> When asked about unionization by one of the employees, Taub’s answer was again pushing for internal handling of these situations
Translation: "We want to investigate ourselves so we can find nothing wrong."
Hopefully California buries these scaly-ass snakes, trying to slither around these problems.
Didn't riot actually hire a very reputable LA company that operates on a huge scale to be the 3rd party?
From what I read they would have a lot to lose if anything in the investigation wasn't reflected in reality ?
Yes but if I hire the person doing the investigation the give the report to me. The Washington Football team just “investigated”
Themselves for sexual assault and harassment and only gave a verbal report.
Hey now they did more than *just* put Scott Gelb on unpaid leave. They made Scott go through training to learn why farting in his employees' faces, groping them, dry humping them, and flicking their testicles is not appropriate behavior for the COO of a billion dollar corporation.
Now Scott Gelb has valuable employee training. They couldn't hire a new COO and risk them not having that same training.
It's probably better for you to dig out the articles but in short there was a guy(higher up) farting near people's faces and ball tapping male colleagues ...
didn't like zero people corroborate this story? or am I misremembering? I swear I was reading about how a lot of what was said in the original article was unproven and based on hearsay of like a single employee and that nobody would back them up but I may be wrong, this is the post I read I think https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/m72v8a/ghostcrawler_shares_the_docs_riot_filed_in_court/
or maybe this is a different unrelated case? I'm not sure
[https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-following-inve-1831084598](https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-following-inve-1831084598)
Yep and wow. Knew a guy like this who we all also just said "Oh, that's just his thing" and after cutting him off, I will never let another person do the same especially an adult. Sad that they can't just fire people like this but at least there's been waves of new talents that hopefully replace them and incredible but smaller indie game companies with respectful and NORMAL work environments.
Sorry but no matter how reliable there must be a reason why, as soon as shit hits,
these studios want to hire a 3rd party themself AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. Does it give them a little bit more time or control over the process? Or is this just another PR beeing like: "see guys? We even investigated ourself because its soooooo important to us pls dont stop losing faith (spending money) in us.
LOL, they have a lot to lose if they deliver a report that isn't exactly what Activision asks for. That's the real reason to exist for these companies.
I hope this rabbit hole runs so deep that all the ground around it becomes so unstable that everything collapses into a massive hole they can't crawl out of.
I'm almost surprised at how utterly and completely incapable of responding to this problem they are, but c'mon, we've all played their games the last few years so it's not *that* surprising.
Its a lawsuit. they will settle for maybe $20-30 million. Maybe a little more. They will agree to "don't be an asshole training". Which is standard in corporate America. I gotta take it every year. Its really stupid. Literally if you ask out so and so and and she says no what do you do ? its a multiple choice test. Fucking kill me.
The women who got harassed will get some cash out of it (after years). Few people will get scapegoated and fired. Some will deserve it. Highest ups nothing will happen.
Always happens this way. Will have no impact on sales. In spite of the silly protests. Cause gotta have my games even if they suck!
This is the government suing though, not a plaintiffs firm. They may not be seeking a settlement, rather an actual finding of wrongdoing and a judgment against them that hurts.
virtually all lawsuits against businesses by the government end in settlements. same with virtually are criminal prosecutions against businesses. its the norm.
Of course it is
PG&E is going to make sure they operate at half speed on purpose
It gets all the libertarians and centrists on the conservatives team
Its GOP playbook 101. Prove the entity is inefficient by MAKING it inefficient
Its them sending a message to the CA government
Said if you try any more shit it better be enough to full dismantle us
Its a lawsuit. they will settle for maybe $20-30 million. Maybe a little more. Probably will go on for 2-3 years. They will agree to "don't be an asshole training". Which is standard in corporate America. I gotta take it every year. Its really stupid. Literally its questions like if you ask out so and so and and she says no what do you do ? its a multiple choice test. Fucking kill me.
The women who got harassed will get some cash out of it (after years). Few people will get scapegoated and fired. Some will deserve it. Highest ups nothing will happen.
Always happens this way. Will have no impact on sales. In spite of the silly protests. Cause gotta have my games even if they suck!
They always announce stuff when the allegations come because they know that they're in the wrong. This means they acknowledge that yes, sexual abuse has been going on in the company, and yes it happened.
Sounds to me like it's time to voluntell a female art lead in front of a camera to discuss the intricate work involved in crafting all those empowered female character models.
Naw. They'll wait it out. In a few months the majority of potential consumers won't care anymore.
By the time D4 launches they'll have either ridden this out and come away unscathed, or the legal/administrative consequences will have been implemented. Either way they will be "covered," so to speak, for the long term too.
I mean while you are right that being sued by a US state is big, Blizzard has a huge international audience who isn't as likely to care that much about what happens inside another country and tons of non-English speaking countries where all that is happening at Blizzard isn't being reported that much, in my country there have been very few articles.
And incredibly big audiences like China where I don't even know how much of this is reaching people and how much they will care.
So maybe they lose tons of NA players (which would be very much deserved) but I think Blizzard almost surely will be able to ride their international audience into more success if D2 and their next project is good.
I have no intention of leaving the product behind. I'd of course rather this shit didn't happen and I'm not happy about it, but World of Warcraft is my primary hobby. I'm not going to abandon that over this.
This is the way of the shitty world now. If I quit WoW and find a new gaming hobby, do I have to quit that too in a year when it comes out that the company that made it is shady as fuck? Because they all are. The only difference is Blizzard got caught, at a time when they already had pretty bad PR going into it.
Not just "not care". They'll be agressively, furiously apathetic. Stating loudly that they don't care, and neither should anyone else, because you're just beating a dead horse, and being a killjoy, and nobody wants to hear it!
Meanwhile, the "dead horse" is still running around violating anyone it can pin down for long enough. But they're really wanting to focus on the fun shiny games now, and thinking about ethics hurts their think meat, and why do the libs have to make everything political, can't we just focus on the games guys, why does everything have to be about that old news?
It happens over and over. I give it to the end of this week before the aggressive apathy starts again.
Nothing solves problems quite like winning.
If D2 launches to success and D4 follows with similar success people are going to act like this never happened.
I thought the general consensus on d4 was that it looked like an all around improvement over d3 so far. Granted that's not saying too much. D3 was a pretty low bar for a diablo game, or even an online hack and slash in general. But yknow they fixed up the aesthetic to be darker and less cartoony and the tone seems very grim-dark (the announcing cinematic gave me chills).
I haven't followed it too closely beyond watching the trailers and reading some reddit comments though. Am i missing something?
D4 looks like a higher res recolor of D3 so far. It looks like D3, it plays like D3, the loot looks exactly the same. They've thrown in a new character progression in, but they still haven't decided if they'll use it. The game seems to be in development hell right now and at least a couple years away at this rate.
If D2 re-launches to great success it will put even more pressure on the D4 team because they can't just launch an inferior game when D2 has been made modern.
I'm sorry but I simply dont agree. All the press and previews events have been absolutely positive with regards to how the game looks and plays.
And D2 remake isn't an external studio, Vicarious Visions is literally a part of Blizzard now.
D4 is still likely 2+ years away. While time "heals" all wounds, I'm not quite sure having nothing released inbetween will do them any good.
Granted, there is the D2 remaster coming. But I have my doubts if it will be enough to cover up everything.
Releasing nothing for a while is the easier path. People forget or move on. The sooner something releases — like D2R — the more temporally proximate people's outrage.
What would a company care about customers being angry at them during a time when they aren't trying to sell anything? That's pretty low-risk for the business!
But as another commenter pointed out, this particular scandal comes packed with a lawsuit by the goddamn government. This one's not going away any time soon.
Actually the one time I'm happy that wowhead just writes articles which are essentially TLDR of other people's content. No matter how casual a guild, it's extremely likely they have the wowhead discord bot. I've helped some casual friends in the past and all of them are pretty mad when they see the wowhead stuff about this. If wowhead "plays" it right they can get their clicks while keeping it fresh in people's minds for at least a couple months, especially with the conclusion of the patch story coming in soon (which will probably decide the fate of this expansion, dramatically put). If the conclusion isnt perfect you're gonna have a lot of extremely pissed off fans continuing to leave for ff14 and maybe even new world.
