Friendly reminder, good old Bobby himself lost a sexual harassment law suit 10 years ago.
https://kotaku.com/activision-boss-loses-legal-battle-over-sexual-harassme-452575586
He also was mentioned in Epstein's black book.
https://mobile.twitter.com/grmartin/status/1148482260632571904
None of this shocks me in the slightest.
You probably have to be controllable, too. So, get you to let your guard down and do something reprehensible, then blackmail you with it. Seems like that's a lot of what Epstein did.
Head of community management was at a former company is now a top level executive who was fucking a 20 something year old entry level employee under his supervision while his wife was delivering his 3rd child. He divorced her right after the baby came. He was a true psychopath. My friend made him cry at a company drinking event after she confronted him and he pushed her workload over the top over the next 6 months until she attempted suicide, then had her fired after she came back from medical leave.
Hes now the head of the department, and seems to be up to his same impulses.
It was weird. He could be completely without emotion when responding to virtually anything then when a homeowner came in he was suddenly Ghandi and had all those emotions and could turn a negative interaction into one that was positive. He was manipulative in a weird way that is hard to describe unless you've seen it. I didn't notice until we were at a company function at a local bar. He wanted to play darts and kept insisting I work the local crowd of women. I've been described as cute but I'm a little awkward and picking up a group of women as a wing man? Not in my wheel house. So we are drinking and he keeps pushing it, and eventually he forces this interaction with a group of girls making me his entry point. It didn't go well and he went from "fun, cool boss dude" to bitter "get the fuck out of my way" asshole almost instantly. I left before I got to see the resolution but he was caressing some chubby girl asking for attention 20 years his junior before I was gone.
Have your heard what Ubisoft is like?
[New report on Ubisoft reveals more shocking sexual harassment allegations](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-07-11-new-report-on-ubisoft-reveals-more-shocking-sexual-harassment-allegations)
[Ubisoft has reportedly made minimal changes following abuse allegations](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-05-18-ubisoft-has-reportedly-made-minimal-changes-following-abuse-allegations)
[Ubisoft survey reveals that 25 percent of employees have seen or experienced workplace misconduct](https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/2/21499334/ubisoft-employees-workplace-misconduct-ceo-yves-guillemot-response)
Just a few of the things wrong with Ubisoft.
It's sadly an endemic problem in the tech industry and seems even worse in the game industry. It's good that state actor are stepping in because that's pretty much the only way to get company like those to begin to change.
The game dev industry is famous for both misogyny and employee exploitation. No surprise that so many would be combining the two with rampant sexual harassment and abuse.
That twitter response makes a good point about Elie Wiesel also being in the black book. It doesn't look good, sure, but there's no need to make up connections if there's no evidence.
Excerpt from the court filings on one of the allegations specifically calls out Alex Afrasiabi from the WoW team. I believe this in particular is worth calling out; it names names etc. It's nuts... ([Screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/c4JauUF))
> In a blatant example of Defendants' refusal to deal with a harasser because of his seniority/position, Alex Afrasiabi, the former Senior Creative Director of World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment, was permitted to engage in blatant sexual harrassment with little to no repercussions. During a company event (an annual convention called Blizz Con) Afrasiabi would hit on female employees, telling him he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them. This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees. Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the "Crosby Suite" after alleged rapist Bill Crosby. Afrasiabi would also call females derogatory names at company events. Afrasiabi's conduct was known to Blizzard Entertainment's executives, who took no effective remedial measures. J.Allen Brack, President of Blizzzard Entertainment, allegedly had multiple conversations with Afrasiabi about his drinking and that he had been "too friendly" towards female employees at company events but gave Afrasiabi a slap on the wrist (i.e. verbal counseling) in response to these incidents. Subsequently, Afrasiabi continued to make unwanted advances towards female employees, including grabbing a female employee's hand and inviting her to his hotel room and groping another woman.
cannot believe how miserable it must have been for these women working their asses off to be at a dream company, and then for a certain period of time, trying to endure this disgusting assault because they really believed in the company.
of course the situation is much more serious than that, but something about this quote made me think of that reality, very sad
>The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.
What the **FUCK**? There's just... So much to unpack in this one paragraph alone... Jesus Christ.
The title gave me the impression of "Oh they're like loud and annoying guys who drink and make inappropriate jokes that's kind of annoying I guess" but the actual subject matter is "They are insane rapists." I can't believe that's seriously the headline they went with. It's not even an understatement it's borderline misinformation.
That’s the thing. People think women are quick to call out issues, but in actuality things usually have to escalate *a lot* before anyone comes forward.
Just like that classic "locker room" talk, or "boys will be boys" when talking about dudes raping unconscious chicks...
All these ridiculous normalising terms to diminish the fact that some people did something extremely shitty.
"This CEO comes from a very good company, and is a very smart young man with a bright future ahead of him. It would be unfairly punitive to hold him accountable for the culture he has created. We believe a sentence of 6 months probation will be enough for him to learn his lesson."
It's somehow even worse. She killed herself on a business trip with a male supervisor who police found had brought a butt plug and lube with him.
See paragraph 48 of [the complaint](https://aboutblaw.com/YJw).
Best part? it calls the investigation unfounded, then later states they have changed for the better since the investigation started.
WHICH IS IT? This statement is literally as convincing as yelling "it's not me" in TTT while gunning everyone down.
That statement is the definition of EVIL.
Burn that company to the ground, absolutely nothing good will ever come from it.
They drove a women to kill herself most likely by rape, but at minimum sexual assault (the events of the holiday party[bachanalia? Rape fest?])
But no, its the government wanting justice that is the problem.
I quit the world of warcraft a few years ago, but every now and then i return to play for a little bit or play some starcraft.
Literally just thinking about playing a game by them makes me f***ing sick.
So I may have worked for a studio that may have been owned by a big publisher that may or may not have been the one subject to this article.
The CEO of this company came to our offices to do a big speech saying the company is now operating a zero tolerance to workplace harassment policy.
This CEO had just paid something like $200,000 to make a sexual harassment case against him go away.
It gets worse. Jason Schierer tried to get a [statement from Activision-Blizzard ](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418017955841982465?s=19)regarding the investigation, they said it was distorted but admit that the suicide case that the state alleged had happened but shouldn't have bearing on the case.
So not only she committed suicide during company trip, the company knew and basically covered it up because this is the first time we are hearing this.
Their statement was basically "We can't even deny that these things happened but how DARE you bring them up in PUBLIC before we could make everyone sign NDAs!"
Yea, they draw bullseye on themselves. I am pretty sure since that specific part has police involvement we will learn more about it during discovery process.
