Comment by john567 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by john567 | Hacker News Reader

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Blizzard was never a privately held company or not in the sense that founders had real autonomy. I believe Michael Morhaime had a lot to do with why Blizzard could do what it did. I remember reading in interviews that he defended the soon(tm) mindset and steered the owners away from chasing quarterly reports. I also believe that Chris Metzen was a key figure in upholding a geeky and fun culture. I was genuinely impressed by Blizzard in my youth and dreamed of working there one day.

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.

Metzen Knew about the toxic “bro-culture” while he was in one of the management positions directly above some of what turned out to be the worst sexual offenders, and did nothing about it, for which he apologised on his own Twitter post scandal.

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).

If they knew and did nothing that's bad but somehow I don't believe these people didn't care or didn't try to tell these people to behave.

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.

You can fire people for misconduct.

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.

Morhaime and the leadership definitely had autonomy. Blizzard was the goose that laid the gold egg. Also multiple former employees have stated that there's no way Morhaime didn't know what was going on. So I think you've got it backwards.

Both Mike and Metzen state in the own response that they didn't realize how bad it was and they only respond this way because this lawsuit got huge press.

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.

I guess we agree on one thing then - that's the exact reason that I don't believe all the press about Kotick fostering a culture of harrassment. He can't possibly be across everything that's happening at a dozen or more studios with over 9,000 employees.

> 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.

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...

I've seen it. I have also seen a lot of disgruntled employees and it's not obvious to me that I should take anyone's word over senior management.

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.

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