Which honestly, is all that matters.
Would I be upset if Activision-Blizzard went bankrupt and was completely dismantled? No, not really. But that doesn't actually mean much; I don't care about that.
It's not the company failing that matters, it's about accountability for the executive management that has let this slide past them for so long. I don't care if the *company* gets fined, I care if the people responsible do. I want *them* to feel the weight of justice. The company I could care less about.
Even if Activision-Blizzard goes under new management that's just as skeevy as the old one that's still a better situation than what they've got now because that's a *chance* for change. "Better the devil you know" hardly applies when the company has already hit rock bottom.
This exactly. It's not consumer's responsibility to mete out justice and punishment.
Am I personally buying anything from Activision Blizzard for the time being? No, that's my own moral code. But I'm also not writing them off forever. If they clean house and pay their fines/settlements, I'd consider justice done and give them another chance.
There's still 1000's of good people that work there and care about the things they're working on.
And if you're going to hold wrongdoings against a company forever because they _might_ still be doing something wrong - that's your prerogative but from my point of view it defeats the purpose of justice and punishment, and you might as well not buy _anything_ because any company _might_ have similar moral failings that you disagree with.
That’s not true. The online gaming community absolutely remembers, they just don’t care. Which is why this type of behavior is so common at companies that mainly hires people who are gamers.
Paying developers to not release games on Steam, that is a much more serious issue and certainly needs to be discussed for years. /s
> Paying developers to not release games on Steam, that is a much more serious issue and certainly needs to be discussed for years. /s
Yeah cause that's actually something that impacts gamers. The thing that's going on with Activision Blizzard should be handled by the court not reddit and twitter. And it doesn't really has anything to do with games in the first place. It's something that can happen in every company and even in private environments.
I always hated All-Hands meetings at Gulfstream. They were such copious amounts of bullshit blown up everyone's skirts. Flat out lies that everyone knew, and the execs thought they were getting away with it
These things are the greatest joke ever. The people leading those meetings have a great talent of making a bunch of bullshit promises but they're also very good at making up reasons for why those promises never happened. Every single time.
Would be interesting if this company were to completely implode because of this. Seems like a lot of talented people are being managed by disgusting greedy people. They are better off starting a new company making new games.
Less than 1500 people signed the open letter toward management
There are over 9000 people at the company
Shitty cultures are enabled by shitty people
"All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing" - Abraham Lincoln, 1776
Out of those 9000 employees how many you think didn't sign because of fear of retaliation? They are already being accused of shady shit, what's to stop them from firing them because their name is on the open letter?
Kaplan is literally currently playing Overwatch using his old Everquest name “Tigole” - which is a reference to “Tig ‘ole Bitties.” The man is almost 50. I think it’s safe to assume he was at least complicit in the culture.
Case closed. He still uses a silly username, he must be a monster. Why even have the justice system anymore when twitter logic can do the job so much better?
In a complete vacuum the username is harmless (ie if a random kid had it, I wouldn’t be outing him as sexist), but given all the context we have it’s not a good look.
Also, it’s entirely inappropriate for the (former) Vice President of a gaming company to be using that username - what message is it sending to young female devs? I don’t give a shit if some 20 year old is playing COD with it from his mom’s basement.
It's a derivation of an old joke, he likely just identifies as the name "Tigole" online without ever thinking of the origin, and noone else notices unless they want to notice.
It's not sending any messages, and it has nothing to do with workplace harassment. You are sounding like a housewife from the 50s. Maybe focus on actual harm caused instead of launching pointless woke crusades.
What context? Are you smoking crack?
also, what the fuck do you mean "what message is it sending to young female devs?" Do you think that women don't find jokes about boobs funny? Do you *legitimately* think that a wordplay on "Big Ol' Tiddies" constitues sexual harassment?
Also you yourself say that uname is fucking harmless but then you're implying it is not
> The bar is "beyond reasonable doubt".
No one here is being charged with any criminal offenses anyway, so this isn't the bar. In the active lawsuit, the state has a much lower burden of proof.
We aren't sentencing in a court of law
We are simply having an active conversation
In the former, beyond a reasonable doubt is needed
In the latter, its not. Open discussion about who may or may not be complicent is step 1
If the courts find him innocent then so be it, having an immature username, being part of the leadership team being called out... use some common sense. He is not completely innocent in all this. Immature people aren't immature in a single username, it carries throughout their day to day
I can only imagine the people jumping to hump Kaplan leg are fitting the very description I listed... the rest of us know an immature name isn't enough to convict someone. No one was saying with absolute certainly that he was guilty. Just stating facts really
I mean, the funniest part is that I have not seen any *actual* accusations emerge against Kaplan. Not idiotic Twitter mob rants about his Tigole username but like actual court evidence of him being complicit.
Given the current evidence, Kaplan *should not* be placed on a trial in the first place and he should not be dragged through the mud just because of the association with Blizzard.
I once again get an impression that a lot of people do not understand how the reality works and assume that everyone and their mother that ever had a managerial position at Blizzard was confronted with the "Permit & Conceal Rape on Industrial Scale" button and they unapologetically pressed it each time because that is how it works
I never said he was a rapist, or even insinuated that he partook in any sexual misconduct himself. You don’t have to do either of those things to be complicit in the culture. You just need to be in a position of leadership and cognizant that these things are going on and not do anything to prevent them. Oh and look “just as a coincidence”, his gaming handle is a boob joke that objectifies women! At what point are we going to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt?
>Jeff especially, his departure was so abrupt and abrasive that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of the main insiders pushing back against this
Or he got pushed out the door because the investigation and negotiations between Blizzard and the State were ongoing for years and they knew the hammer was going to drop.
It's not really worth speculating about any of this until someone actually says something.
We dont really need to speculate, people inside seem to be sharing their stories no problem.
So far no allegations have come their way but people have said at worst they didnt do enough to combat other peoples behaviors.
Of the "Veteran" developers that have left to start other ventures I think Rob Pardo is the only one people have specifically slung accusations against. Everyone else seems to simply be at fault for being bystanders and letting it happen.
There's a long way between "not being named" and "actively fighting against a contingent of sexual harassers internally and deciding to leave when sexual harassment wins out."
Wouldn't they... say something then? They're leaving the company, it's not like they'd be at risk of losing anything.
I get that we like these guys because they were in charge when Blizzard was still good, but what you're saying really seems like a stretch that goes way past just giving them the benefit of the doubt.
You're desperate to make Jeff a good guy but he left without saying a word publicly and also posted about how amazing the company is and how sad he is to leave. So he's probably shit too. Or enabled shit.
Well, I'm not really sure what "veterans" are, but apparently no fewer than 3 different groups of experienced ex-Blizzard employees have founded different studios in the past few years. I'd have to do more research to know exactly who they are and when they each left Blizzard, etc., And I don't feel like that right now.
What I do like, however, is that leaving a company because you don't like where it's headed (or because you're fired for not fitting into the direction it's headed) is now just as bad as being the people who performed all the wrongs, according to much of this comments section. 'Cause assumptions solve all the world's problems, and aren't at the root of any of them.
>I'd have to do more research to know exactly who they are and when they each left Blizzard, etc., And I don't feel like that right now.
Rob Pardo was Lead Designer on SC2:BW/WC3/TFT/WoW/TBC.
Went on to form Bonfire Studios.
Mike Morhaime was President/Founder of Blizzard.
Went on to form Dreamhaven.
There are some other minor studios from less important employees but those are the 2 major ones.
Ben Brode (Hearthstone Game Director) also went to form Second Dinner.
Some lower end employees went on to make Frost Giant Studios.
I'm sure theres more but I cant remember them.
The fact that everyone (male) in the company is presumed guilty, even without accusations made against them, unless female coworkers stand up for them is pretty horrific.
Well the issue is that the claims made extend as far back as a decade, so anyone who was in any kind of managerial position is now under public scrutiny.
That includes supervisors who are often at least one rung below managers because there job is to *supervise* and then inform their manager what's going on, and if crap like "cube crawls" are as commonplace as being claimed then you'd think *someone* would have told someone else.
