Activision Blizzard pushes out dozens of employees over workplace misconduct
wsj.com
wsj.com
They fired 20 people, not the CEO, and haven’t disclosed who it what reason these people were fired for.
Smells to me like major scrapegoating.
Not disclosing a reason is the opposite of scapegoating. It's downplaying to avoid a fresh news cycle with lurid details.
Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.
In either case, the leadership is not fit for, ahem, leadership.
FWIW, I had many friends spend time at Activision. Lord of the Flies is an apt description of their internal politics.
Otherwise every time you replace leadership you must immediately replace the new leadership, since they too have not instantly fixed the culture.
Mr. Kotick, who has served as CEO for more than three decades, didn’t inform the board of sexual misconduct allegations that he was aware of, including rape, against managers across the company.
The Nov. 16 article, citing interviews and internal documents, also detailed misconduct allegations against Mr. Kotick, including when an assistant complained in 2006 that he had threatened in a voice mail to have her killed.
A very odd statement to make when at this point all we know is that MSFT is acquiring Acti-Blizzard and very little information about what will happen to the latter's existing leadership post-acquisition.
Even if you believe the "maximize shareholder value" line - it is the very definition of the CEO's job to prevent stuff like this from happening.
Is this a typo of "scapegoating", or a conscious neologism to indicate "scraping (the bottom of the barrel) to look for a scapegoat"...?
cough cough massive severance package cough cough
My bet is on security engineers and QA. If I could bet on this - I would have my money on those people being fired. Always annoying at meetings, constantly being downers /s
No doubt the culture there is rotten to the core, the rumors of the horrible work environment and harassment are widely known, however, I predict you won't see too many of the exec team having to leave. It'll be all low level expendable IC's that the CEO won't have to encounter at the country club after the sacking.
Nope, probably not. Kinda sad to see that’s what it took to motivate them to take action. I’m not a gamer and have no horse in this race, but what initially seemed like a change of pace turns out to be the entirely laughable status quo of management giving lip service to these issues.
Given the timing, there should be no question that this was done in direct response to the acquisition, and only expendable tokens have been remove from play. Meanwhile, the management that led this shit show will avoid any consequences and laugh themselves all the way to the bank.
Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...
I think you might be underestimating how many man hours it takes to create the content for an AAA game.
An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.
it's enormously difficult to make a game and not a repeatable business model.
> I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster.
To create the products they're making the big dogs are leveraging years and years and years of tech R&D development and tooling and enormous amounts of manpower.
To be able to create a hit AAA without any of this is relying on capturing lightning in a bottle.
If one stumbles upon some novel gameplay that propels your game to notoriety, the design will be copied by the big AAA devs next release cycle.
This isn’t a fish.
And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
Are you familiar with the concept of 'metaphor'?
> This isn’t a fish.
> And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
The metaphor isn't about "rotting away", it is about "rotting and stinking". The head definitely goes first. Many languages have this phrase as "the fish stinks from the head".
All fish rot from the soft organs first, and muscles and skin last.
In the kitchen, you’ve already removed all the fish guts so the fist thing to rot is the eyes and tongue in the head.
So… er… you are both right?
Bobby has to go, no matter if this is "his fault" or not. Shareholders lost a lot of money, Blizzard lost a lot of reputation. It happened on his watch and new blood is needed. To be honest I think the studio is lost, we can only hope that some of the spin off studios will turn out to be great.
And mark my words, this won't be the last instance of severe employee mistreatment and harassment.
My fear is that individual perpetrators have been fired but not the leaders who buried complaints or their own inaction dissuaded victims from complaining.
A fish rots from the head.
Are you sure about that? Doesn't it rot from the guts outwards?
It starts from the head because gills, but the stink comes from the guts (lack of fresh air) ;)
https://australian.museum/learn/science/stages-of-decomposit...
for example you can see the decomposition of a pig, it looks like the head is first, but it is actually the bacteria in the gut.
it is funny though, i have used this proverb hundreds of times, until today i decided to think a bit about it, and look up how bodies decompose.
i wonder if in those big companies actually the leadership takes all the fault, maybe like in 1984, the real power is in the proles, they can change everything if they want.. they just dont seem to want change.
