens but in reality, nobody anticipated that.

some things are knowable beforehand.

Can you prove that you knew it beforehand?

The NBA literally just went through this 3 days prior. South Park literally released an episode satirizing this exact scenario 2 days prior.

It's definitely prior knowledge. They either didn't care or are grossly incompetent.

What I think is interesting is that none of this happened during US business hours. Someone in their China office or whatever made the decision, and when everyone in LA woke up, they found a shitstorm.

The trouble that Blizzard has is walking back this decision could put their employees in China in danger.

Good point :)

China's using economic leverage to bully companies into toeing their propaganda line -- particularly in light of the nba incident -- should have every public companies entangled in China figuring out their strategy for when someone speaks this way.

What we need is an economic partnership that can stand up to China, like a union of companies that can actually deter China from throwing its weight around. This partnership should be more than just the United States too. It should span across the entire Pacific region, including Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore and others. Maybe we could call it a "Cross-Pacific-Partnership". This is a totally new idea that I'm having in response to recent events and nobody could have foreseen the need for this.

> How they've (mis)handled this will be studied by business and PR students for years to come.

It really depends on their goal. Reading the Chinese gaming forums, everyone is praising Blizzard for their “fair” stance and saying they will spend more on them.

So if this actually helps their bottom line, Blizzard’s actions could be studied as a master stoke on how to deal with geopolitical PR.

These kind of decisions are made by a 5th level middle manager, not by the CEO or the PR department.

Just like when the Delta flight crew forcefully removed that doctor from the airplane. Or a Starbucks employee calling the police on black people waiting there.

By the time PR get's involved, it's too late.

This is one crucial vulnerability of many companies in today's world, any low level employee can generate a huge PR disaster by just not being smart enough to see the bigger picture.

So basically today you need every employee to be trained like a world class PR agent.

> any low level employee can generate a huge PR disaster by just not being smart enough to see the bigger picture

The military of many countries recognise this, recognising the concept of the 'strategic corporals' [0] [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War

[1] https://thediplomat.com/2012/03/the-strategic-corporals-evil...

Ha - one bit of irony here is that it was actually United, not Delta, that removed the doctor from the plane. That's another angle in these situations. People remember the outcry, but not all of the details.

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