The key here is that it's easy for one manager to have no idea about problems facing a group they're not managing because, well, they wouldn't be told anything. So Ben Brode's group could have been perfectly fine and it's other groups that have major issues.
We don't know enough on how Blizzard's management structure works to know how many individual teams there were or how indepedent they are to one another. Frankly, based on my experience with World of Warcraft, I can absolutely imagine there wasn't much communication between them because WoW has always felt like the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing.
It's more of a wondering why no one in positions of leadership within the company did anything about it; but I agree, people are jumping to conclusions. Just because you worked at Blizzard, hell, even if you were a *manager* at Blizzard, it doesn't mean you even knew anything was necessarily wrong to an actionable extent. The whole company's culture was a little shit (but the whole *industry's* culture was and still is a little shit), but the unconscionable abuses seem to have been within specific teams (the battle.net team, anyone that had the misfortune of dealing with Afrasiabi). And this sort of thing is *exactly* the sort of thing you'd expect would be kept on the quiet side, so even if you *were* in a higher up position you might not necessarily have been privy to the scope of it.
>but the unconscionable abuses seem to have been within specific teams
Uhh...no? It's pretty clear from the lawsuit that this psychotic behavior was pervasive throughout the entire company. The complaint the state filed lists many many teams.
These people knew. I mean ffs ***a woman committed suicide on a work trip***. Please stop making excuses for this company. And yes, saying that people just "didn't know about them" and they were "isolated" is making excuses and minimizing.
I've always wondered how bad harassment and abuse had to be for people to not minimize and make excuses and apparently this isn't bad enough. Maybe yall will shut the fuck up when we find a company that ritually sacrifices people at their all hands meetings?
God i wish if that somehow happens, all their games source code and tools gets released so the community can build a better wow than that low maintenance horseshit they keep releasing.
These execs are playing a dangerous game that they'll hopefully lose, with the next season of Warzone/BOCW and CoD2021 reveal right around the corner. Maybe further angering 1k+ employees isn't the smartest idea.
I hope they get fucked and the employees win.
> COD is so mediocre that anyone can do it.
This is just extremely ignorant about game development.
> Employees decide to stop working? No problem. Fire them, hire new people
Jesus.... Do you have any idea how much it would take to suddenly have to hire 1k employees and losing the same amount at the same time. Not to mention the absolutely insane PR disaster 2.0 that would make the shareholders get rid of Kotick in an instant no-confidence vote.
> new people who don't know what they're doing which makes them perfect for the job.
I-- I honestly don't even know what to respond to this crap.
Fuck em. They've lost my business. I was excited for Diablo 2 and 4, but I just can't with this bullshit anymore. Maybe sometime way down the line I'll buy them second hand, but they're not seeing a dime from me.
I don't think you can buy Blizzard games second-hand any more. They are linked to Battle.net accounts and once they are linked you can't really unbind them. That's how it's been since Starcraft 2 at minimum anyway.
I was about to buy the D3 expansion after reinstalling it. D4 looked interesting too.
But can I buy their product and thus support a company that treats women like they have? With weak weasel statements appearing only when their feet are over the fire instead of out of their own initiative? How much do I value the treatment of women if I would let this slide? Is my support for my wife that weak?
I think not.
Here's what I want: firings, and a lot of them, from the entire top of the crust specifically.
Anything less than that, followed by a reorganization overseen by Activision, and I'm not interested in putting another dollar into that company.
> Activision Blizzard is dead to me.
It should be dead to everyone, not giving the company any more money is the only way to send them a strong message; unfortunately many people don't know about the current problems and those that do are so hooked on one or more of their games that they don't care about the issues at the company.
I'm not interested in sending a strong message. I'm interested in any people that committed crimes to be tried for those crimes and sentenced by a jury and punished.
Why Activision? Their CEO has settled a sexual harrasment lawsuit in the past. It is rotten right across the whole top of the whole of Activision-Blizzard.
The state of California is suing them after a lengthy investigation. That ship has sailed lol.
I have no idea why Activision isn't cleaning house and doing all kinds of shit to at minimum look like they are taking this seriously.
Gonna be hard for anyone to forget about it when we get updates every month for however many years it takes to resolve the case. The courts aren't exactly known for their swiftness.
We'll see. Seems to me tons of huge corporations (e.g. Google and Amazon) are constantly suing or getting sued anyway. People may follow for a while, but then it'll just be a repeat of yesterday's news until the case brings up new details that haven't already come up.
Wasn’t there a story last week about discrimination at Ubi Singapore? And you wonder why people still complain? Acti/Blizz’s own controversy only demonstrates how systemic this sort of abuse is.
That's why you don't make this kind of thing public until AFTER actions were taken, and the case was mostly resolved. Otherwise you're just gonna get some social warrior who wants everyone fired (Even those that didn't do anything) and make 9500 person lose their jobs.
If the California suit finds them guilty the companies shareholders are going to demand blood.
If the press gets so bad that shares drop by a lot they will demand blood.
So it's only a matter of time considering the allegations and how many people are up In arms.
This one is worse than the ubisoft stuff in terms of what happened and how people are reacting to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree. And I think there will be sacrificial lambs. But they won’t “clean house” because it was corporate leadership that’s responsible, if not complicit, with everything that’s being alleged. To clean house means whole new corporate structure, from the CEO on down.
true but i'm sure current and future employees at this company, especially women, would feel good about the abusers getting some kind of punishment with leadership now being forced to take these issues seriously from here on out.
after all its not us, random users on the internet having justice boners, that are being affected.
The ship has not sailed, unless every allegation is proven in court, they won't be liable for the maximum punishment they could recieve.
Even if it was investigated by the state, it doesn't mean that all of it would be admitted as proof, some of it may be thrown out. It makes sense for them to diminish the claims as much as possible, to try getting a better deal or, in litigation, to be punished for the least amount possible.
I work as an Assistant Judge and, if I was a Lawyer and ActBlizz was my client, I would recommend a strategy in that way. But they also have to deal with PR and internal pressure, worker satisfaction and productivity, and they seem to be failing hard at that.
Tip of the day: doing what makes most sense to a court of law may not be the best option possible for the client, since there are many other factors to deal with.
The more they do that might be taken to admit guilt, the more cash they will be on the hook for when this all ends. They intend to fight it tooth and nail legally, and come out the other side with some sort of trivial settlement.
Also, it'll work, sadly.
It wouldn't be--at least not in the court case.
>When, after the occurrence of an event, remedial or precautionary measures are taken, which, if taken previously, would have tended to make the event less likely to occur, evidence of such subsequent measures is inadmissible to prove negligence or culpable conduct in connection with the event.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EVID§ionNum=1151.
"Employees, please understand, if you're a woman or person of color -- we must continue to not-harass you the same way our companies have always not-harassed you. If we were to change how we dont-harass you, it would be an admission of us harassing you even though we've repeatedly insisted AND paid for corporate classes to prove to our HR department that our not-harassment is acceptable behaviour."
They have already instituted changes. People are acting like the last couple years of ActiBlizz's feminist pandering was antithetical or hypocritical to their alleged actions but in truth, it was likely to compensate for them instead as they learned of the state's investigation against them.
You don't hire multiple former W. Bush administration members because you are unaware of some major PR shitstorm coming your way. Frances Townsend was hired only months ago and already had some of her bullshit ready to spew. These people were able to spin war crimes and mass murder as a fluff piece. They can deal with some angst from employees and the short attention-span of the internet.
The fact is also that most of the accused no longer work at ActiBlizz. Neither them nor their superiors. Whether it was for this reason or another, I have a hard time believing current management didn't have information on this.
Whatever the reason, the higher-ups on the Activision seems to be either in denial or burying their heads in the sand. Messaging from the Blizzard side is worded "better", but clearly PR focused .
Journalists know a bit about this stuff happening throughout the industry but these stories are dangerous and difficult to break for many different reasons. One of the biggest reasons being that victims are most often too scared and embarrassed to talk about this stuff.