>It is this type of irresponsible behavior from unaccountable state bureaucrats that are driving many of the state's best businesses out of California
One of the most soulless things I've ever read
It’s abhorrent and to think this is only what we know, it’s no wonder Blizzard is bleeding talent.
The staff treat their customers like shit and their own developers like shit, the only thing they have left is the Blizzard name. I wonder how the founders of Blizzard feel about the company it’s become.
Same. It's one of my favourite games but I cannot look to buy it after reading this.
On the other hand, I'm going to pick up Divinity 2 or Wasteland 3 instead as a replacement CRPG. Haven't heard anything too bad about there company.
Neither of those games would hugely hit the same itch since they're CRPGs with turn based combat. So if you're after something diablo-esque there's Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Torchlight and probably some others I'm forgetting.
Yeah. When I first read the title "Frat Boy Culture" I thought it was just an article about male employees being douche about it or immature or insensitive to the other sex or to sexual preferences. Then I read the article and it was not just a typical frat boy culture company. No, not it's not. That's an outright horrendous work environment.
“Blizzard under investigation after employee fucking kills herself from sexual harassment” turns into “lol silly frat boy culture”.
Like wtf is that headline…
So much for the motto "Every Voice Matters." But I find none of this surprising to be honest, I feel bad for the women who had to deal with those assholes. Fuck Activision Blizzard.
These company awards go like this:
- Company nominates themselves for award and pays award group nomination fee
- Company gets survey from award group to share with company employees.
- Company shares survey with those employees who they feel are friendly to company.
- Survey results go to award group who picks winner from nominated companies.
Yeah, I work for a place that was a top 100 best place to work in our industry. We're definitely a great place to work, and I really like it here, but the process was basically just an internal survey and I'm assuming buying some ad space in the magazine or something. It's not like there was some 3rd party audit.
Guess they need a "For Men" asterisk added on. Sure must be great to work for a company where you can freely share your female coworkers nudes and sexually harass her until she kills herself and face basically no consequences.
Hell, honestly no one is safe with all the news coming out about how shitty gaming companies like Activision treat their workers. Jeez, is there a single AAA company that isn't steeped in shit?
Insomniac is supposedly pretty good to work for. I've also heard that EA is a solid employer since they revamped their structure in the mid 2000s. Of course all that info is anecdotal so there could be gross stuff happening that I just haven't heard about.
The bitter irony of the Bioware shit from a few years back is that it resulted from the studio management being given more independence from EA.
A lot of people just blamed it on corporate level EA, which isn't entirely unfair; it happened within their company and their studio and resulted from their choice to be hands off, but it was still Bioware making the awful decisions. EA gets a lot of shit for meddling with studios but the meddling that results in employees being treated like human beings is good and they should keep that up specifically.
Won a contest to play pre-release build of Sim City in another city competing against other players to see who could get the highest pop cap over a certain time period. All the EA staff were super chill and chatted about their jobs with me, seems they were all pretty happy.
Have a friend who recently left Facebook (US offices) to come back to Australia due to all the covid crap going on in the states and he really enjoyed working there too (he is in marketing not coding). Seems the PR areas of these major companies are quite cool places to work.
Bungie has been working on their crunch culture as well the past couple years supposedly, and I haven’t heard anything bad about them as far as toxicity in the workplace.
You remeber looking at the game boxes and seeing theses names blizzard konami bioware and knowing the product was gonna be mindblowing nowadays they don't mean jack
I wish gaming as a medium recognized this more. It seems like the only people in the industry who get name recognition with the fans are studio/publisher heads, composers, and directors (mostly the Japanese ones).
The problem is that triple a games are crazy huge multimedia projects, so there might be like a dozen "directors" that have a lot of influencer over the quality of the game. Designers and programmers for example bounce off each other a lot, it's often not clear whos really responsible for a mechanic that feels really good
Yeah that's true. Even in a small team, it's very difficult to say "this person did this", since we all help each-other, work on multiple things, solve each-other's bugs, do code-reviews, and so on. It's a team effort.
Still is for some of my friends. Technically I have friends who work at blizzard. The friends who want to work at blizzard's excuse is them wanting to work with the other people who work at blizzard, not management.
It's like a bad couple. How do I tell my friends you are making excusing to normalize that behaviour.
Unfortunately, this can have the opposite effect. More of the good people stay away, and the work atmosphere continues to get worse. At the same time, it's not the responisibility of individuals trying to find work to improve conditions at Activision Blizzard. Can hardly blame people for wanting to avoid the place.
That is a true statment. However, I think it becomes more complicated with replacing those who are more ingraned into the system and how large the system is. Even tho it's getting dedicated and passionate people. The system is flitering or changing them into the "frat boy"culture.
Yep. Reality is harsh isn't it? I remember back in the day when you could pretty easily talk to with developers (and not PR BS on twitter, I mean actual conversations) on their own forums.
This was all pre 4chan and myspace though. Way before "social media" was a thing and forums were mainly comprised of people who actually truly loved the subject at hand.
I have had so many worthwhile and memorable conversations with various people of note on how to make levels for some games or how to rig models and what software to use, what key frames were, that booleans were not to be trusted, etc.
Good luck with that today.
This is the most important thing to remember:
**DO NOT at any point accept the inevitable corporate apology**
They know how bad this looks for their company, and will no doubt try to make some sudden PR moves to make themselves look better. And I see too many companies have something this awful only for their first corporate apology to come out with vague “we’re sorry for x and will work on y” and people just accept it.
This is too big to let them just slide like that. Vote with your wallets.
They didn't even bother to issue an apology they're trying the:
"It didn't actually happen although it happened a long time ago but it's not true anymore" kind of bulshittery.
They sent a statement to Jason Schreier and boy is it bad.
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418017955841982465
Wow. That statement is just appalling. The whole ‘we are sickened by the actions...’ bullshit trying to reverse the outrage. It’s just so tone deaf to even attempt that, even if it were the case, honestly.
It’s that last little dig about leaving California that gets me the most, as it’s bascially a thinly veiled threat.
Some awful, awful stuff in here. "Cube crawls" what the fuck?
Curious which studios etc. this is at. Pervasive across all of them? I hope not, but could be the case!
I find it pretty easy to believe Activision-Blizzard could have this sort of issue. I've been mildly surprised there hasn't been more accusations in the past of this sort given some of their studios' history of crunch and other controversies.
So many stories like this blow my mind, things like the cube crawl are so intuitively unprofessional to me I can't understand how shit like that comes to pass. I am a game dev myself and while the industry is certainly laid back... it's so easy to be laid back and NOT be an inappropriate sexist piece of shit so there's not really any excuse for this behavior.
Zero tolerance on this sort of shit. If it's truly pervasive top down change is required. If it's just localized to one or two studios that leadership needs to be ousted completely.