Like "no BS Sherlock"?
This isn’t a fish. And, as a kid that grew up on a bay, I’d note that usually the head is the last identifiable part to go.
However, if all of their IP were to be given to a completely different company and Kotick were to be made penniless for the rest of his natural life, I could see myself playing a formerly-Blizzard game again.
"That person was fired because an investigation conducted by our company suggested they participated in sexual harassment."
IANAL, but basically it's not worth it. The company already has what they want: Not working with that employee. Anything past that is unnecessary risk.
Now, imagine the same scenario, except what your previous employer said was true. But you sued them anyway.
In both cases, you have the ability to sue. In both cases, unless there is some very strong and obvious evidence against you, a judge and/or jury might take your side.
From the perspective of one of your former employers, it's just not worth the risk to give details about why someone was separated from a company.
For the sake of my argument, I was conjuring the scenario where companies give either positive recommendations or bare minimum ones.
Even if you think something is true, someone else might contest that, and ask a court to decide. Court battles are costly and time consuming.
Problem is, in many countries, it's not a fact until a court has made a judgement.
Bearing in mind that the accused employees are technically and legally innocent, you are introducing a few problems. First, the disadvantages of calling these people criminals:
1. They can (and probably will win) sue you for calling them a criminal.
2. The resulting news that a court found against you is a bigger problem. You called someone a criminal, they sued you for it and won. Now you have to deal with the fact that as far as the public goes, you just fired and shamed innocent people.
3. Finally, after the news gets out, all the employees who were laid off in the same round and with same accusations now have legal precedent to challenge your accusations of criminality. And due to precedent, they will almost surely win.
Now, the disadvantages of giving only their start/end dates and job title when called:
[uhh, I can't think of anything ...]
It all boils down to "there is some risk in badmouthing them" vs "there is literally no risk, 0% risk at all, is saying nothing about their behaviour".
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
Any HR person / lawyer will tell you providing a negative review of an employee, let alone with amount of detail, opens you up to liabilities that aren't worth it.
As an employer, I've been told that, if called, I should only provide the date a person started with the company, the date a person left, their starting and ending salaries (murky now given salary history laws) and whether they'd be eligible to be re-hired.
I ask any employee we fire for cause not to list us as a reference.
"Bob isn't eligible for rehire. Wait, I think the line cut out a bit there, I said Bob isn't eligible for rehire. Just wanted to make sure you got that: Bob is not eligible for rehire, no way, no how, nosirree."
For an extreme example, see Randi W. v. Muroc Joint Unified School Dist [1]. In that case, the plaintiff sued several school districts for fraudulently or negligently providing positive recommendations for a teacher who ultimately sexually assaulted her. The California state Supreme Court held that the school districts were liable because there was a substantial, foreseeable risk of physical injury to a third-party resulting from the misrepresentations.
For this reason, it is common practice for businesses to decline to provide a review and instead simply confirm a prior employment relationship and the dates of the employment.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/4th/14...
On the flip side, a reference has an implicit duty of skill and care to both the former employee and the person asking for the reference, so an overly-positive reference can also lead to legal liability from the person asking for the reference.
In some regulated industries the content and form of references is also regulated as well, for example see pages 11 and 31 of https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/SYSC/22.pdf
(None of this is legal advice)
Otherwise, many managers are happy to give a positive reference.
You could probably get a manager to give an informal reference “off the books”, not on company time.
If you help your manager succeed, they will almost always be happy to help you out with a good word. It’s only a few minutes so no one is worried about it being on or off the clock in my experience.
And yet I'm sure they try to keep anyone still employed from revealing their current salary to their coworkers.
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/discrimination/salary-his...
> California Assembly Bill 168 took effect in October, 2017. This legislation bars employers from asking job applicants about salary history when applying for a position.