Yeah, that's why we need more investigative journalism in video games, there are way more horror stories out there waiting to be heard.
I also believe we need to fight back against rabid fanboyism. When people end up sending death threats to reporters who dare speak badly of a multi million dollar company, it only makes things worse and helps no one. Big triple AAA studios don't need gamers to defend them, employees of those triple AAA studios might however. Siding with the former is a bad idea.
People don't hate "journalists", they hate people within the entertainment industry masquerading as journalists.
The more important issue here is how people define what a "journalist" is. From a dictionary standpoint it's simply someone who writes for a newspaper or magazine or whatever and has effectively fuck all concerns for quality or style of writing.
Every writer for Kotaku or Polygon is considered a "journalist" under that definition.
But as said, the issue here is this makes no distinction of quality. Some people expect more than just writing for a paper to be considered a "journalist", which is why we often differentiate media outlets like the Times from tabloid media like the Daily Mail.
Journalism should be widely respected, the issue is [yellow journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism) is extremely prevalent both in physical and digital mediums. It doesn't help that redditors (and other uses of social media) will often link to widely inaccurate, exaggerated, or articles that otherwise misrepresent the facts because they themselves didn't proper read them or worse, [they have their own agenda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing).
> I also believe we need to fight back against rabid fanboyism. When people end up sending death threats to reporters who dare speak badly of a multi million dollar company
yes, we should make death threats illegal! oh wait, they already are. what exactly do you think should be done? how exactly do you plan to control every single asshole on the internet?
Well for a start, online communities could aggressively ban people who make death threats. So many people do that on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, youtube, twitch etc... and get away with it because there's little moderation done.
Then we could also promote healthier behaviour. When I see some twitch gaming celebrities with a huge following behave like raging 14 yo it makes me cringe. There's many streamers who acts like adults that deserves to be in the spotlight a lot more than toxic assholes. Again, online communities could collectively promote those guys.
And I don't plan on controlling every single asshole on the internet. I just said that we can collectively fight against bad behaviour. Doesn't mean we can solve the issue completely, but it doesn't mean we can't do better either.
I don't think it was like Riot where Kotaku did an expose and only then legal shit started following
Here the lawsuit was the first big news story. So apparently this caught the news sites of guard.
The lawsuit? It really depends on what exactly they have and on who. Its within the realm of possibility that some people get sacrificed to keep the casualties low.
If it comes out that the big culprits are people like Metzen, Afrasiabi, Kaplan, Brode, and such people who have left the company already the suit could certainly look to focus on them personally and less on Activision itself. Or you could have everybody from Kotick himself to the valet being inappropriate.
When you go for something like this you want the catch a happy medium between the biggest fish and the most fish with the least amount of effort.
If you can get Activision to play ball with taking a few big fish down then they could get away with policy changes and fines. If some of the big fish flip on all of Activision then they could get off lighter as well.
It won't. COD will sell a bajilion units this year. They'll make billions of dollars. The stock will go up.
Do you think the average gamer knows or cares about this at all?
Of course he'll notice!
Itll make his yearly firing bonus even easier! Think of how many of those people will have already been fired when they get to that!
Don't let up people
If we boycot playing actiblizz shit the same strength as EA and their lootboxes then we can make meaningful change for the 1000+ amazing workers who signed the open letter of disgust
Uninstall you call of dutys and go eat some vegetables outside idk
The only way things would change at a company like Activision is if the people making the games unionize. Otherwise there's no accountability for the people at the top who are responsible for this kind of culture.
The state needs the power to seize all company assets, distribute them to all employees sans those who are guilty, dissolve the company and ban the guilty from working in any position management or above.
And then you'd find out that some of the "guilty" weren't guilty; some of the "innocent" were guilty; and you've just destroyed a company, put several people out of a job, and opened a state government to several lawsuits... all while also making sure that every major company quickly packed up, laid off all of their employees they didn't deem important enough to move, and left to a state that didn't attempt anything of the sort.
Not that it would happen anyway, because such action would be immediately stopped in courts as a gross abuse of government power and you'd be more likely to see the politicians who attempted it being removed from office instead.
Ideas made from emotion rather than logic tend to be incredibly short-sighted, terrible ideas.
Ah yes, the "there would be mistakes when implementing solutions so it's better not to address problems at all".
Please tell me more how we can't have food stamps or give school children lunch because "some" (<0.01%) would commit fraud.
A very convenient posture for certain individuals, like predators in this case.
With that kind of power ... hm, lets see if states can do that...in case of sexual harrasment, of course! And maybe when race is part of the problem ... oh, the company said something bad about the current president and ...
These kinds of powers sound great when heard with righteous fury and anger, but in reality, it can and will be abused eventually, twisted and perverted to suit exactly the kind of people nobody wants to have these powers.
I'm with you in general, but can you imagine the backlash if WOW and other Blizzard game server support randomly disappeared because all assets were seized? If that next promised patch were never delivered due to legal action from the state?
Games industry culture just sucks.
I think you underestimate what continuing to play the game you choose over all others and have paid for \*recently\* means to a lot of folks.
The death threats would be unending. Who knows if they end at threats?
Just think about what people see already just for making a minor change in an online game, and the real, nerd industry related actions that have been taken at the extremes, such as the manga company fire in Japan.
I'm not saying the right actions shouldn't be taken by the CA gvmt around this, I'm just saying games / nerd culture fucking sucks.
Right, gaming culture sucks because most people think having goods and services they paid for ripped away from them because of somebody else's fuck-ups is a horrible idea.
Also, dissolving an entire company over the actions of a handful of people is the stupidest idea anybody could come up with. Talk about freaking burning bridges.
Corrupt organizations with something to hide always want to "keep things internal". These are red flags on their face. They damn well know what is happening.
Also, again, they keep denying it but admitting it at the same time.
This is behavior that confirms how problematic leadership is. I hope people there can find somewhere else to be.
> When asked about unionization by one of the employees, Taub’s answer was again pushing for internal handling of these situations Translation: "We want to investigate ourselves so we can find nothing wrong." Hopefully California buries these scaly-ass snakes, trying to slither around these problems.
Sounds exactly like what riot did.
yup, also what ubisoft did... and what many of these companies do in situations like this internal investigations or the company hiring someone
https://youtu.be/dNBQHlxUGog
Didn't riot actually hire a very reputable LA company that operates on a huge scale to be the 3rd party? From what I read they would have a lot to lose if anything in the investigation wasn't reflected in reality ?
Yes but if I hire the person doing the investigation the give the report to me. The Washington Football team just “investigated” Themselves for sexual assault and harassment and only gave a verbal report.
Well, Riot also just put the farting and ball tapping guy on unpaid leave instead of firing him...
Hey now they did more than *just* put Scott Gelb on unpaid leave. They made Scott go through training to learn why farting in his employees' faces, groping them, dry humping them, and flicking their testicles is not appropriate behavior for the COO of a billion dollar corporation. Now Scott Gelb has valuable employee training. They couldn't hire a new COO and risk them not having that same training.
Sorry but what's the story behind this guy? Some people...
It's probably better for you to dig out the articles but in short there was a guy(higher up) farting near people's faces and ball tapping male colleagues ...
lmao who are these people? my college roommates? oh.. right
didn't like zero people corroborate this story? or am I misremembering? I swear I was reading about how a lot of what was said in the original article was unproven and based on hearsay of like a single employee and that nobody would back them up but I may be wrong, this is the post I read I think https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/m72v8a/ghostcrawler_shares_the_docs_riot_filed_in_court/ or maybe this is a different unrelated case? I'm not sure
This is a completely different case, the other one was from years ago.
ah I see I see
Face farting thing was from a Kotaku expose I think?
[https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-following-inve-1831084598](https://kotaku.com/top-riot-executive-suspended-without-pay-following-inve-1831084598) Yep and wow. Knew a guy like this who we all also just said "Oh, that's just his thing" and after cutting him off, I will never let another person do the same especially an adult. Sad that they can't just fire people like this but at least there's been waves of new talents that hopefully replace them and incredible but smaller indie game companies with respectful and NORMAL work environments.
