Originally published at: Activision Blizzard sued by California over constant abuse of women employees | Boing Boing
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Activision’s response was quite telling
It is a shame that the DFEH did not want to engage with us on what they thought they were seeing in their investigation.
I’m gonna quickly repost my thoughts about this from another forum
Activision’s general struggles with non COD & Crash Bandicoot products, severe mismanagement of IPs (which included Bungie buying back the Destiny IP in order to save it from Activision’s nonsense for an example), Blizzard bleeding talent like a gash wound and the fact that studio hasn’t really released a hit since Overwatch 1… and now the most horrifying accounts so far of abuse of women and POCs in the game development world that we know of SO FAR from the company. Honestly, I don’t think Acti Blizz is going to survive to see the end of this gaming generation (i’m talking PS5/Series X) with or without winning the California suit. How are they going to explain or deflect to their investors about why a buggy and/or delayed game release was due to many of the programmers constantly drinking their asses off at work?
They’re screwed.
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Anyone who’s familiar with the culture of the AAA games industry and its target audience:
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‘Dudebro’ is just a euphemism for ‘asshole’
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Mr. Bells is a game dev and has been commenting over the last few months about the number of resumes he’s seen from Blizzard employees. Including one former co-worker who left for their “dream job” at Blizzard and is now back after 9 months there.
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trying to gaslight the public in response to sexual harassment allegations isn’t going to work like they think it is
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I have a few acquaintances at Blizzard. I don’t talk to them often, but we are hooked up on linkedin, and I’ve been astounded at the number of people I’ve seen leaving Blizzard over the past year or so that show up in their feeds. It is a shame… I couldn’t get enough Warcraft II back in the day.
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As much as we might delight in seeing ActiBlizz taken down a peg, keep in mind they’re friggin’ huge, like almost 10k employees and $15bn in assets. They employ something like 10% of all game developers in North America. Seeing a few more resumes from them crossing your desk is interesting in that it might signal a loss of prestige, but they could shed teams larger than most entire businesses and still ship games.
A company that big, which is still bringing in plenty of revenue, has a loooong way to fall and lots of opportunities to catch itself.
And because of that, I really hope something comes of this action – I don’t trust employee attrition or public opinion to do the job. Treating employees like crap is a competitive disadvantage, but not enough of one on its own.
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I would boycott Blizz over this, but they haven’t released anything worth a shit since 2016-ish anyway. Pretty disappointing how an industry that is ostensibly about fun is such a toxic sewer of bigotry and chauvinism - by both the companies themselves and their most vocal consumers.
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I wonder how long it’s been like this. It seems like making all your female employees miserable while letting all the male ones get drunk and goof off, in addition to being morally reprehensible, would have massive negative impacts on the quality of their work. Which certainly explains Warcraft III Reforged.
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But, if @jojojo is right, the impact won’t be big enough to bring the company down or even force them to change their corporate culture.
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Among many game coding companies, it’s the circle of life, where smaller companies are constantly gobbled up by larger ones to acquire assets and/or well-performing games. We watched Flying Lab Games get scarfed up by Blizzard, which was in turn guzzled by ActiVision. All the while, new content on the one game FLG created that had more than a tiny following was slower and slower to appear, got replaced by pay-to-win, and bugs were mostly ignored. Once a game goes ‘free to play’, that usually means YOU are the product because you are constantly barraged by ads for in-game microtransactions that are often the best if not the only way to complete a level. It’s not surprising that this also creates a toxic work environment in the pursuit of the almighty bitcoin.
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Which is why I’m wondering how far back it goes. Was it like this during Diablo III? World of Warcraft? Brood War? Has it been this way since day one, or was there a turning point where it suddenly became more toxic?
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Originally Blizzard was two separate companies - North and South, and now only South remains. In the early days they were largely independent of each other and had small (almost entirely male) teams, but I suspect they weren’t all that different - small game companies were (and are) run very informally, by men who accidentally ended up in management positions with no relevant management skills, and certainly no concept of “inappropriate work behavior” or what to do about it. (So a lot of game companies have had similar issues.) I knew people who worked at North, and heard stories about programmers sitting around openly watching pornography at their desks, so that gives you a sense of what it was like… there was always that seed, but as they got bigger and hired more women, there were more opportunities for men to be awful.
I just realized I’ve never bought a Blizzard game. I had friends working at Blizzard North, so I got free games from them, but when it got shut down and they moved on (after WoW came out), Blizz haven’t released anything I’ve wanted enough to actually spend money on…
Although, to be fair, there have been a lot of reasons to leave Blizzard in recent years, not just a toxic workplace.
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I’d say dudebros are a specific flavor of asshole. In a venn diagram, the “dudebro” circle is entirely enclosed by the “asshole” circle.
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I forwarded this to my Son, he’s in the tech industry. He was well into the interview stage with Blizzard, but declined due to the shitty wages & the mandatory move to Santa Monica/LA [average rent is astro-money]. So it seems the rumors were fact true, they suck.
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I worked for a branch of Activision around the turn of the century, and it wasn’t that different in our tiny satellite office in an upper midwestern metropolis. The toxicity goes deeper than racism and misogyny, incidentally, it also extends to people who aren’t straight. And built into this is the fact that you were expected to make the job your life. People who wished to socialize outside of work circles were looked down on and people who didn’t suck up to the dudebro management were forced out.
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Make a better target (audience) isn’t a minigame? That eggshell’s due to crack.
Flying Lab Games? (Rails Across America and Pirates of The Burning Sea, okay.)
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Twitter thread from former Activision partner Bungie that shown an day and night difference between the two
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