I guess asking a reference isn’t quite the same as asking the applicant, but still it’s pretty inappropriate (if not illegal) and I’ve never heard of a past company revealing past compensation information.
We were only allowed to confirm dates of employment, and were required to direct all referrals to HR.
Our HR was run by lawyers, and was very tight about all kinds of policies.
In one case, I once had to lay off a couple of employees. HR policy demanded that I do a “perp walk” to HR, before telling them in an HR ambush. I felt that this was unnecessarily humiliating and dehumanizing (I was right. One teared up), and informed them in individual sessions in my office. HR wrote me up for that. They were technically correct, as this gave the employees the chance to cause havoc (except that I immediately walked them up, after informing them. HR was really concerned that I would say something legally liable -I did not). A big part of my job, as a manager, was to act as a buffer between my employees, and a rather coldhearted and dishonest HR department.
I will say that the company I worked at, had a very diverse workplace (below the Executive Suite), and harassment was not ever an endemic problem (of which I am aware). I know of a small number of instances (over 27 years), where people (men and women) were fired for inappropriate behavior.
There was definitely a “the rules only apply to the little people” thing going on, but not in any really significant way. HR tended to look the other way at the C-Suite doing things we mensch weren’t allowed to do, but they kept it quiet.
One of the things that I most enjoyed about leaving the company, was going to my former employees’ and coworkers’ LinkedIn pages, and giving them the glowing references they deserved.
Here's an old Dilbert comic, that summarizes it: https://dilbert.com/strip/2002-04-25
Eg in Germany, employers are both legally obliged to give a reference and to make it not-negative. It's a weird place.
The goal is generally to avoid litigation in the event that any such comments could be construed as libel or as interfering with the employee's future employment...and with good reason, since a lawsuit over a negative reference for anything other than a for-cause termination (such as sexual harassment) is generally very costly to defend against even if the former employer would win on the merits.
Even if you take a very nihilistic view of company morality... for simple liability reasons, most places don't want someone fired for sexual harassment.
But it's trivial for those fired to not get caught. For example, it's likely some (not a majority, but some) people are leaving Activision Blizzard over what's been uncovered, they could claim to be part of that group. Or they could just lie and say the left earlier.
It'd be more than a little ironic to tar all of those with the "suspected offender" brush.
Would it be illegal to ask if they were fired in connection with this push? If the candidate answers no, they’re clean or a liar. If they demur or confirm, you have your answer.
So I presume HR had a chat and offered them a pile of money to resign - or if they didn't accept, indicated there would be an investigation into their behaviour.
Presuming they didn't choose option 2 and lose - when asked, nobody's going to say they left for sexual misconduct.
It saves the company some paperwork, and weakens the employee's case for taking them to court for wrongful firing. In exchange, the employee can truthfully tell future employees they weren't fired.
I think so; since they weren't charged with a crime, I guess privacy comes into play.
That said, if someone was sacked for sexual misconduct, nobody would hire them if they end up working with women. (I'm aware I'm gender-stereotyping here, but unless I missed it, all allegations were from women aimed at men. As is often the case.)
1) Anyone in the industry presumably knows about this news. If someone’s end date at Activision Blizzard is January 2022, they’re going to have a strong suspicion.
2) Backchannel reference checks (very warranted in this case) will likely confirm it. Activision Blizzard wouldn’t confirm anything other than start and end dates and any candidate-provided references are going to say good things, so it’s important to network and ask somebody who worked there at the time.
I suppose that may mean something if you're playing detective with a former Blizzard employee's resume, but I'd be cautious in reading too much into "if the former employee is eligible to be employed there again" generally. I know of a company where HR policy is that all involuntary separations are ineligible for rehire, including things like downsizing layoffs.
Most likely to avoid someone returning on false pretenses to retaliate against being downsized in the firstplace.
"Lowest performers" doesn't imply bad performers (e.g. a strong team of A & B players).
Also downsizing can happen in different ways. For instance: "we're closing this whole site and laying off everyone who works there," or "this project failed [due to bad leadership], so we're laying off the whole team."