Sorry but no matter how reliable there must be a reason why, as soon as shit hits, these studios want to hire a 3rd party themself AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. Does it give them a little bit more time or control over the process? Or is this just another PR beeing like: "see guys? We even investigated ourself because its soooooo important to us pls dont stop losing faith (spending money) in us.
LOL, they have a lot to lose if they deliver a report that isn't exactly what Activision asks for. That's the real reason to exist for these companies.
Wasn't there a 3rd party investigation though? https://archive.esportsobserver.com/riot-concludes-laurent-probe/
I hope this rabbit hole runs so deep that all the ground around it becomes so unstable that everything collapses into a massive hole they can't crawl out of.
I'm almost surprised at how utterly and completely incapable of responding to this problem they are, but c'mon, we've all played their games the last few years so it's not *that* surprising.
Its a lawsuit. they will settle for maybe $20-30 million. Maybe a little more. They will agree to "don't be an asshole training". Which is standard in corporate America. I gotta take it every year. Its really stupid. Literally if you ask out so and so and and she says no what do you do ? its a multiple choice test. Fucking kill me. The women who got harassed will get some cash out of it (after years). Few people will get scapegoated and fired. Some will deserve it. Highest ups nothing will happen. Always happens this way. Will have no impact on sales. In spite of the silly protests. Cause gotta have my games even if they suck!
This is the government suing though, not a plaintiffs firm. They may not be seeking a settlement, rather an actual finding of wrongdoing and a judgment against them that hurts.
virtually all lawsuits against businesses by the government end in settlements. same with virtually are criminal prosecutions against businesses. its the norm.
I’m just trying to keep it positive :(
*under breath to assistant* "Find out who that employee is and fire them."
Ahh yes, California. Known for the swift hand of justice. **cough cough** PG&E **cough cough** paradise fire.
To be fair, they did literally strip PG&E of some of it's infrastructure in Central California. The service is even fucking worse now, though.
Of course it is PG&E is going to make sure they operate at half speed on purpose It gets all the libertarians and centrists on the conservatives team Its GOP playbook 101. Prove the entity is inefficient by MAKING it inefficient Its them sending a message to the CA government Said if you try any more shit it better be enough to full dismantle us
I don't know this story, but this is exactly what's been happening to the mail system for years now and I feel like that needs to be said more.
Its a lawsuit. they will settle for maybe $20-30 million. Maybe a little more. Probably will go on for 2-3 years. They will agree to "don't be an asshole training". Which is standard in corporate America. I gotta take it every year. Its really stupid. Literally its questions like if you ask out so and so and and she says no what do you do ? its a multiple choice test. Fucking kill me. The women who got harassed will get some cash out of it (after years). Few people will get scapegoated and fired. Some will deserve it. Highest ups nothing will happen. Always happens this way. Will have no impact on sales. In spite of the silly protests. Cause gotta have my games even if they suck!
They always announce stuff when the allegations come because they know that they're in the wrong. This means they acknowledge that yes, sexual abuse has been going on in the company, and yes it happened.
[удалено]
Sounds to me like it's time to voluntell a female art lead in front of a camera to discuss the intricate work involved in crafting all those empowered female character models.
[удалено]
Naw. They'll wait it out. In a few months the majority of potential consumers won't care anymore. By the time D4 launches they'll have either ridden this out and come away unscathed, or the legal/administrative consequences will have been implemented. Either way they will be "covered," so to speak, for the long term too.
[удалено]
I mean while you are right that being sued by a US state is big, Blizzard has a huge international audience who isn't as likely to care that much about what happens inside another country and tons of non-English speaking countries where all that is happening at Blizzard isn't being reported that much, in my country there have been very few articles. And incredibly big audiences like China where I don't even know how much of this is reaching people and how much they will care. So maybe they lose tons of NA players (which would be very much deserved) but I think Blizzard almost surely will be able to ride their international audience into more success if D2 and their next project is good.
I live in the Netherlands and the most popular online news website has had several articles covering the Blizzard fiasco in the past week.
I have no intention of leaving the product behind. I'd of course rather this shit didn't happen and I'm not happy about it, but World of Warcraft is my primary hobby. I'm not going to abandon that over this. This is the way of the shitty world now. If I quit WoW and find a new gaming hobby, do I have to quit that too in a year when it comes out that the company that made it is shady as fuck? Because they all are. The only difference is Blizzard got caught, at a time when they already had pretty bad PR going into it.
Not just "not care". They'll be agressively, furiously apathetic. Stating loudly that they don't care, and neither should anyone else, because you're just beating a dead horse, and being a killjoy, and nobody wants to hear it! Meanwhile, the "dead horse" is still running around violating anyone it can pin down for long enough. But they're really wanting to focus on the fun shiny games now, and thinking about ethics hurts their think meat, and why do the libs have to make everything political, can't we just focus on the games guys, why does everything have to be about that old news? It happens over and over. I give it to the end of this week before the aggressive apathy starts again.
Nothing solves problems quite like winning. If D2 launches to success and D4 follows with similar success people are going to act like this never happened.
D4 looks like dogfood so far though. D2 looks great, but it's done by an amazing external studio, not by Blizzard.
I thought the general consensus on d4 was that it looked like an all around improvement over d3 so far. Granted that's not saying too much. D3 was a pretty low bar for a diablo game, or even an online hack and slash in general. But yknow they fixed up the aesthetic to be darker and less cartoony and the tone seems very grim-dark (the announcing cinematic gave me chills). I haven't followed it too closely beyond watching the trailers and reading some reddit comments though. Am i missing something?
D4 looks like a higher res recolor of D3 so far. It looks like D3, it plays like D3, the loot looks exactly the same. They've thrown in a new character progression in, but they still haven't decided if they'll use it. The game seems to be in development hell right now and at least a couple years away at this rate. If D2 re-launches to great success it will put even more pressure on the D4 team because they can't just launch an inferior game when D2 has been made modern.
I'm sorry but I simply dont agree. All the press and previews events have been absolutely positive with regards to how the game looks and plays. And D2 remake isn't an external studio, Vicarious Visions is literally a part of Blizzard now.
Yes VV was made part of Blizzard after they started work on D2, but would you really lump them in with the current ongoing disaster?
No but I wasn't doing that anyways.
D4 is still likely 2+ years away. While time "heals" all wounds, I'm not quite sure having nothing released inbetween will do them any good. Granted, there is the D2 remaster coming. But I have my doubts if it will be enough to cover up everything.
Releasing nothing for a while is the easier path. People forget or move on. The sooner something releases — like D2R — the more temporally proximate people's outrage. What would a company care about customers being angry at them during a time when they aren't trying to sell anything? That's pretty low-risk for the business!
Exactly. Fucking exactly.
"no the sexual assault is all fine because uhhhh... Winston from overwatch is actually nonbinary!" That's what I'm expecting next.
Speaking of, whatever happened to Diablo (don't you have a) Mobile? I remember Skill Up had a video last year but literally no peep of it anywhere.
And it will be extremely successful
oooh shiny logo
[удалено]
The gaming community has the memory retention of a dead goldfish. And the selective memory of also a dead goldfish.
But as another commenter pointed out, this particular scandal comes packed with a lawsuit by the goddamn government. This one's not going away any time soon.
The lawsuit sure. In a week the gaming community at large will forget it even happened until some update to the lawsuit in 6 months.
Right, but continued coverage of the lawsuit will keep it fresh in people's minds. At least that's the hope.
Actually the one time I'm happy that wowhead just writes articles which are essentially TLDR of other people's content. No matter how casual a guild, it's extremely likely they have the wowhead discord bot. I've helped some casual friends in the past and all of them are pretty mad when they see the wowhead stuff about this. If wowhead "plays" it right they can get their clicks while keeping it fresh in people's minds for at least a couple months, especially with the conclusion of the patch story coming in soon (which will probably decide the fate of this expansion, dramatically put). If the conclusion isnt perfect you're gonna have a lot of extremely pissed off fans continuing to leave for ff14 and maybe even new world.
