The original article included bits like:gbasden wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 7:54 pmThe names that keep getting thrown around are Afrasiabi and Morhaime as well as unnamed people on the World of Warcraft team. I certainly might have missed allegations against other studios, but there's more than enough there to cancel everything in my Blizzard subscriptions. I did give them a reason, and I'll do the same with Activision if the same kind of stuff is happening.Blackhawk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 3:12 pm
I hope you gave them a detailed reason. Enough people dropping subs and citing this reason will have more impact than the news stories if their profit line doesn't budge.
The thing is, we keep talking Blizzard and Blizzard games, but a lot of what's going on is Activision-Blizzard. That includes a lot more games than just WoW, Overwatch, Starcraft, and Diablo. It's not clear if this was just corporate ActiBlizz and Blizzard, or if any of the other studios under their umbrella were involved.
The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment prior to her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.
What isn't clear is how they're using their terminology. Activision, Blizzard and Activision-Blizzard are related, but not quite the same. To keep it simple, Blizzard (Entertainment) is the in-house development studio that's part of ActiBlizz, while Activision is the publishing arm that handles Blizzard games along with all of their games from other studios. Activision-Blizzard itself is the parent company that owns all of them, along with a few others (King and MLG.) They're calling out Blizzard people by name, and also saying 'Activision' without names, but seem use them interchangeably. We know Blizzard is an issue. Execs at ActiBlizz and/or Activision are also called out, but we're not sure which. It could be all of them. Or some of them. It's kind of a mess until someone sorts through the paperwork.According to the complaint, filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court, female employees make up around 20% of the Activision workforce, and are subjected to a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” including “cube crawls,” in which male employees “drink copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”
Of course, the most likely scenario, given the industry and management, is that it's rotten all the way down.
And that brings us to the issue boycotts and the third party developers that aren't part of this, but sell their games through the Activision brand.
In other words, it's a mess. The industry needs to grow the hell up before it sinks.