Content Warning: Descriptions of sexual abuse and suicide.VideoGames posted:This topic is for Game Industry news only. Welcome to the Blizzard's Decline & Fall thread. Before we get into anything else: off-topic chat is strictly forbidden. This thread was created out of a want and need to have a space to discuss the topic at hand without cross-talk. If you're interested in a more casual environment or simple deathwatch shitposting, the Blizzwatch thread will be happy to have you. Over the last 5 years, there has been a growing perception of wrongdoing in the videogame industry by big name actors in the development scene. There have been three notable players in this space: ABK, Riot, and Ubisoft. If you somehow don't know who ABK are, they're a conglomerate of Activision (Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot), Blizzard (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo), and King (Candy Crush). On the whole, ABK's issues could fill a library, so I'm not going to directly write a blurb on each of them and instead link to a relevant wiki article (given the wiki has links to the relevant news articles directly). However, it's worth noting that for many years, Blizzard was considered to be THE studio to work at to build prestige, having created multiple beloved franchises and generally being considered an industry giant due to its overwhelming cultural influence. Current topics California Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Activision Blizzard - without going into too much detail, the State of California lodged a court case against ABK relating to a culture of workplace sexual harassment, where women were functionally treated like second class citizens and sexual objects. Additionally covers Blizzard's treatment of staff and fans at Blizzcon (the infamous "Cosby suite" - reportedly not named after Bill Cosby's conduct but because "A rug in the room looked like one of his sweaters"). On a related point, it's just came out today that it looks like the Blizzard case may be moving from State Court to Federal Court https://twitter.com/josheidelson/status/1437813878461644803?s=20 Blitzchung "Free Hong Kong" controversy - Blitzchung was an esports player of hearthstone from Hong Kong who in October 2019 after winning a round of Hearthstone live on stream put on a mask similar to those worn by those in Hong Kong protesting the Chinese Government's actions and said "Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times". This specifically lead to the stream being cut, the casters who were hosting it had their contracts terminated, and Blitzchung himself was banned from that tournament and others. The public outcry to this was swift, brutal, and far reaching to the point that the US Senate ended up issuing a letter to the company, several comentators / streamers chose to no longer stream blizzard products. During Blizzcon 2019, Blizzard chose to address the controversy without actually addressing the controversy by promising to "do better", and then promptly deleted the apology from the VODs. ABK hires a literal GWB Era War Criminal as compliance officer - this isn't the only one! =============================================== The following two topics are specifically relating to Ubisoft (Developers of Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six Siege, etc) and Riot (League of Legends, Valorant), however I want to specify ahead of time that I am not fully across the relevant allegations here and are included principally because of the proximity of the allegations to ABK - more relevant information can be found in the #metoo thread where people have discussed this in more detail as information has come to light. Ubisoft Sexual Misconduct - This is a large topic, however similar to the Blizzard allegations, Ubisoft have been hit by several waves of sexual harrassment allegations that have claimed the scalps of several executives. The issue here however is that the allegations have not ceased and are continuing as at time of writing with the Singapore studio currently under investigation indicating that the french studio's problems span company and worldwide. Riot Games Sexual Misconduct - Similar to Ubisoft, Riot's had extensive issues for several years, which is understandable given the cross pollination between ABK and Riot Games. Specifically allegations of Sexual harassment stemming directly from the CEO, (an internal investigation later found "no evidence" of this conduct by the CEO), as well as ongoing gender discrimination in terms of pay rates. Riot specifically has attempted to avoid government ire here with specific private settlements with individuals that prevents them from speaking to the government. =========================================== It is specifically worth pointing out as a final note here that the scale of information that's come out over the last few years is staggering in its depth and as such the information presented in the OP is specifically intended as a high level view only and specifically omits information because there's just no way to cover it all in a summary. If you're eager for reading up on similar subjects outside of this specific thread, there is the #metoo thread and the TG Industry thread. Mazed posted:My testimonial as ex-Blizz doesn't weigh as much in comparison to the utterly ghastly anecdotes that flooded social media in the wake of the story breaking, mostly from women impacted directly, which is where so much of the real raw meat of this shitshow lies. Zil posted:KPI talk reminds me of something, were you there for the four boxes thing? Where you had four categories to reach and if you were above the average you were considered epic. Oh and you needed to have four epic boxes three times in a row to be considered for promotion. Also if you had 1 sick day you immediately got a red box for attendance. Heran Bago posted:I can't keep track of what and when Blizzard poo poo went down. Some news sites have their own timeline but it's always missing things. I started my own to summarize each one concisely but there's just so much that it balooned. I also include an out-of-context quote for most to help me remember and contextualize that specific poo poo. Anyone leaving the company I called "quitting" which isn't accurate. I think I forgot a couple employee protests or company-wide emails, so if I missed or misplaced anyting please speak up and I'll edit.