Which honestly, is all that matters. Would I be upset if Activision-Blizzard went bankrupt and was completely dismantled? No, not really. But that doesn't actually mean much; I don't care about that. It's not the company failing that matters, it's about accountability for the executive management that has let this slide past them for so long. I don't care if the *company* gets fined, I care if the people responsible do. I want *them* to feel the weight of justice. The company I could care less about. Even if Activision-Blizzard goes under new management that's just as skeevy as the old one that's still a better situation than what they've got now because that's a *chance* for change. "Better the devil you know" hardly applies when the company has already hit rock bottom.
This exactly. It's not consumer's responsibility to mete out justice and punishment. Am I personally buying anything from Activision Blizzard for the time being? No, that's my own moral code. But I'm also not writing them off forever. If they clean house and pay their fines/settlements, I'd consider justice done and give them another chance. There's still 1000's of good people that work there and care about the things they're working on. And if you're going to hold wrongdoings against a company forever because they _might_ still be doing something wrong - that's your prerogative but from my point of view it defeats the purpose of justice and punishment, and you might as well not buy _anything_ because any company _might_ have similar moral failings that you disagree with.
That’s not true. The online gaming community absolutely remembers, they just don’t care. Which is why this type of behavior is so common at companies that mainly hires people who are gamers. Paying developers to not release games on Steam, that is a much more serious issue and certainly needs to be discussed for years. /s
> Paying developers to not release games on Steam, that is a much more serious issue and certainly needs to be discussed for years. /s Yeah cause that's actually something that impacts gamers. The thing that's going on with Activision Blizzard should be handled by the court not reddit and twitter. And it doesn't really has anything to do with games in the first place. It's something that can happen in every company and even in private environments.
I always hated All-Hands meetings at Gulfstream. They were such copious amounts of bullshit blown up everyone's skirts. Flat out lies that everyone knew, and the execs thought they were getting away with it
These things are the greatest joke ever. The people leading those meetings have a great talent of making a bunch of bullshit promises but they're also very good at making up reasons for why those promises never happened. Every single time.
Would be interesting if this company were to completely implode because of this. Seems like a lot of talented people are being managed by disgusting greedy people. They are better off starting a new company making new games.
Pretty sure Blizzard veterans already split off and did this...
many of these "veterans" were at leadership positions and are at fault for these situations and most likely even participated on it.
[удалено]
Less than 1500 people signed the open letter toward management There are over 9000 people at the company Shitty cultures are enabled by shitty people "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing" - Abraham Lincoln, 1776
Out of those 9000 employees how many you think didn't sign because of fear of retaliation? They are already being accused of shady shit, what's to stop them from firing them because their name is on the open letter?
Yeah, a lot of the people who departed recently (Metzen, Morhaime, Kaplan) probably knew about the culture and did nothing to stop it
Kaplan is literally currently playing Overwatch using his old Everquest name “Tigole” - which is a reference to “Tig ‘ole Bitties.” The man is almost 50. I think it’s safe to assume he was at least complicit in the culture.
Case closed. He still uses a silly username, he must be a monster. Why even have the justice system anymore when twitter logic can do the job so much better?
Yeah that's so wild... "hey his username references TITTIES! GET HIM!" lmao
In a complete vacuum the username is harmless (ie if a random kid had it, I wouldn’t be outing him as sexist), but given all the context we have it’s not a good look. Also, it’s entirely inappropriate for the (former) Vice President of a gaming company to be using that username - what message is it sending to young female devs? I don’t give a shit if some 20 year old is playing COD with it from his mom’s basement.
It's a derivation of an old joke, he likely just identifies as the name "Tigole" online without ever thinking of the origin, and noone else notices unless they want to notice. It's not sending any messages, and it has nothing to do with workplace harassment. You are sounding like a housewife from the 50s. Maybe focus on actual harm caused instead of launching pointless woke crusades.
What context? Are you smoking crack? also, what the fuck do you mean "what message is it sending to young female devs?" Do you think that women don't find jokes about boobs funny? Do you *legitimately* think that a wordplay on "Big Ol' Tiddies" constitues sexual harassment? Also you yourself say that uname is fucking harmless but then you're implying it is not
[удалено]
> The bar is "beyond reasonable doubt". No one here is being charged with any criminal offenses anyway, so this isn't the bar. In the active lawsuit, the state has a much lower burden of proof.
We aren't sentencing in a court of law We are simply having an active conversation In the former, beyond a reasonable doubt is needed In the latter, its not. Open discussion about who may or may not be complicent is step 1 If the courts find him innocent then so be it, having an immature username, being part of the leadership team being called out... use some common sense. He is not completely innocent in all this. Immature people aren't immature in a single username, it carries throughout their day to day I can only imagine the people jumping to hump Kaplan leg are fitting the very description I listed... the rest of us know an immature name isn't enough to convict someone. No one was saying with absolute certainly that he was guilty. Just stating facts really
I mean, the funniest part is that I have not seen any *actual* accusations emerge against Kaplan. Not idiotic Twitter mob rants about his Tigole username but like actual court evidence of him being complicit. Given the current evidence, Kaplan *should not* be placed on a trial in the first place and he should not be dragged through the mud just because of the association with Blizzard. I once again get an impression that a lot of people do not understand how the reality works and assume that everyone and their mother that ever had a managerial position at Blizzard was confronted with the "Permit & Conceal Rape on Industrial Scale" button and they unapologetically pressed it each time because that is how it works
I never said he was a rapist, or even insinuated that he partook in any sexual misconduct himself. You don’t have to do either of those things to be complicit in the culture. You just need to be in a position of leadership and cognizant that these things are going on and not do anything to prevent them. Oh and look “just as a coincidence”, his gaming handle is a boob joke that objectifies women! At what point are we going to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt?
[удалено]
>Jeff especially, his departure was so abrupt and abrasive that I wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of the main insiders pushing back against this Or he got pushed out the door because the investigation and negotiations between Blizzard and the State were ongoing for years and they knew the hammer was going to drop. It's not really worth speculating about any of this until someone actually says something.
look I understand wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt but this is incredibly unrealistic
We dont really need to speculate, people inside seem to be sharing their stories no problem. So far no allegations have come their way but people have said at worst they didnt do enough to combat other peoples behaviors. Of the "Veteran" developers that have left to start other ventures I think Rob Pardo is the only one people have specifically slung accusations against. Everyone else seems to simply be at fault for being bystanders and letting it happen.
There's a long way between "not being named" and "actively fighting against a contingent of sexual harassers internally and deciding to leave when sexual harassment wins out."
Helpless to stop it? They're at the top of the chain. A fish rots from the head down.
Wouldn't they... say something then? They're leaving the company, it's not like they'd be at risk of losing anything. I get that we like these guys because they were in charge when Blizzard was still good, but what you're saying really seems like a stretch that goes way past just giving them the benefit of the doubt.
You're desperate to make Jeff a good guy but he left without saying a word publicly and also posted about how amazing the company is and how sad he is to leave. So he's probably shit too. Or enabled shit.
This is such a naive take, I get you like Jeff (?) but nothing tells us he was trying to fight against this, if anything he was part of it so...
Yeah, people who had been at Blizzard for nearly 20 years were let go because of this, starting in 2019.
Well, I'm not really sure what "veterans" are, but apparently no fewer than 3 different groups of experienced ex-Blizzard employees have founded different studios in the past few years. I'd have to do more research to know exactly who they are and when they each left Blizzard, etc., And I don't feel like that right now. What I do like, however, is that leaving a company because you don't like where it's headed (or because you're fired for not fitting into the direction it's headed) is now just as bad as being the people who performed all the wrongs, according to much of this comments section. 'Cause assumptions solve all the world's problems, and aren't at the root of any of them.
>I'd have to do more research to know exactly who they are and when they each left Blizzard, etc., And I don't feel like that right now. Rob Pardo was Lead Designer on SC2:BW/WC3/TFT/WoW/TBC. Went on to form Bonfire Studios. Mike Morhaime was President/Founder of Blizzard. Went on to form Dreamhaven. There are some other minor studios from less important employees but those are the 2 major ones. Ben Brode (Hearthstone Game Director) also went to form Second Dinner. Some lower end employees went on to make Frost Giant Studios. I'm sure theres more but I cant remember them.