Do you keep track of the month and year of every corporate scandal, and compare it to the resume of all applicants? Or do you just say "oh, you worked at Blizzard huh, do you play WoW?"
Presumably some of these folks will need to try to find work ASAP.
But months or years down the road chances are slim it’ll stick out.
How would you know this?
I sure as heck have never volunteered information like that.
Not sure what the repercussions are of simply lying to the interviewer though.
The first sentence of the article mentions:
> Activision Blizzard Inc. has fired or pushed out more than three dozen employees and disciplined about 40 others since July as part of efforts to address allegations of sexual harassment and other misconduct at the videogame giant, according to people familiar with the situation.
(Emphasis mine.)
For those who more closely follow Blizzard and/or WoW news (fansites such as MMO Champion and Wowhead), several people were known to be fired or left the past year. So the date January 2022 is entirely arbitrary by you, but also, important to note the following: some people left because of the scandal while they were not the culprit, or other reasons (many people were laid off because of, well, I can't say bad financial result but that was the reasoning. Also, state of games in decline). Just because someone left Blizz in 2021 does not mean much, but if you look into certain people who did leave in 2021 then, yes, you will find allegations. End date alone is meaningless though, and quite frankly falls under the definition of guilty by association.
But someone's previous conduct in a professional role is absolutely relevant information when considering hiring them; that's why we have the concept of a reference at all. It's not stigmatising someone or being unfair to them to consider their prior actions.
If someone has previously been fired for harassment, then that doesn't mean that they should never be employed again. Rehabilitation is totally possible, but it's not an automatic thing: someone with that history should expect it to be a concern for future employers, and should be able to outline (as you would with any other issue) the steps they've taken to mitigate it and ensure the same behaviour won't be repeated.
I mean, I don't want to stigmatize people and I want to believe that people can change if confronted with the error of their ways, but I've seen too many instances where it just didn't work like that. If they are still behaving inappropriately in the workplace, they should not be in the workplace.
We’ve had candidates answer “You have to organise a fun evening for the 80 employees of this office. Your budget is $10. What do you do?” (a question meant to leverage their understanding that 70 of those 80 are insanely creative people who barely need a pen and paper to have fun) by suggesting going to a strip-club.
“What’s your favourite game?” is a staple (no answer is disqualifying in most cases); “Which character do you play?” the obvious follow-up when it’s an option. Candidates have suggested with blunt words that their pick characters in certain video games because they are female, well-endowed and barely dressed. The word “jiggle” was used, with a nervous laughter that I had to describe in my feedback as ‘cringey’.
If one of those people understand that they did wrong, I’m hoping they’ll give considerate answers to what are standard, common questions. I’ve never heard a full contrition during an interview (not on that matter) but that could be an interesting conversation. If they think that they did nothing wrong sexualising their colleagues, I would expect hiring manager to notice a nervous laughter, connect that to the previous employer and date of departure, and possibly prod discretely; “What do you think is missing in the game industry nowadays?” is a good follow-up. If they walked passed a female employee, I might ask her if she noticed any sideway look.
That’s the key part, though. Part of being a professional is knowing how and when to appropriately compartmentalize. Keep the video game heroine fetishes at home. If someone can’t keep that stuff to themselves for an interview, there’s no way they’ll be able to keep it to themselves on the job. Hire someone inept enough to discuss this on an interview and you’ve hired your next sexual harassment case.
If you ask me what kind of characters I play in an MMO (for example) then I'm going to honestly tell you that as a heterosexual man I find it pleasurable to look at a woman's behind while I'm playing.
That would be ONLY if you ask me "why do you pick females as playable characters?" however, I won't blurt it out of the blue.
I haven't harassed a woman in any capacity, in any setting, work or not, in my life. The mere idea to noticeably ogle a female co-worker or make sexual jokes towards them never even occurred to me. I learned that this is a thing for the first time in my life when I was 29 or so, when one colleague was fired for following two attractive coworkers around and not leaving them alone for a smoke break (WTF).