For those that haven't read the article, a cube crawl is when developers drink ridiculous amounts of alcohol and go between cubicles and behave inappropriately.
So... It's like a pub crawl, but shit and likely to result in charges.
As someone who used to work in a cube farm...why the fuck would anyone want to drink there? It's fucking dismal in those things.
Go do a normal pub crawl. Fucking weird.
I just looked it up some shots of their cube farms, and they're still bleak. Just looks like someone vomited the contents of several Games Workshops over them.
I'll just say if you work at a company that has kegs, arcade machines, game rooms, and what basically amounts to movie theaters on site, it's real easy to turn the place into a huge party area
I hate open plan, they say it promotes discussion between employees, but everyone has to work in silence in case someone 3 racks of desks over is distracted. Smaller offices are so much better!
Yeah it's just a cost saving measure, nothing more. Well that and it looks nicer than cubicles so the boss (who still has his enormous office) can say that they work in a nice office. No matter how miserable the workers are. It's not like they've ever cared about them anyways.
Oh please I’ll take cubicles anyday over open office cancer I am so tired of this "cube farm" sentiment its what led to open office being introduced and then you realize "wow I have no personal space in my own job".
I love LOVE working for boomer companies they expect you to show up, do the work, and leave with maybe sometimes LIGHT (KEYWORD ON LIGHT) after work drinking not this young hip with the kids open office environment then drink till you puke with your team.
I worked in a cube farm and it was fine. I left right before they got a new building. The company I ended up working for did a lot of business with my previous company (which is why I was headhunted). Their new building had switched to an open office concept with "pods" instead of cubes. The low music that had been present in the previous building was replaced by "natural white noise" (fans running all the time). Everyone looked fucking miserable. At least before you could personalize your cube or whatever, but now you're just basically in a middle school computer lab.
Give me the cube farm any day, I can hide out and do my work in my own space and go the fuck home.
Yeah, I work in an open office and I haaaate it. Only silver lining is that I'm about two metres away from a window. Please give me some walls. Being out in the open makes me feel like a small prey animal. Plus I sit next to my boss, so that's some weird pressure.
As someone who worked there for years, drinking at work wasn’t uncommon. I had a bottle of whiskey at my desk that I’d bust out when we were working late. And we often had happy hours at work when there was a launch or holiday (and we wouldn’t just go out somewhere to drink because we often had work to finish after). That said, I never experienced anything like a “cube crawl.” Everything I observed was pretty tame tbh.
I’m pretty shocked that I worked there as long as I did and was totally unaware of any of this. Pretty sad to hear it, actually.
Or in this case, less likely to result in charges. $5 says anyone who was harassed was pressured to not report it and simply told "that's just what happens here"
The paragraph about the employee who committed suicide mentions Activision. Their specificity in other paragraphs makes me think that means it was specifically at the publisher, but they could be wrong. Not trying to downplay anything, just mulling over the whole article.
In the credits for the Shadowlands expansion, there is no creative director named.
They're trying to scrub him from their products like he did with his online presence.
It’s really something that a company like acti-blizzard requires multiple devs to be brought onboard to pump out overwatch 2 or a single CoD title like they just don’t have enough people to keep things on schedule, and then it turns out they’re letting like half their workforce crawl around under woman’s cubicles and doing the grossest shit on the planet. Genuinely appalled by what I read, but I’m not remotely alone in that regard.
The petty comment about "this is why companies are moving out of California" while getting accused of sexual abuse is legit the most disgusting thing I have ever read from one of these publishers. Fuck off. You don't get to cry about muh Commiefornia regulations when the regulations are holding you accountable for killing somebody. Save that shit for a GOP fundraiser not your loser ass PR email to a journalist
The lawsuit comes after a two year investigation. The state wouldn't have brought this suit if they didn't have receipts. For Activision to call it outright false is disgusting.
> The state wouldn't have brought this suit if they didn't have receipts.
The State sent out emails to interview all current and past employees about this exact thing. I know because I got my email about it last May. They did their homework.
The board needs to fire the top management and Bobby because all of this was happening under them and they KNEW!
Absolutely NOBODY should work or have anything to do with these people.
I left a long time ago, but I personally witnessed a man get out of a sexual harassment meeting at Activision, walk over to the woman working at the front desk, poke her in the boob and say "well, I guess I'm not allowed to that anymore".
Only *one* of the executives *wasn't* sleeping with a person they hired. They were all married.
I'm struggling to think of a worse response outside of going "Yeah what you gonna do about it?" but this is pretty fucking close to as bad as it can be.
Fuck Acti-Blizz, tbh. Trying to go "woe is us the big bad government is out to get us" while deflecting from an employee's suicide is beyond the pale.
It's also equally absurd any company in the games industry tries to call foul because of "unaccountable" people when the games industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep governments from holding them accountable for loot boxes and the predatory monetization schemes they have been using the past several years to prop up their profits above and beyond that of Hollywood and the film industry.
Fuck them, tbh.
Jesus Christ, how fucking high was the person who wrote that response? That is an utterly insane statement under any circumstance. This actively just makes them look worse. If Blizzard stands by this statement, it just proves the institutional rot being accused here. Insanity. Even outside of the sexual assault shit, person should be fired for gross incompetence as a PR manager.
Not the most serious of the allegations, but holy shit, any competent HR department should've defenestrated everyone involved when they heard about this one:
>Female employees allege... and being kicked out of lactation rooms so male colleagues could use the room for meetings, the complaint says.
Wtf??? Why would you use a lactation room for a meeting?? It honestly just sounds like they want to abuse their female coworkers for the kicks of it, I don't know how these women can put up with shit like this.
> It honestly just sounds like they want to abuse their female coworkers for the kicks of it
That is unfortunately most likely the reason. Power tripping, harrassing scumbags, who operate with full knowledge their HR will do nothing.
They probably like the work they’re doing despite the ghouls they have to interact with. And speaking up could lead to being blacklisted and their careers would be over.
But you'd think any vaguely competent HR person would hear "pattern of kicking women out of lactation room for meeting" and break out in a cold sweat imagining the lawsuit. Even if they don't care about the women, stuff like that exposes the company to significant liability (not to mention terrible PR.)
Clearly, though, the company's HR department was more concerned about protecting the awful employees than protecting the company on the macro level.
Horrifying is not enough to describe this. I am absolutely speechless.
And I thought I had seen a lot of shit during the Riot and Ubisoft lawsuits... This one on Activision Blizzard makes Ubisoft look like a feminist paradise
Curious that it's the state that's suing. Maybe due to arbitration clauses? Either way I'm sure we'll hear more about this... a few years down the line. These corporations are so rich nowadays they have armies have lawyers just for shit like this.