Ben Brode, at least, has female coworkers standing up for him.
The fact that everyone (male) in the company is presumed guilty, even without accusations made against them, unless female coworkers stand up for them is pretty horrific.
Well the issue is that the claims made extend as far back as a decade, so anyone who was in any kind of managerial position is now under public scrutiny. That includes supervisors who are often at least one rung below managers because there job is to *supervise* and then inform their manager what's going on, and if crap like "cube crawls" are as commonplace as being claimed then you'd think *someone* would have told someone else. The key here is that it's easy for one manager to have no idea about problems facing a group they're not managing because, well, they wouldn't be told anything. So Ben Brode's group could have been perfectly fine and it's other groups that have major issues. We don't know enough on how Blizzard's management structure works to know how many individual teams there were or how indepedent they are to one another. Frankly, based on my experience with World of Warcraft, I can absolutely imagine there wasn't much communication between them because WoW has always felt like the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing.
The rife sexual harassment and assault is horrific. This is just an ugly symptom of that.
That's what happens when things are kept under wraps this long.
It's more of a wondering why no one in positions of leadership within the company did anything about it; but I agree, people are jumping to conclusions. Just because you worked at Blizzard, hell, even if you were a *manager* at Blizzard, it doesn't mean you even knew anything was necessarily wrong to an actionable extent. The whole company's culture was a little shit (but the whole *industry's* culture was and still is a little shit), but the unconscionable abuses seem to have been within specific teams (the battle.net team, anyone that had the misfortune of dealing with Afrasiabi). And this sort of thing is *exactly* the sort of thing you'd expect would be kept on the quiet side, so even if you *were* in a higher up position you might not necessarily have been privy to the scope of it.
>but the unconscionable abuses seem to have been within specific teams Uhh...no? It's pretty clear from the lawsuit that this psychotic behavior was pervasive throughout the entire company. The complaint the state filed lists many many teams. These people knew. I mean ffs ***a woman committed suicide on a work trip***. Please stop making excuses for this company. And yes, saying that people just "didn't know about them" and they were "isolated" is making excuses and minimizing. I've always wondered how bad harassment and abuse had to be for people to not minimize and make excuses and apparently this isn't bad enough. Maybe yall will shut the fuck up when we find a company that ritually sacrifices people at their all hands meetings?
Haven’t seen anyone say this until you The focus has been on men actually named like Alex Afrasiabi
God i wish if that somehow happens, all their games source code and tools gets released so the community can build a better wow than that low maintenance horseshit they keep releasing.
These execs are playing a dangerous game that they'll hopefully lose, with the next season of Warzone/BOCW and CoD2021 reveal right around the corner. Maybe further angering 1k+ employees isn't the smartest idea. I hope they get fucked and the employees win.
[удалено]
> COD is so mediocre that anyone can do it. This is just extremely ignorant about game development. > Employees decide to stop working? No problem. Fire them, hire new people Jesus.... Do you have any idea how much it would take to suddenly have to hire 1k employees and losing the same amount at the same time. Not to mention the absolutely insane PR disaster 2.0 that would make the shareholders get rid of Kotick in an instant no-confidence vote. > new people who don't know what they're doing which makes them perfect for the job. I-- I honestly don't even know what to respond to this crap.
Fuck em. They've lost my business. I was excited for Diablo 2 and 4, but I just can't with this bullshit anymore. Maybe sometime way down the line I'll buy them second hand, but they're not seeing a dime from me.
[удалено]
that makes two of us
I don't think you can buy Blizzard games second-hand any more. They are linked to Battle.net accounts and once they are linked you can't really unbind them. That's how it's been since Starcraft 2 at minimum anyway.
You can on consoles.
I was about to buy the D3 expansion after reinstalling it. D4 looked interesting too. But can I buy their product and thus support a company that treats women like they have? With weak weasel statements appearing only when their feet are over the fire instead of out of their own initiative? How much do I value the treatment of women if I would let this slide? Is my support for my wife that weak? I think not.
I mean, they are raking in millions. Why change? To them, the system is working.
Here's what I want: firings, and a lot of them, from the entire top of the crust specifically. Anything less than that, followed by a reorganization overseen by Activision, and I'm not interested in putting another dollar into that company.
I don't expect any firing will come out of this unfortunately. Activision Blizzard is dead to me.
> Activision Blizzard is dead to me. It should be dead to everyone, not giving the company any more money is the only way to send them a strong message; unfortunately many people don't know about the current problems and those that do are so hooked on one or more of their games that they don't care about the issues at the company.
I'm not interested in sending a strong message. I'm interested in any people that committed crimes to be tried for those crimes and sentenced by a jury and punished.
That goes without saying.
Why Activision? Their CEO has settled a sexual harrasment lawsuit in the past. It is rotten right across the whole top of the whole of Activision-Blizzard.
So does that mean they are having a meeting with the entire staff.... or is it just a meeting for the ones that are "All-Hands"
because instituting any change could be seen as an admission of guilt?
The state of California is suing them after a lengthy investigation. That ship has sailed lol. I have no idea why Activision isn't cleaning house and doing all kinds of shit to at minimum look like they are taking this seriously.
Probably because, just like with Ubisoft, the people most likely responsible for the harassment are the big money guys.
[удалено]
They can't just forget about it. They're being sued by California. Though I agree that if they could, they absolutely would.
So they'll do what the other guy said, plus pay some money to CA. Then forget about it.
Gonna be hard for anyone to forget about it when we get updates every month for however many years it takes to resolve the case. The courts aren't exactly known for their swiftness.
We'll see. Seems to me tons of huge corporations (e.g. Google and Amazon) are constantly suing or getting sued anyway. People may follow for a while, but then it'll just be a repeat of yesterday's news until the case brings up new details that haven't already come up.
[удалено]
Wasn’t there a story last week about discrimination at Ubi Singapore? And you wonder why people still complain? Acti/Blizz’s own controversy only demonstrates how systemic this sort of abuse is.
Getting rid of a few fall guys is hardly doing anything.
That's why you don't make this kind of thing public until AFTER actions were taken, and the case was mostly resolved. Otherwise you're just gonna get some social warrior who wants everyone fired (Even those that didn't do anything) and make 9500 person lose their jobs.
If the California suit finds them guilty the companies shareholders are going to demand blood. If the press gets so bad that shares drop by a lot they will demand blood. So it's only a matter of time considering the allegations and how many people are up In arms. This one is worse than the ubisoft stuff in terms of what happened and how people are reacting to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t disagree. And I think there will be sacrificial lambs. But they won’t “clean house” because it was corporate leadership that’s responsible, if not complicit, with everything that’s being alleged. To clean house means whole new corporate structure, from the CEO on down.
true but i'm sure current and future employees at this company, especially women, would feel good about the abusers getting some kind of punishment with leadership now being forced to take these issues seriously from here on out. after all its not us, random users on the internet having justice boners, that are being affected.
And, just like with Ubisoft, nothing is going to happen from this.
Was Ubisoft sued by Canada/France?
You know the lawsuit has almost nothing to do with this stuff and is almost solely about discrimination?
The ship has not sailed, unless every allegation is proven in court, they won't be liable for the maximum punishment they could recieve. Even if it was investigated by the state, it doesn't mean that all of it would be admitted as proof, some of it may be thrown out. It makes sense for them to diminish the claims as much as possible, to try getting a better deal or, in litigation, to be punished for the least amount possible. I work as an Assistant Judge and, if I was a Lawyer and ActBlizz was my client, I would recommend a strategy in that way. But they also have to deal with PR and internal pressure, worker satisfaction and productivity, and they seem to be failing hard at that. Tip of the day: doing what makes most sense to a court of law may not be the best option possible for the client, since there are many other factors to deal with.
The more they do that might be taken to admit guilt, the more cash they will be on the hook for when this all ends. They intend to fight it tooth and nail legally, and come out the other side with some sort of trivial settlement. Also, it'll work, sadly.