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# ¿ Sep 14, 2021 23:41 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 09:39 |
Dreylad posted:didn't Blizzard North do Diablo 1 & 2, which was a completely separate studio? then again, not sure if they also had allegations in their studio that's long since disbanded They are a separate studio yes, no allegations have been made against blizzard North that I'm aware of. The man responsible for that studio has been extremely open with his disgust. Can't remember his name but he came up in the other thread when the news broke of the California case.
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# ¿ Sep 15, 2021 01:04 |
BisbyWorl posted:Which might as well be no mods period, imo. I very much doubt they will. Median XL in particular is basically operating its own version of the d2 executable with a bunch of QOL features and support for modern day resolutions blizzard meanwhile, stubbornly refuses to support any ultra-wide screen monitor resolutions because "they don't want people with those monitors to have a competitive advantage in multiplayer"
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# ¿ Sep 18, 2021 08:57 |
A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah, I don’t see them trying to stir trouble if they believed their money was in safe hands. A Blizzard at full prestige might have been strong enough to weather this poo poo and calm investors, but incompetently scrambling like they’re doing is like the opposite of what you want to instill investor confidence. It’s not investors going “Wow, Shadowlands was bad, let’s destroy Bobby”, it’s “They kept us in the dark, and clearly have no idea how to get us our money back”. Incompetent scrambling has been their entire modus operandi since their spiral really started to hit its stride in the last 36 months.
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 08:01 |
What, don't you guys have phones?
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# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 11:36 |
Kith posted:this is a real good post and deserves to be part of the OP imo Inshallah, it is now
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# ¿ Sep 22, 2021 02:49 |
Natural 20 posted:Blizzard suck because all the hot blondes were garbage.
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# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 05:47 |
Desfore posted:To expand on this a tiny bit, during the WoD beta, there was a split in the outcome of the Kargath raid fight, based off difficulties. I don't recall the full details, but I think LFR-Heroic Kargath would run away at 2%, leaving his severed blade hand as the lootable object; while Mythic difficulty ended the same way it does now. I'm not sure if they had previewed the Mar'gok fight at this point, but a lot of people started complaining about canonicity of fights, and only seeing the "Full story" on mythic. Plus, I think Blizzard realized they couldn't really do anything with Kargath after this fight, or they'd have to spin some weird "I wasn't really dead!" bullshit for people that saw that version of the fight, so everyone gets to kill him. they do that a lot and I don't like it
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# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 08:47 |
stev posted:He didn't even deny that one. Jesus loving Christ what an awful human being. While it's probable that the root cause of the "we can't fire Kotick" is the fact that they'd have to pay him a third of a billion dollars, might also be worth looking at the board to figure out who old mate's holding skeletons against. WSJ posted:In 2006, one of his assistants complained that he had harassed her, including by threatening in a voice mail to have her killed, according to people familiar with the matter. He settled the matter out of court, the people said. christ alive, he really is just going to post through it.