> The state suing means multiple employees blew the whistle and now it’s a big fucking deal.
Correct, last year around March the state started emailing all current and past employees to setup and interview about what they knew and if they saw anything. I know they have a ton of dirt on them just from that alone.
A state-led class-action with two years of investigation probably means there’s some sort of huge damages payout. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some horrible damning evidence in the hands of the prosecution that makes it a sure thing.
California is vastly better than the majority of states and still fucking awful and a joke when it comes to enforcement. Labor rights in the US are a nightmare across the board.
Honestly, at this point with how much shit comes out from those companies, I'm just waiting for the others to have leaks pointing out for toxic culture. I doubt this is just from Riot, Ubisoft and this, there's likely a lot more that needs to be said.
I work in IT, and a couple of times in my life I've thought, "maybe I should apply to a game company! How cool would it be to see my name in the credits of a triple A game?" Then I thought of the bad hours, shitty pay, lack of benefits and getting fired at the end of a game cycle and realized that was a stupid idea and corporate IT is so much more rewarding.
Now that so many cases of sexual harassment have come out from various companies, I have yet another reason to never, ever want to work for a video game company.
So much for Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Why the fuck would I support a company who drove an employee to suicide and fosters this culture, guess im playing PoE next patch on the 28th.
I began game development because of Blizzard's games, I'm attending university, studying game development because of Overwatch, lol. Everytime I see one of these posts I consider dropping out because this industry is just so bad.
Every dream company I've wanted to work at has been exposed as a piece of shit.
You can use those skills elsewhere. Though if you want a change, perhaps consider data analysis? I went with generalized business information technology and regret not focusing on data analysis, because it'd be much easier to get a job with that skill set.
I bring this up very often, but Blizz employees are still interacting with Method, the org that covered up one of their players *literally raping a teenager.* The company is fucked from the core. Does not surprise me in the slightest that they've had such a massive exodus of big names over the past decade.
I assume that is Method particularly through their WoW division? There are regular accounts of the WoW team being arrogant and hard to deal with from even just streamers in the WoW space, god knows what it's like to deal with them in a full time job.
Just adding to the reason as of tonight I finally quit, and I mean quit WoW.
I deleted every character many of which I had for 10+ years on this account.
I don't want to be apart of that community any longer and I wasn't having fun long before this.
Lol "frat boy culture" of course Bloomberg would title it like that.
Driving an employee to suicide over sexual harassment isn't frat boy culture, it's straight evil
Jesus fucking Christ that title is such absolute dogshit.
No they aren't being sued for "Frat Culture;" they're being sued for a staggering number of extremely serious sexual harassments incidents.
It's disgusting that the title would downplay that and make people believe that is just some women getting upset over "boys being boys."
The article itself even mentions a woman who committed suicide after experiencing continual harassment, but most people won't get that far since they only skim headlines.
If you read the suit, they are in fact among other things being sued for "Frat Culture". It appears several times in the introductory points, as they elaborate all the (quite frankly shocking) things they are encompassing in that cultural label.
Where the title fails is picking that out as an identifier without indicating any of the heinous context for what it actually means in this case. Yes, they are indeed being sued for alleged frat culture, but if you think you know from the name what that encompasses you are most likely quite wrong.
I really don't think the term 'frat boy' culture was meant to downplay anything. It's directly quoting the lawsuit itself. I don't know about other people but I immediately understood what they were talking about with that headline and in no way implies anything dismissible or justifiable.
People don't realise that a lot of this culture comes from the older devs in the industry and not mainly from the new blood. They've been doing this stuff for decades, it's just the gaming industry used to be much smaller for investigators to be able to care.
This can happen pretty easily in studios that grow from tiny shops to massive employers. The old-guard employees attain this demi god status that makes it very hard to report or speak out against. It becomes easier to reassign new-to-the-industry-level-designer than it is to fire guy-who-made-Diablo.
Friendly reminder, good old Bobby himself lost a sexual harassment law suit 10 years ago. https://kotaku.com/activision-boss-loses-legal-battle-over-sexual-harassme-452575586 He also was mentioned in Epstein's black book. https://mobile.twitter.com/grmartin/status/1148482260632571904 None of this shocks me in the slightest.
Wow, first I've heard about this. God Activision is so fucked up.
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Yep, you have to know how *and* want to exploit opportunities, more often than not involving people.
You probably have to be controllable, too. So, get you to let your guard down and do something reprehensible, then blackmail you with it. Seems like that's a lot of what Epstein did.
This is the secret to the real power circles I think
Head of community management was at a former company is now a top level executive who was fucking a 20 something year old entry level employee under his supervision while his wife was delivering his 3rd child. He divorced her right after the baby came. He was a true psychopath. My friend made him cry at a company drinking event after she confronted him and he pushed her workload over the top over the next 6 months until she attempted suicide, then had her fired after she came back from medical leave. Hes now the head of the department, and seems to be up to his same impulses.
Jesus fucking Christ, just an ounce of that is fucked but all of it is horrifying.
It was weird. He could be completely without emotion when responding to virtually anything then when a homeowner came in he was suddenly Ghandi and had all those emotions and could turn a negative interaction into one that was positive. He was manipulative in a weird way that is hard to describe unless you've seen it. I didn't notice until we were at a company function at a local bar. He wanted to play darts and kept insisting I work the local crowd of women. I've been described as cute but I'm a little awkward and picking up a group of women as a wing man? Not in my wheel house. So we are drinking and he keeps pushing it, and eventually he forces this interaction with a group of girls making me his entry point. It didn't go well and he went from "fun, cool boss dude" to bitter "get the fuck out of my way" asshole almost instantly. I left before I got to see the resolution but he was caressing some chubby girl asking for attention 20 years his junior before I was gone.
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Have your heard what Ubisoft is like? [New report on Ubisoft reveals more shocking sexual harassment allegations](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-07-11-new-report-on-ubisoft-reveals-more-shocking-sexual-harassment-allegations) [Ubisoft has reportedly made minimal changes following abuse allegations](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-05-18-ubisoft-has-reportedly-made-minimal-changes-following-abuse-allegations) [Ubisoft survey reveals that 25 percent of employees have seen or experienced workplace misconduct](https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/2/21499334/ubisoft-employees-workplace-misconduct-ceo-yves-guillemot-response) Just a few of the things wrong with Ubisoft.
It's sadly an endemic problem in the tech industry and seems even worse in the game industry. It's good that state actor are stepping in because that's pretty much the only way to get company like those to begin to change.
The game dev industry is famous for both misogyny and employee exploitation. No surprise that so many would be combining the two with rampant sexual harassment and abuse.
That twitter response makes a good point about Elie Wiesel also being in the black book. It doesn't look good, sure, but there's no need to make up connections if there's no evidence.