I think it's fair to give an honest answer if asked "why do you pick female heroines?". And yet it seems you'll flag me as a potential harasser?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you though.
If an interviewer specifically asks if you only play female characters and why, that’s pretty weird. If your response is something like “because I like their jiggly titties” instead of something like “because I find them attractive”, well, that’s even weirder and frankly not work appropriate.
But yeah, if the interviewer is pushing you to discuss your favorite characters, you shouldn’t feel the need to hide the fact that you play female characters. That’s your preference so whatever. That’s different from making it overtly sexual.
I'll only answer in a potentially compromising way if pressured by the interviewer -- and even then I'm much more likely to retaliate with "why are you focusing on the fact that I enjoy looking at attractive video game characters so much?".
So my previous comment wasn't very accurate, sorry. But on the rare occasion I think I sense people stigmatizing sexuality itself. Happy to have been wrong.
I share your concern about stigmatizing sexuality. People are people and should not have to pretend to be asexual.
Are these characters ones made available to them by the game developers? If so, what's the offence here?
If you want an actual female opinion on the candidate, have your female employees active in interviews. Then ask them what they think about the candidate. Your female employees are just as capable of evaluating candidates effectively as your male employees.
I wonder do female candidates get the same test? Not judging, just curious if there is a double standard, and why.
This is just a summary of the last half year. If you've been keeping an eye on ABK, this isn't news.
I just find it funny how often commenters here assume all broism originates in SV.
My guess would be "no" for the following reasons:
1. Neither Blizzard nor Activision nor Ubisoft are headquartered in Silicon Valley.
2. "Silicon Valley bro culture" itself seems to be a largely manufactured story.
To my eyes and experience over 10 years interacting with people, I have seen nothing of the sort, for which I believe this kind of culture must be very conditioned to the right (or wrong?) mix of individuals that by far do not make justice to the average SV engineer.
The tech teams and tech managers are usually trying to impress you about how they spent the weekend coding on a PDP-11, playing board games or mountain biking while drinking custom brand protein drinks. Generally harmless stuff like that.
The exec teams are where the sociopaths live and work, and I've seen all sorts of bro one-upmanship there. The worse types, by far, are the rugby bros. The tales these guys tell each other are always of the "here's a horrible thing I did, so don't mess with me".
Edit: While the tournament was held in Taiwan, Blitzchung is actually a native of Hong Kong.
The competitor should be free to make his case in his own platform(s), but not on a platform he doesn't own if the owners of that platform doesn't want to affiliate themselves with the political discourse.
I too deleted my Blizzard account in the wake of the HK nonsense, but it’s not like I had bought anything from them since Diablo 3 released considering I refunded my Warcraft 3 remade, so it felt a little like virtue signalling that nobody probably noticed.
Especially because we subscribe to Disney+ (I have young children), and I still buy a lot of things that were likely made by near (or possibly) slave labour. I know it’s still better to avoid what you can, but I can’t help but feel a little hypocritical about it.
At least with Blizard it turned out to have been a very good call when their toxic culture was revealed.
The idea is that if the platform owners don't want it, a platform user should respect that choice.
When you play in someone else's sandbox, you're going to have to deal with their rules. No one is guaranteed an audience.
You can argue that Blizzard was well within their rights in punishing Blitzchung, but then Blizzard's audience is well within their rights to be upset with said punishment.
Actually, you don’t have to accept that. That’s what moderation is for.
Is it now? Parler shows that if you rock the boat, your hosting will be pulled and your phone app removed. Google censors a certain page that was the successor to r/The_Donald on Reddit, along with another certain chan style site. Similarly Gab got payment processors and hosting pulled out.
Now I have never bothered to explore these sites, but if their public image is telling of the truth, then I deplore the political narrative within them. Yet they still paint a real clear example that companies can and will screw you over if they want to, with not a whole lot you can do about it.
On the other hand, do we really want everyone able to make political statements in unrelated arenas? Literally everyone feels strongly about something. Letting all causes be elevated via unrelated venues would be untenable, which means you must draw a line somewhere.