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# ¿ Nov 16, 2021 21:59 |
Every day that something more, and worse, comes out makes me regret the money I've spent on AB products over the years because it feels like tacit enablement of that behaviour - even if it was outside of the public view. I'm just in awe, really, of kotick writing an email and sending it under someone elses name because they're a woman, and when it landed like a lead balloon, had the temerity to call it tone deaf like he hadn't written it. Just an absolute all timer. Old mate really must know where the board's bodies are buried to have them stand by him after all the poo poo that's coming out
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# ¿ Nov 17, 2021 21:16 |
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2021 03:17 |
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# ¿ Nov 19, 2021 07:12 |
thetoughestbean posted:From what I understand, Kotick has a clause in his contract that means they have to pay him a lot of money if they fire him so it’s cheaper to just keep him around yup firing him without cause is $265~ mill with cause is $265k The Gadfly posted:It's genius. As a CEO, you basically control the business, so just sign yourself a contract with an insane buyout to make yourself unfireable. If anyone opposes this, fire them immediately. Amazing. Contract and CEO remuneration is set by the companies board which is supposed to govern and limit this poo poo but well, in activision's case..
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# ¿ Nov 26, 2021 13:44 |
Bentai posted:https://twitter.com/BanishedJourno/status/1467203514971529218 Lots of comments saying it's someone who looks like him. The poo poo people will say to dissociate their brands from crimes is depressing.
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2021 03:27 |
Forgive the 4ch screenshot, but it looks like the blizzard guy was bragging about the breastmilk thing back in 2019 on there
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2021 00:40 |
Regalingualius posted:Actually, speaking of, what’s MS’s games division’s public track record on sexual/racial harassment? I wanna say there was some stuff back in the xbox 360 / xbox one transition days that lead to the games divisions loses some heads, but I don't have any links to hand.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2022 23:37 |
Just gonna channel my inner Cassandra here - They're gonna lose a shitload of money on NFTs - The exec who is clearly all in on NFTs is gonna sulk and double down on how people "just don't get" - The devs who were forced to implement this poo poo are going to be canned for not meeting the company's bullshit expectations - The exec who's championing it will get a promotion and a raise for their "forward thinking vision that unfortunately didn't come to fruition" - Assassins Creed 2023 will have a few bits in the "real life / modern day" segment where you're hackign the emails of Abstergo employees and they'll say poo poo like "the real difference between the assassins and the templars is a single point of difference, assassins believe nfts are great, and the templars don't"
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2022 08:40 |
anyone order an insider trading investigation into Bobby Kotick? Here's a secondary source too tithin fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2022 08:42 |
Rarity posted:Trusting the guy who made Sonic 2006 sounds like a bad call Remember during the last steam summer sale when sega was giving away games and they gave away sonic 1, and he complained about them giving away his work for free
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# ¿ Apr 29, 2022 13:54 |
CBD Corndog posted:Shut the gently caress up Jim Ryan https://twitter.com/imranzomg/status/1374033875601477632 Jim Ryan's the fuckwit who doesn't understand why people like playing BC games seems like a liability for sony to me tbh
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# ¿ May 13, 2022 00:34 |
Please post about your forum enemies in another thread
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# ¿ May 22, 2022 09:53 |
Metis of the Hallways posted:Take it to QCS please, let's stay on topic here. Reiterating this please. If you have an issue with one of the admins, take it to the designated forum that's meant to address this.
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2022 01:06 |
Dick Burglar posted:Yeah, why would I want to question in this thread why somebody closed this thread for several days immediately after sebmojo showed their entire rear end? Because it's a bigger problem than this thread. Also, I asked for the thread to be closed, because the way the thread was going was super lovely. If you're unhappy about an admin showing their whole rear end, there's a whole forum for discussion on gently caress ups by SA staff - so thank you for moving it there.
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# ¿ Jul 3, 2022 03:47 |
2x mods have already ruled it irrelevant - please stop talking about dunkey, there's another thread elsewhere for it, ty and gb
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# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 09:16 |
Seems like a solved problem, please move on.
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# ¿ Oct 18, 2022 23:27 |
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2024 09:39 |
MarcusSA posted:I don't really think that's needed seeing as how Disney is doing a pretty good job on its own of running itself into the ground. Could you elaborate on this? I was under the impression they were doing extremely well
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# ¿ Dec 9, 2022 08:12 |