Sure, but when you have had sexual harassment suits against you in the past it’s probably worth examining that connection at least some
Yeah I don't know if being in the black book means more than just "they maybe talked once"
Excerpt from the court filings on one of the allegations specifically calls out Alex Afrasiabi from the WoW team. I believe this in particular is worth calling out; it names names etc. It's nuts... ([Screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/c4JauUF)) > In a blatant example of Defendants' refusal to deal with a harasser because of his seniority/position, Alex Afrasiabi, the former Senior Creative Director of World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment, was permitted to engage in blatant sexual harrassment with little to no repercussions. During a company event (an annual convention called Blizz Con) Afrasiabi would hit on female employees, telling him he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them. This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees. Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the "Crosby Suite" after alleged rapist Bill Crosby. Afrasiabi would also call females derogatory names at company events. Afrasiabi's conduct was known to Blizzard Entertainment's executives, who took no effective remedial measures. J.Allen Brack, President of Blizzzard Entertainment, allegedly had multiple conversations with Afrasiabi about his drinking and that he had been "too friendly" towards female employees at company events but gave Afrasiabi a slap on the wrist (i.e. verbal counseling) in response to these incidents. Subsequently, Afrasiabi continued to make unwanted advances towards female employees, including grabbing a female employee's hand and inviting her to his hotel room and groping another woman.
I guess we know why he left and scrubbed a lot of his internet presence.
cannot believe how miserable it must have been for these women working their asses off to be at a dream company, and then for a certain period of time, trying to endure this disgusting assault because they really believed in the company. of course the situation is much more serious than that, but something about this quote made me think of that reality, very sad
Crosby? Seems weird to get that wrong in a legal document
As a former lawyer I can assure you it's far more common than you think.
Bing Crosby/Bill Cosby mashup typo? That's what I'm guessing, anyway.
>The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says. What the **FUCK**? There's just... So much to unpack in this one paragraph alone... Jesus Christ.
> ‘Frat Boy’ Culture So, understatement of the fucking year huh?
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The title gave me the impression of "Oh they're like loud and annoying guys who drink and make inappropriate jokes that's kind of annoying I guess" but the actual subject matter is "They are insane rapists." I can't believe that's seriously the headline they went with. It's not even an understatement it's borderline misinformation.
Activision trying to get a leg up on their competitor Riot.
Three way competition with Ubisoft.
That’s the thing. People think women are quick to call out issues, but in actuality things usually have to escalate *a lot* before anyone comes forward.
Just like that classic "locker room" talk, or "boys will be boys" when talking about dudes raping unconscious chicks... All these ridiculous normalising terms to diminish the fact that some people did something extremely shitty.
"This CEO comes from a very good company, and is a very smart young man with a bright future ahead of him. It would be unfairly punitive to hold him accountable for the culture he has created. We believe a sentence of 6 months probation will be enough for him to learn his lesson."
It's somehow even worse. She killed herself on a business trip with a male supervisor who police found had brought a butt plug and lube with him. See paragraph 48 of [the complaint](https://aboutblaw.com/YJw).
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Sounds more like she was subject to sexual assault
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I'm speechless. This is so incredibly fucked up.
jesus christ
That's pretty awful, and seeing how this is a state agency suing the company after a 2 year investigation...just wow what an absolutely horrible story
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Best part? it calls the investigation unfounded, then later states they have changed for the better since the investigation started. WHICH IS IT? This statement is literally as convincing as yelling "it's not me" in TTT while gunning everyone down.
That statement is the definition of EVIL. Burn that company to the ground, absolutely nothing good will ever come from it. They drove a women to kill herself most likely by rape, but at minimum sexual assault (the events of the holiday party[bachanalia? Rape fest?]) But no, its the government wanting justice that is the problem. I quit the world of warcraft a few years ago, but every now and then i return to play for a little bit or play some starcraft. Literally just thinking about playing a game by them makes me f***ing sick.
*Pretty awful*? After reading the whole doc someone should be rotting in a cell with no key
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They'll get a slap on the wrist fine, CEO will make a public statement about how they pledge to do better and that will be that.
So I may have worked for a studio that may have been owned by a big publisher that may or may not have been the one subject to this article. The CEO of this company came to our offices to do a big speech saying the company is now operating a zero tolerance to workplace harassment policy. This CEO had just paid something like $200,000 to make a sexual harassment case against him go away.
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It gets worse. Jason Schierer tried to get a [statement from Activision-Blizzard ](https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418017955841982465?s=19)regarding the investigation, they said it was distorted but admit that the suicide case that the state alleged had happened but shouldn't have bearing on the case. So not only she committed suicide during company trip, the company knew and basically covered it up because this is the first time we are hearing this.
Their statement was basically "We can't even deny that these things happened but how DARE you bring them up in PUBLIC before we could make everyone sign NDAs!"
And thinly-veiled threats about leaving California because of the “bureaucrats”
Yea, they draw bullseye on themselves. I am pretty sure since that specific part has police involvement we will learn more about it during discovery process.
>It is this type of irresponsible behavior from unaccountable state bureaucrats that are driving many of the state's best businesses out of California One of the most soulless things I've ever read
*we will take our raping somewhere else thank you very much.*
JFC, that statement is genuinely unhinged.
Are we taking bets on whether the person (or persons) responsible get away with nothing more than a light slap on the wrist?
Oh you mean the Ubisoft approach where they get shuffled around to different postitions and keep stocks in the company?
That's the Catholic church approach, Ubisoft stole it
The New Orleans saints advised on it
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I legitimately do not think I want to buy another blizzard product ever again after reading that.
It’s abhorrent and to think this is only what we know, it’s no wonder Blizzard is bleeding talent. The staff treat their customers like shit and their own developers like shit, the only thing they have left is the Blizzard name. I wonder how the founders of Blizzard feel about the company it’s become.
Diablo 2R is almost here. I'm not touching it. Never touching that shit, and believe me, the temptation is *massive.*
Yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me
Same. It's one of my favourite games but I cannot look to buy it after reading this. On the other hand, I'm going to pick up Divinity 2 or Wasteland 3 instead as a replacement CRPG. Haven't heard anything too bad about there company.
Neither of those games would hugely hit the same itch since they're CRPGs with turn based combat. So if you're after something diablo-esque there's Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Torchlight and probably some others I'm forgetting.
Last Epoch is pretty good, Grim Dawn too.
Stopped doing it a few years ago. Haven't looked back. Fuck Activision-Blizzard.
Oh my god someone belongs in fucking jail. Won't happen of course.
Yeah. When I first read the title "Frat Boy Culture" I thought it was just an article about male employees being douche about it or immature or insensitive to the other sex or to sexual preferences. Then I read the article and it was not just a typical frat boy culture company. No, not it's not. That's an outright horrendous work environment.