I suppose it's not totally unreasonable to draw that line by saying, "all content must be related to the topic at hand" when it comes to, for example, a gaming competition.
I'm not sure it would be untenable. People generally intuit the social cost/risk that comes with making a statement in an unrelated venue. That is a natural force acting against people randomly bringing up strongly held opinions on unrelated platforms. Explicitly drawing and enforcing a line just doesn't seem necessary.
> I suppose it's not totally unreasonable to draw that line by saying, "all content must be related to the topic at hand"
I think this would have the effect of either completely sterilizing platform discussion or being impossible to enforce reasonably. For instance, what would happen if a competitor just mentioned something totally innocuous that would incense nobody but was off-topic? Should that be punished?
"The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. ... It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely."
Freedom of speech does not protect you from harming others directly (yelling "bomb" on an airplane is not protected). But the issue with HK and China is -entirely- what the first amendment is trying to protect (albeit usually this is usually to protect Americans to complain about America).
When Americans see an American company denying someone what we perceive as an unalienable right it becomes infuriating.
This is absolutely incorrect. To Americans, Freedom of Speech is, as the person you're replying to said, an inalienable right of all human beings. It's a fundamental principal of our society. The first amendment is a legal constraint on the US government that keeps them from violating that right. It does not grant the right, the right belongs to all humans simply from the nature of being.
Think of it like this. People don't think murder is wrong because it's illegal. We have laws in place making it illegal to setup how government handles murder, and we want those laws because murdering a person is wrong at a deep and fundamental level. The laws follow from the underlying ethical beliefs. Freedom of Speech works exactly the same way.
So a company like Blizzard censoring an activist is not a violation of the First Amendment, but it is arguable a violation of Freedom of Speech.
But in reality you can't hide the fact, that limiting freedom of speech is very much in the interest of those who want full control on what we can say.
A good example is the Muhammad cartoons, which reminds us that there is a very long way to go before religions can exist peacefully.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_car...
So when we see it being limited it freaks us out.
Going with the same kind of example: society agrees that murder, thievery and lying are bad things, yet find it justifiable to kill in self-defense, to steal in order to eat, and to lie in certain situations.
I'll also say that it's very different to limit a certain type of speech than to limit speech you disagree with.
Whether you like it or not, censorship among private individuals and businesses is an exercise in free speech. It's within my right to free speech to set the terms of your speech in my home, in my businesses or anywhere else on my property.
Your right to free speech is not violated by private censorship. Although the concept of free speech can exist independently of the First Amendment, the "right" to free speech cannot.
Nonsense. Humans have inalienable rights. Businesses exist on our sufferance, they don't have an inalienable right to anything.
No, sorry, it makes absolutely zero sense.
Not all political statements are "black" or "white", "right" or "wrong" (Manichaeism style), and there are a lot of gray areas sometimes, and everybody has something to complain about on Twitter. And if Blizzard decides "wrong" then they may suffer and repair the backslash.
So the reaction from Blizzard is like the sign you used to see in a lot of bars: "No politics, no religion".
Understand I'm not saying that the player is wrong about what he said, or justifying what happens in HK.
Not that it makes much of a difference, but:
It is my understanding that he's from Hong Kong, and is not Taiwanese. It is my understanding that Taiwan comes in to the picture only because the Blizzard event that he spoke out at was in Taiwan; that he has no connection to Taiwan.
Thanks for pointing that out, you're indeed correct that he's a Hong Konger. I've edited my comment.
Blizzard games don’t hold a candle to the money CoD, Madden, or Skylanders bring in. If Blizzard lets him go, someone else will snatch up his genius immediately.
What makes you say that? Every piece of info I encountered on the case suggests the opposite [1][2] In addition to that Kotick himself has been involved in such cases before and is no stranger to getting rid of victims [3]
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-videogames-bobby-kot...
[2]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-11-16-activision-bos...
[3]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/kotick-a-flight-attendant...
