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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Huh? The foundation of their success is some excellent video games. I’ve never associated Blizzard with justice or “wokeness,” not that it would be a bad thing to be associated with.

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I think people could argue that modern Blizzard does specifically lean into being diverse or "woke". Overwatch got a lot of praise on it's release for having such a diverse cast and they have continued to lean into that over the years since. I also think people could argue they started being more inclusive and diverse with some stuff they did in WoW, but I think they really got attention for it starting with Overwatch.

With that said, I kind of agree with you in that the foundation of their success was making fantastic PC games.

Fair enough. Overwatch and WoW happen to be the two Blizzard games I never really got into, so it makes sense that I missed that connotation. I've kept up with the competitive Starcraft 2 scene (mostly in Korea) and I haven't really noticed any association of Blizzard with being particularly concerned with social justice.

They removed Raynor’s cigar in some situations, and removed some skeletons in WoW, both for Chinese audiences.

Yeah, whenever I read stuff like that I feel like I've been living in a parallel world. I've always grown up around people who played video games and they've never cared about anything other than the games themselves. They might passively agree or disagree with a company's stance on something but they'll still keep that entirely separate from the games being produced.

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