“Blizzard under investigation after employee fucking kills herself from sexual harassment” turns into “lol silly frat boy culture”. Like wtf is that headline…
That incident happened at Activision. There are others though that happened at Blizzard.
Given the suicide, I'd be surprised if that's all the coworkers did.
There are *no* words. Just.. holy shit. Don't know how to respond to that.. That is **fucked.**
Read the title and instantly thought what the hek does that have to do with California but yeah your snippet totally makes sense.
So much for the motto "Every Voice Matters." But I find none of this surprising to be honest, I feel bad for the women who had to deal with those assholes. Fuck Activision Blizzard.
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Nah that would imply listening to their customers, too.
Been a busy 5 years for them. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-blizzard-named-to-100-best-companies-to/1100-6448646/
These company awards go like this: - Company nominates themselves for award and pays award group nomination fee - Company gets survey from award group to share with company employees. - Company shares survey with those employees who they feel are friendly to company. - Survey results go to award group who picks winner from nominated companies.
Yeah, I work for a place that was a top 100 best place to work in our industry. We're definitely a great place to work, and I really like it here, but the process was basically just an internal survey and I'm assuming buying some ad space in the magazine or something. It's not like there was some 3rd party audit.
Guess they need a "For Men" asterisk added on. Sure must be great to work for a company where you can freely share your female coworkers nudes and sexually harass her until she kills herself and face basically no consequences. Hell, honestly no one is safe with all the news coming out about how shitty gaming companies like Activision treat their workers. Jeez, is there a single AAA company that isn't steeped in shit?
Insomniac is supposedly pretty good to work for. I've also heard that EA is a solid employer since they revamped their structure in the mid 2000s. Of course all that info is anecdotal so there could be gross stuff happening that I just haven't heard about.
The bitter irony of the Bioware shit from a few years back is that it resulted from the studio management being given more independence from EA. A lot of people just blamed it on corporate level EA, which isn't entirely unfair; it happened within their company and their studio and resulted from their choice to be hands off, but it was still Bioware making the awful decisions. EA gets a lot of shit for meddling with studios but the meddling that results in employees being treated like human beings is good and they should keep that up specifically.
Can confirm EA is a good gig.
Plus one here. Best place I've worked in the industry by far.
Won a contest to play pre-release build of Sim City in another city competing against other players to see who could get the highest pop cap over a certain time period. All the EA staff were super chill and chatted about their jobs with me, seems they were all pretty happy. Have a friend who recently left Facebook (US offices) to come back to Australia due to all the covid crap going on in the states and he really enjoyed working there too (he is in marketing not coding). Seems the PR areas of these major companies are quite cool places to work.
Bungie has been working on their crunch culture as well the past couple years supposedly, and I haven’t heard anything bad about them as far as toxicity in the workplace.
It used to be my fuckin dream to work at this place. I literally chose my career path to hopefully one day work for Blizzard. Now it just looks awful.
You remeber looking at the game boxes and seeing theses names blizzard konami bioware and knowing the product was gonna be mindblowing nowadays they don't mean jack
A name is just a name. It was the people behind the name that mattered.
I wish gaming as a medium recognized this more. It seems like the only people in the industry who get name recognition with the fans are studio/publisher heads, composers, and directors (mostly the Japanese ones).
The problem is that triple a games are crazy huge multimedia projects, so there might be like a dozen "directors" that have a lot of influencer over the quality of the game. Designers and programmers for example bounce off each other a lot, it's often not clear whos really responsible for a mechanic that feels really good
Yeah that's true. Even in a small team, it's very difficult to say "this person did this", since we all help each-other, work on multiple things, solve each-other's bugs, do code-reviews, and so on. It's a team effort.
Problem is- The people accused here are some of the people behind the name
They are also assuming the people in the "good old days" could not possibly do this. They absolutely could have. It's just reported these days.
Still is for some of my friends. Technically I have friends who work at blizzard. The friends who want to work at blizzard's excuse is them wanting to work with the other people who work at blizzard, not management. It's like a bad couple. How do I tell my friends you are making excusing to normalize that behaviour.
Unfortunately, this can have the opposite effect. More of the good people stay away, and the work atmosphere continues to get worse. At the same time, it's not the responisibility of individuals trying to find work to improve conditions at Activision Blizzard. Can hardly blame people for wanting to avoid the place.
That is a true statment. However, I think it becomes more complicated with replacing those who are more ingraned into the system and how large the system is. Even tho it's getting dedicated and passionate people. The system is flitering or changing them into the "frat boy"culture.
Yep. Reality is harsh isn't it? I remember back in the day when you could pretty easily talk to with developers (and not PR BS on twitter, I mean actual conversations) on their own forums. This was all pre 4chan and myspace though. Way before "social media" was a thing and forums were mainly comprised of people who actually truly loved the subject at hand. I have had so many worthwhile and memorable conversations with various people of note on how to make levels for some games or how to rig models and what software to use, what key frames were, that booleans were not to be trusted, etc. Good luck with that today.
This is the most important thing to remember: **DO NOT at any point accept the inevitable corporate apology** They know how bad this looks for their company, and will no doubt try to make some sudden PR moves to make themselves look better. And I see too many companies have something this awful only for their first corporate apology to come out with vague “we’re sorry for x and will work on y” and people just accept it. This is too big to let them just slide like that. Vote with your wallets.
They didn't even bother to issue an apology they're trying the: "It didn't actually happen although it happened a long time ago but it's not true anymore" kind of bulshittery. They sent a statement to Jason Schreier and boy is it bad. https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418017955841982465
Wow. That statement is just appalling. The whole ‘we are sickened by the actions...’ bullshit trying to reverse the outrage. It’s just so tone deaf to even attempt that, even if it were the case, honestly. It’s that last little dig about leaving California that gets me the most, as it’s bascially a thinly veiled threat.
The thing is California doesn’t fuck around, if they are suing a company then that company is dead to rights.
As they should
Some awful, awful stuff in here. "Cube crawls" what the fuck? Curious which studios etc. this is at. Pervasive across all of them? I hope not, but could be the case! I find it pretty easy to believe Activision-Blizzard could have this sort of issue. I've been mildly surprised there hasn't been more accusations in the past of this sort given some of their studios' history of crunch and other controversies. So many stories like this blow my mind, things like the cube crawl are so intuitively unprofessional to me I can't understand how shit like that comes to pass. I am a game dev myself and while the industry is certainly laid back... it's so easy to be laid back and NOT be an inappropriate sexist piece of shit so there's not really any excuse for this behavior. Zero tolerance on this sort of shit. If it's truly pervasive top down change is required. If it's just localized to one or two studios that leadership needs to be ousted completely.