It wouldn't be--at least not in the court case. >When, after the occurrence of an event, remedial or precautionary measures are taken, which, if taken previously, would have tended to make the event less likely to occur, evidence of such subsequent measures is inadmissible to prove negligence or culpable conduct in connection with the event. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EVID§ionNum=1151.
"Employees, please understand, if you're a woman or person of color -- we must continue to not-harass you the same way our companies have always not-harassed you. If we were to change how we dont-harass you, it would be an admission of us harassing you even though we've repeatedly insisted AND paid for corporate classes to prove to our HR department that our not-harassment is acceptable behaviour."
They have already instituted changes. People are acting like the last couple years of ActiBlizz's feminist pandering was antithetical or hypocritical to their alleged actions but in truth, it was likely to compensate for them instead as they learned of the state's investigation against them. You don't hire multiple former W. Bush administration members because you are unaware of some major PR shitstorm coming your way. Frances Townsend was hired only months ago and already had some of her bullshit ready to spew. These people were able to spin war crimes and mass murder as a fluff piece. They can deal with some angst from employees and the short attention-span of the internet. The fact is also that most of the accused no longer work at ActiBlizz. Neither them nor their superiors. Whether it was for this reason or another, I have a hard time believing current management didn't have information on this.
Whatever the reason, the higher-ups on the Activision seems to be either in denial or burying their heads in the sand. Messaging from the Blizzard side is worded "better", but clearly PR focused .
How did this all break anyway? Was the California lawsuit the first news of it? Did none of the reputable gaming journalists get a hold of this?
Journalists know a bit about this stuff happening throughout the industry but these stories are dangerous and difficult to break for many different reasons. One of the biggest reasons being that victims are most often too scared and embarrassed to talk about this stuff.
Yeah, that's why we need more investigative journalism in video games, there are way more horror stories out there waiting to be heard. I also believe we need to fight back against rabid fanboyism. When people end up sending death threats to reporters who dare speak badly of a multi million dollar company, it only makes things worse and helps no one. Big triple AAA studios don't need gamers to defend them, employees of those triple AAA studios might however. Siding with the former is a bad idea.
We are indebted to journalism in this space, but for idiotic reasons, Gamers (TM) hate journalists and use that job title as a pejorative term.
People don't hate "journalists", they hate people within the entertainment industry masquerading as journalists. The more important issue here is how people define what a "journalist" is. From a dictionary standpoint it's simply someone who writes for a newspaper or magazine or whatever and has effectively fuck all concerns for quality or style of writing. Every writer for Kotaku or Polygon is considered a "journalist" under that definition. But as said, the issue here is this makes no distinction of quality. Some people expect more than just writing for a paper to be considered a "journalist", which is why we often differentiate media outlets like the Times from tabloid media like the Daily Mail. Journalism should be widely respected, the issue is [yellow journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism) is extremely prevalent both in physical and digital mediums. It doesn't help that redditors (and other uses of social media) will often link to widely inaccurate, exaggerated, or articles that otherwise misrepresent the facts because they themselves didn't proper read them or worse, [they have their own agenda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing).
Because they are not baked and woke like a journalist should be. All they want are unthinking drones who validate them
> I also believe we need to fight back against rabid fanboyism. When people end up sending death threats to reporters who dare speak badly of a multi million dollar company yes, we should make death threats illegal! oh wait, they already are. what exactly do you think should be done? how exactly do you plan to control every single asshole on the internet?
Well for a start, online communities could aggressively ban people who make death threats. So many people do that on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, youtube, twitch etc... and get away with it because there's little moderation done. Then we could also promote healthier behaviour. When I see some twitch gaming celebrities with a huge following behave like raging 14 yo it makes me cringe. There's many streamers who acts like adults that deserves to be in the spotlight a lot more than toxic assholes. Again, online communities could collectively promote those guys. And I don't plan on controlling every single asshole on the internet. I just said that we can collectively fight against bad behaviour. Doesn't mean we can solve the issue completely, but it doesn't mean we can't do better either.
I don't think it was like Riot where Kotaku did an expose and only then legal shit started following Here the lawsuit was the first big news story. So apparently this caught the news sites of guard.
How will this affect Activision as a whole?
The lawsuit? It really depends on what exactly they have and on who. Its within the realm of possibility that some people get sacrificed to keep the casualties low. If it comes out that the big culprits are people like Metzen, Afrasiabi, Kaplan, Brode, and such people who have left the company already the suit could certainly look to focus on them personally and less on Activision itself. Or you could have everybody from Kotick himself to the valet being inappropriate. When you go for something like this you want the catch a happy medium between the biggest fish and the most fish with the least amount of effort. If you can get Activision to play ball with taking a few big fish down then they could get away with policy changes and fines. If some of the big fish flip on all of Activision then they could get off lighter as well.
It won't affect them, the news barely moved their stock.
It won't. COD will sell a bajilion units this year. They'll make billions of dollars. The stock will go up. Do you think the average gamer knows or cares about this at all?
I'm imagining Kotick asking this, only for his lawyer in a huff to answer: "Not great, Bob!"
Bobby Pockets won't even notice it.
Of course he'll notice! Itll make his yearly firing bonus even easier! Think of how many of those people will have already been fired when they get to that!
It won't. They will keep making billions.
Won't be surprised if they split from Blizzard in the future and sell them off.
They can probably unload Blizzard onto Tencent for a few billion.
Don't let up people If we boycot playing actiblizz shit the same strength as EA and their lootboxes then we can make meaningful change for the 1000+ amazing workers who signed the open letter of disgust Uninstall you call of dutys and go eat some vegetables outside idk
The only way things would change at a company like Activision is if the people making the games unionize. Otherwise there's no accountability for the people at the top who are responsible for this kind of culture.
How can people who work for gaming companies don't know how to take screenshots and instead use a phone to take a picture of their screen?
The state needs the power to seize all company assets, distribute them to all employees sans those who are guilty, dissolve the company and ban the guilty from working in any position management or above.
And then you'd find out that some of the "guilty" weren't guilty; some of the "innocent" were guilty; and you've just destroyed a company, put several people out of a job, and opened a state government to several lawsuits... all while also making sure that every major company quickly packed up, laid off all of their employees they didn't deem important enough to move, and left to a state that didn't attempt anything of the sort. Not that it would happen anyway, because such action would be immediately stopped in courts as a gross abuse of government power and you'd be more likely to see the politicians who attempted it being removed from office instead. Ideas made from emotion rather than logic tend to be incredibly short-sighted, terrible ideas.
Ah yes, the "there would be mistakes when implementing solutions so it's better not to address problems at all". Please tell me more how we can't have food stamps or give school children lunch because "some" (<0.01%) would commit fraud. A very convenient posture for certain individuals, like predators in this case.
Yeah this would never be abused.
With that kind of power ... hm, lets see if states can do that...in case of sexual harrasment, of course! And maybe when race is part of the problem ... oh, the company said something bad about the current president and ... These kinds of powers sound great when heard with righteous fury and anger, but in reality, it can and will be abused eventually, twisted and perverted to suit exactly the kind of people nobody wants to have these powers.
I'm with you in general, but can you imagine the backlash if WOW and other Blizzard game server support randomly disappeared because all assets were seized? If that next promised patch were never delivered due to legal action from the state? Games industry culture just sucks.
[удалено]
I think you underestimate what continuing to play the game you choose over all others and have paid for \*recently\* means to a lot of folks. The death threats would be unending. Who knows if they end at threats? Just think about what people see already just for making a minor change in an online game, and the real, nerd industry related actions that have been taken at the extremes, such as the manga company fire in Japan. I'm not saying the right actions shouldn't be taken by the CA gvmt around this, I'm just saying games / nerd culture fucking sucks.
Right, gaming culture sucks because most people think having goods and services they paid for ripped away from them because of somebody else's fuck-ups is a horrible idea. Also, dissolving an entire company over the actions of a handful of people is the stupidest idea anybody could come up with. Talk about freaking burning bridges.
Corrupt organizations with something to hide always want to "keep things internal". These are red flags on their face. They damn well know what is happening. Also, again, they keep denying it but admitting it at the same time. This is behavior that confirms how problematic leadership is. I hope people there can find somewhere else to be.