I am not trying to defend Kotick, and am not saying his behavior then or now was alright. But the article you linked did not say he was accused of sexual harassment. And he did not lose a sexual harassment case either.
Instead the article says that a guy named Berg, with whom Kotick co-owned a private jet, was accused of sexual harassment by a former stewardess. Kotick was named in the suit because he co-owned the company that owned the jet and he was the one who eventually fired the stewardess, and that was alleged to have been wrongful termination out of retribution for reporting Berg's alleged misconduct. Kotick himself, unlike Berg, was not accused of sexual harassment in this case. (It seems the entire thing was settled out of court eventually).
The suit that was actually lost as per the article was a case brought by a former attorney for him and Berg, who sued them for non-payment of legal fees relating to the original sexual harassment case.
You might be right that Blizzard game don't make as much pure profit. However, COD and Madden are prime examples of the bastardization of the video games industry, where companies are putting profits far ahead of making actual enjoyable games. Kotick is a pioneer in this respect, being the best in the biz at making games unfun reskinned garbage and making a mint while doing it.
IMO keeping someone like Kotick around for his money making prowess is extremely short sighted. One of these days people are going to pick up on the ruse. You can already see it with Blizzard's waning fanbase for games like Overwatch and WoW.
For a gaming company? Even the best-run gaming companies struggle to last a decade financially. If you’re a shareholder, you’re looking at these returns and realizing that this man is a unicorn.
I brought this up when I spoke to one of their talent sourcing folks last week. They really need to coach them on better replies because the dishonesty is a terrible look.
I do wonder if the games industry is close to wide-scale reckoning on working conditions. It really does just sound brutal and even more exploitative than Hollywood. I've personally suffered mild enterprise ERP burnout, but the kind of stuff I read about in the game industry is just next level.
Yes, and gets imitated all the way down the org chart.
I met zero people who told me they dreamed about working in a FAANG since childhood.
Hi, nice to meet you: I dreamed about working in Microsoft since I was 12. Ended up in a different FAANG, but anyway.
Now that I'm here, it's sort of lame, but it's still a lot better than any other jobs I've done..
Microsoft is not included. So technically you did not dream of working at a FAANG since childhood.
But something happened after the success of WoW the company grew quickly and with that came some bad people and after the merger, Bobby Kotick could exert his influence.
Blizzard stopped being a geeky place for geeks and culture eroded slowly.
I also believe that the original core Blizzard people were struggling with leaving the company in the hands of the next generation. They wanted to believe that the people they had in the company would carry the torch and embody the same ideals. It didn't happen.
The saddest day was when Metzen announced his departure. It was felt by many as a shock. He was a beacon of hope and light but I also think the was struggling with some personal family matters. He now felt the work was no longer in his best interest and left. A lot of Blizzard veterans followed suit. I don't think a single one of the original people still work there, with the exception of Samwise Didier. Blizzard still has a very strong art department.
I believe Michael Morhaime did what he could but ultimately realized that he didn't have the autonomy to fix it. The problem had grown to big. Maybe they were naive? I mean, these people struck gold and built one of worlds most renown gaming brands and the worlds most successful MMO to date.
On the flip side. All the key people have moved on to found new gaming ventures and I believe this time they've had the capital to fund it themselves. Hoping they stay independent and build great experiences for us to enjoy.
Michael Morhaime similarly was the head of Blizzard doing the worst of the sexual misconduct and people don’t things like “cube crawls”.
I’ve worked in big enterprise, I know how easy it is to turn the blind eye to things (maybe not drunk employees litterally crawling around to harass women) but still, but I fear that the toxic culture may be as old as Blizard west itself, and that it likely only grew into the sexual misconduct that it did following the growth of World of Warcraft and the huge influx of new hires (including a lot of in-office women which had been rare up till then).
In a company with thousand's of employees how can you expect a few people to be responsible for everybody, that's just absurd.
You come to a point where you've said and done all you can and nobody is listing. At that point you will make yourself very unhappy staying. This is why I think these people, who are genuine geeks, ultimate just left Blizzard and hoped the people they left in charge could bring it into the next generation.