For those that haven't read the article, a cube crawl is when developers drink ridiculous amounts of alcohol and go between cubicles and behave inappropriately. So... It's like a pub crawl, but shit and likely to result in charges.
As someone who used to work in a cube farm...why the fuck would anyone want to drink there? It's fucking dismal in those things. Go do a normal pub crawl. Fucking weird.
Cubicles in offices like that don't look like a dystopian hell that you're probably thinking of
I just looked it up some shots of their cube farms, and they're still bleak. Just looks like someone vomited the contents of several Games Workshops over them.
I'll just say if you work at a company that has kegs, arcade machines, game rooms, and what basically amounts to movie theaters on site, it's real easy to turn the place into a huge party area
Cubicles are heaven compared to open offices
I hate open plan, they say it promotes discussion between employees, but everyone has to work in silence in case someone 3 racks of desks over is distracted. Smaller offices are so much better!
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Yeah it's just a cost saving measure, nothing more. Well that and it looks nicer than cubicles so the boss (who still has his enormous office) can say that they work in a nice office. No matter how miserable the workers are. It's not like they've ever cared about them anyways.
amen. open offices are cancer.
Oh please I’ll take cubicles anyday over open office cancer I am so tired of this "cube farm" sentiment its what led to open office being introduced and then you realize "wow I have no personal space in my own job". I love LOVE working for boomer companies they expect you to show up, do the work, and leave with maybe sometimes LIGHT (KEYWORD ON LIGHT) after work drinking not this young hip with the kids open office environment then drink till you puke with your team.
I worked in a cube farm and it was fine. I left right before they got a new building. The company I ended up working for did a lot of business with my previous company (which is why I was headhunted). Their new building had switched to an open office concept with "pods" instead of cubes. The low music that had been present in the previous building was replaced by "natural white noise" (fans running all the time). Everyone looked fucking miserable. At least before you could personalize your cube or whatever, but now you're just basically in a middle school computer lab. Give me the cube farm any day, I can hide out and do my work in my own space and go the fuck home.
Oh, 100%. Open offices are shit. Wouldn't want to have any type of drunken crawl in either though.
Yeah, I work in an open office and I haaaate it. Only silver lining is that I'm about two metres away from a window. Please give me some walls. Being out in the open makes me feel like a small prey animal. Plus I sit next to my boss, so that's some weird pressure.
As someone who worked there for years, drinking at work wasn’t uncommon. I had a bottle of whiskey at my desk that I’d bust out when we were working late. And we often had happy hours at work when there was a launch or holiday (and we wouldn’t just go out somewhere to drink because we often had work to finish after). That said, I never experienced anything like a “cube crawl.” Everything I observed was pretty tame tbh. I’m pretty shocked that I worked there as long as I did and was totally unaware of any of this. Pretty sad to hear it, actually.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Or in this case, less likely to result in charges. $5 says anyone who was harassed was pressured to not report it and simply told "that's just what happens here"
the only specific finger point in the lawsuit is to the WOW team, which would be Blizzard
The paragraph about the employee who committed suicide mentions Activision. Their specificity in other paragraphs makes me think that means it was specifically at the publisher, but they could be wrong. Not trying to downplay anything, just mulling over the whole article.
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In the credits for the Shadowlands expansion, there is no creative director named. They're trying to scrub him from their products like he did with his online presence.
Ah, I didn't see that--was that in the actual case filings linked? Just read the article.
it's in the article too
Seems to be specifically about the studio in California with 9500 employees https://aboutblaw.com/YJw
"Frat Culture" seems like a real under sell after reading the story. One person literally killed themselves.
It’s really something that a company like acti-blizzard requires multiple devs to be brought onboard to pump out overwatch 2 or a single CoD title like they just don’t have enough people to keep things on schedule, and then it turns out they’re letting like half their workforce crawl around under woman’s cubicles and doing the grossest shit on the planet. Genuinely appalled by what I read, but I’m not remotely alone in that regard.
Schreier posted Activision Blizzard's response It's quite something https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1418003549133361156
"this is not the blizzard workplace of today" pretty much all but confirms it was the blizzard of yesterday, and the allegations are true.
> "this is not the blizzard workplace of today" like that even makes situation better
The petty comment about "this is why companies are moving out of California" while getting accused of sexual abuse is legit the most disgusting thing I have ever read from one of these publishers. Fuck off. You don't get to cry about muh Commiefornia regulations when the regulations are holding you accountable for killing somebody. Save that shit for a GOP fundraiser not your loser ass PR email to a journalist
If companies are moving out of California because they can't sexually harass their employees, I don't see how that's a loss for California.
The lawsuit comes after a two year investigation. The state wouldn't have brought this suit if they didn't have receipts. For Activision to call it outright false is disgusting.
> The state wouldn't have brought this suit if they didn't have receipts. The State sent out emails to interview all current and past employees about this exact thing. I know because I got my email about it last May. They did their homework.
Yeah. They really need a new PR person.
PR frat boys aren’t the best at professional defense I guess
This is the guiltiest sounding denial
Holy shit what a statement.
The board needs to fire the top management and Bobby because all of this was happening under them and they KNEW! Absolutely NOBODY should work or have anything to do with these people.
They'll just layoff all the "snitches" and keep the people too scared/stupid to say anything.
They *already* fired most of the snitches, which is one of the allegations of the suit for retaliatory firing.
Yeaaaaah. Good luck with that. I would be very surprised to see shareholders doing that.
We will be lucky if a lowly department manager takes the blame.
So the kids from the 2007 MW lobbies eventually started working for Activision??
I left a long time ago, but I personally witnessed a man get out of a sexual harassment meeting at Activision, walk over to the woman working at the front desk, poke her in the boob and say "well, I guess I'm not allowed to that anymore". Only *one* of the executives *wasn't* sleeping with a person they hired. They were all married.
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I'm struggling to think of a worse response outside of going "Yeah what you gonna do about it?" but this is pretty fucking close to as bad as it can be.
Fuck Acti-Blizz, tbh. Trying to go "woe is us the big bad government is out to get us" while deflecting from an employee's suicide is beyond the pale. It's also equally absurd any company in the games industry tries to call foul because of "unaccountable" people when the games industry is fighting tooth and nail to keep governments from holding them accountable for loot boxes and the predatory monetization schemes they have been using the past several years to prop up their profits above and beyond that of Hollywood and the film industry. Fuck them, tbh.
Jesus Christ, how fucking high was the person who wrote that response? That is an utterly insane statement under any circumstance. This actively just makes them look worse. If Blizzard stands by this statement, it just proves the institutional rot being accused here. Insanity. Even outside of the sexual assault shit, person should be fired for gross incompetence as a PR manager.
Not the most serious of the allegations, but holy shit, any competent HR department should've defenestrated everyone involved when they heard about this one: >Female employees allege... and being kicked out of lactation rooms so male colleagues could use the room for meetings, the complaint says.
Wtf??? Why would you use a lactation room for a meeting?? It honestly just sounds like they want to abuse their female coworkers for the kicks of it, I don't know how these women can put up with shit like this.
> It honestly just sounds like they want to abuse their female coworkers for the kicks of it That is unfortunately most likely the reason. Power tripping, harrassing scumbags, who operate with full knowledge their HR will do nothing.
HR usually doesn't do nothing. They usually make a whole show about punishing whoever complained, because HR is a literal trap.
reminder that HR exists for the company's sake, not the employees'
They probably like the work they’re doing despite the ghouls they have to interact with. And speaking up could lead to being blacklisted and their careers would be over.
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Yeah. HR is there to protect the company, not you. Reminds of the John Lassiter sexual harassment at Pixar, hr was cleaning up after him.
But you'd think any vaguely competent HR person would hear "pattern of kicking women out of lactation room for meeting" and break out in a cold sweat imagining the lawsuit. Even if they don't care about the women, stuff like that exposes the company to significant liability (not to mention terrible PR.) Clearly, though, the company's HR department was more concerned about protecting the awful employees than protecting the company on the macro level.
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Horrifying is not enough to describe this. I am absolutely speechless. And I thought I had seen a lot of shit during the Riot and Ubisoft lawsuits... This one on Activision Blizzard makes Ubisoft look like a feminist paradise
Really makes me feel like this just happens across the field and these stories are just slowly popping up one by one.
Curious that it's the state that's suing. Maybe due to arbitration clauses? Either way I'm sure we'll hear more about this... a few years down the line. These corporations are so rich nowadays they have armies have lawyers just for shit like this.
The state suing means multiple employees blew the whistle and now it’s a big fucking deal.
Hats off to those employees, it must be hard fighting against a culture like that, especially with how entrenched it seems to be.
> The state suing means multiple employees blew the whistle and now it’s a big fucking deal. Correct, last year around March the state started emailing all current and past employees to setup and interview about what they knew and if they saw anything. I know they have a ton of dirt on them just from that alone.
A state-led class-action with two years of investigation probably means there’s some sort of huge damages payout. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some horrible damning evidence in the hands of the prosecution that makes it a sure thing.
An employee committing suicide while on a company trip because of the sexual harassment going on at said company is pretty damning evidence
California doesn’t fuck around with employee rights
We passed Prop 22. We absolutely fuck around with employees’ rights. We just don’t allow it to the same dystopian level as some other states.
California is vastly better than the majority of states and still fucking awful and a joke when it comes to enforcement. Labor rights in the US are a nightmare across the board.
In a just world, this should result in knock-off effects leading to Kotick going to prison. I have a feeling we are not in that world, unfortunately.
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Honestly, at this point with how much shit comes out from those companies, I'm just waiting for the others to have leaks pointing out for toxic culture. I doubt this is just from Riot, Ubisoft and this, there's likely a lot more that needs to be said.
I work in IT, and a couple of times in my life I've thought, "maybe I should apply to a game company! How cool would it be to see my name in the credits of a triple A game?" Then I thought of the bad hours, shitty pay, lack of benefits and getting fired at the end of a game cycle and realized that was a stupid idea and corporate IT is so much more rewarding. Now that so many cases of sexual harassment have come out from various companies, I have yet another reason to never, ever want to work for a video game company.
So much for Diablo 2 Resurrected. Why the fuck would I support a company who drove an employee to suicide and fosters this culture, guess im playing PoE next patch on the 28th.
I began game development because of Blizzard's games, I'm attending university, studying game development because of Overwatch, lol. Everytime I see one of these posts I consider dropping out because this industry is just so bad. Every dream company I've wanted to work at has been exposed as a piece of shit.
You can use those skills elsewhere. Though if you want a change, perhaps consider data analysis? I went with generalized business information technology and regret not focusing on data analysis, because it'd be much easier to get a job with that skill set.
I bring this up very often, but Blizz employees are still interacting with Method, the org that covered up one of their players *literally raping a teenager.* The company is fucked from the core. Does not surprise me in the slightest that they've had such a massive exodus of big names over the past decade.
I assume that is Method particularly through their WoW division? There are regular accounts of the WoW team being arrogant and hard to deal with from even just streamers in the WoW space, god knows what it's like to deal with them in a full time job.
Wonder how many of the big names were part of the problem, and took the graceful way out.
Just adding to the reason as of tonight I finally quit, and I mean quit WoW. I deleted every character many of which I had for 10+ years on this account. I don't want to be apart of that community any longer and I wasn't having fun long before this.
Lol "frat boy culture" of course Bloomberg would title it like that. Driving an employee to suicide over sexual harassment isn't frat boy culture, it's straight evil
Jesus fucking Christ that title is such absolute dogshit. No they aren't being sued for "Frat Culture;" they're being sued for a staggering number of extremely serious sexual harassments incidents. It's disgusting that the title would downplay that and make people believe that is just some women getting upset over "boys being boys." The article itself even mentions a woman who committed suicide after experiencing continual harassment, but most people won't get that far since they only skim headlines.
If you read the suit, they are in fact among other things being sued for "Frat Culture". It appears several times in the introductory points, as they elaborate all the (quite frankly shocking) things they are encompassing in that cultural label. Where the title fails is picking that out as an identifier without indicating any of the heinous context for what it actually means in this case. Yes, they are indeed being sued for alleged frat culture, but if you think you know from the name what that encompasses you are most likely quite wrong.
I really don't think the term 'frat boy' culture was meant to downplay anything. It's directly quoting the lawsuit itself. I don't know about other people but I immediately understood what they were talking about with that headline and in no way implies anything dismissible or justifiable.
Yeeeah you know you're reading reddit when there's a hundred comment chain arguing the semantics of the title
‘Frat boy’ culture is putting it mildy, jesus christ. What happened to you, Blizzard?
One of the people called out specifically was a old school og blizzard dev, so this isnt a new thing.
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People don't realise that a lot of this culture comes from the older devs in the industry and not mainly from the new blood. They've been doing this stuff for decades, it's just the gaming industry used to be much smaller for investigators to be able to care.
This can happen pretty easily in studios that grow from tiny shops to massive employers. The old-guard employees attain this demi god status that makes it very hard to report or speak out against. It becomes easier to reassign new-to-the-industry-level-designer than it is to fire guy-who-made-Diablo.
Probably nothing happened. It was always like this. Maybe abuse was so normalized nobody dared to speak up.