Company is doing well but the brand has take quite the blow.
If I had an employee that I repeated told not to get drunk and crawl around hitting on coworkers. I would fire that person if they didn’t stop. To be perfectly blunt, I would have fired them right away, but I’m Danish, we can do such things with little repercussions since it’s so blatantly insane that they would have no ground to defend their actions.
I don't think this was the case, and that rather WoW's success forced the company to become more professional but the sexual harassment culture was so ingrained that the company couldn't shake it off. The name thrown around the most due to the lawsuit was Alex Afrasiabi, who was hired in early 2004 to work on WoW (which released November 23, 2004). You can also take a look at WoW's credits [1] and see the mention of "sexy HR girls" or their internal tenth anniversary video [2] from 2001 that covers why they hired their first female employee.
A couple of weeks back the youtube algorithm decided to show me the youtube channel of one of the Warcraft 3 level designers who worked for Blizzard from 1998 to 2003, and in one of his videos, made 4 years ago mind you, he's pretty clear on what the culture was like there [3], with the choice quote "if I wanted to bring a sexual harassment lawsuit against Blizzard ... I could have easily done that."
The guy also said that Rob Pardo (lead designer of Starcraft, Warcraft III, and WoW, and now founder of Bonfire Studios since his ejection from Blizzard in 2014) was particularly toxic. And it seems he's not the only one with the same sentiment [4]. The other Rob from that tweet I'm guessing was Robert Bridenbecker [5], who was with the company since 1995. These were people that had to have been working closely with Morhaime due to the nature of their positions, so keeping them around for so long despite the outstanding HR complaints doesn't bode well.
Is it worth following and supporting the new gaming ventures if this is the culture those veterans fostered and had grown accustomed to?
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-of-warcraft/cre... [2] https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/1420581827698302980 [3] https://youtu.be/kVWyf7mzVR4?t=945 [4] https://twitter.com/gamedevconnie/status/1418946551834157056 [5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/inside-ac...
With the kind of success that WoW had it goes to your head. Some people get corrupted by it. It can bring the worst out of some people. That probably happened.
Why is it so hard to believe that when you're running a company from above you have virtually zero knowledge of what's going on in the trenches.
And the people around you act as layers to insulate you to some extent. The only way you change that is by building trust between your peers and even if you go out to dinner together the topic of discrimination and harassment probably won't come up. Most people won't just say out loud what they think needs improvement unless you ask them.
You can fault them for not being more proactive but they most probably believed that the people they did trust to be on top of these things actually did what they said they would do.
It's the hardest thing to build and maintain a delicate culture. It takes just a few rotten eggs to ruin everything.
But I can live without buying the next loot box, and I can still be a productive member of society without the new Call of Duty game. And forgoing those might move a needle, as sales are a closely tracked metric, and being one of a few million is a much larger impact than being one of many billions.
You could live on slurried nutrient paste instead of regular food. Yet we choose to pursue good food because it gives us happiness and satisfaction. To a lot of gamers, video games offer happiness and fulfillment.
What Blizzard folks did was terrible, and I reduced willingly spending on them. But when they released Diablo 2 remastered, I bought it immediately and relived my childhood experience. I don’t regret it.
Not everything has to be drama, it was just a word with no hidden cunning evil meaning
I have responded to repeated opening from several oil companies, including one last week, by saying that I have seen their employee brag about sponsoring genocides and war crimes, and more of us were hoping they would be prosecuted at ICJ in The Hague for that, their action on climate change, and their relentless campaign to deny their role. It was explicit that several of those crimes incurred the death penalty.
That’s not just the right thing to do: those companies will face economic difficulty very fast as neighbourhoods are destroyed by hurricanes, heat waves, fires, famine, droughts, that scientist unambiguously tie to global warming.
I don’t understand why hoping that humanity will survive makes me self-obsessed, but you don’t seem to be the right person to explain collective responsibility so I probably shouldn’t ask.