> In a letter to employees made public in October, Ms. Townsend said Activision had “exited” 20 employees and another 20 had faced disciplinary action. “We know there’s a desire to know about the outcome when misconduct is reported,” Ms. Townsend wrote. “Sometimes, there are privacy reasons we can’t share. But where we can, we will be sharing more information with you. We will also be providing you regular, aggregate data about investigative outcomes.”
They fired 20 people, not the CEO, and haven’t disclosed who it what reason these people were fired for.
Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.
I suspect that they get around that by giving a total number, no personal details. If, for instance, they gave the rank of those employees, director or above former employees could argue that they were identifiable and couldn’t hide behind the usual churn.
My bet is on security engineers and QA. If I could bet on this - I would have my money on those people being fired. Always annoying at meetings, constantly being downers /s
This has the feel of the CEO rounding up as many patsies as he can find to scapegoat in order to placate the investors.
No doubt the culture there is rotten to the core, the rumors of the horrible work environment and harassment are widely known, however, I predict you won't see too many of the exec team having to leave. It'll be all low level expendable IC's that the CEO won't have to encounter at the country club after the sacking.
Definitely. For the _Wall Street Journal_ to write most of their article about how the CEO is guilty of the worst and didn’t face any consequence, because the board supported him —— and use the word “rape”, he really need to have made a bad attempt at looking contrite.
It's the game industry way. Diversity this, inclusiveness that, but when you want to go on holiday for Orthodox Easter instead of Catholic Easter, we have a problem. And you realize it's all pandering and saving face in front of the public.
I saw the changes to WoW being described as reeling back from 'the line' because their company culture is so warped they have no idea where 'the line' lies anymore.
Having just finished "Flying Blind" and filled with incandescent rage, reading about the rise and fall of Boeing (and GE) as an engineering company, this seems about right. The upward failures keep failing upward.
Surely the timing of this is coincidence, what with Microsoft announcing their purchase of Blizzard?
Nope, probably not. Kinda sad to see that’s what it took to motivate them to take action. I’m not a gamer and have no horse in this race, but what initially seemed like a change of pace turns out to be the entirely laughable status quo of management giving lip service to these issues.
Given the timing, there should be no question that this was done in direct response to the acquisition, and only expendable tokens have been remove from play. Meanwhile, the management that led this shit show will avoid any consequences and laugh themselves all the way to the bank.
Kotick has taken a dishonorable path. He should be first person out the door.
Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...
> I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier.
it's enormously difficult to make a game and not a repeatable business model.
> I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster.
To create the products they're making the big dogs are leveraging years and years and years of tech R&D development and tooling and enormous amounts of manpower.
To be able to create a hit AAA without any of this is relying on capturing lightning in a bottle.
If one stumbles upon some novel gameplay that propels your game to notoriety, the design will be copied by the big AAA devs next release cycle.
That's basically what AA games are, and are sometimes somewhat successful...but usually not as successful as AAA games. Then you have the indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed. So not only do you need a game idea that is attractive to gamers (AAA games are established franchise with decades of releases and marketing), it also has to be implemented well (see the failures of this years CoD and Battlefield) AND you need a huge marketing budget to get your game in front of eyes (maybe you could get lucky going "viral") to stand out from everyone else.
> indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed
An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.
> And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
The metaphor isn't about "rotting away", it is about "rotting and stinking". The head definitely goes first. Many languages have this phrase as "the fish stinks from the head".
"They expect one of us in the wreckage brother" as one Reddit comment put it.
Bobby has to go, no matter if this is "his fault" or not. Shareholders lost a lot of money, Blizzard lost a lot of reputation. It happened on his watch and new blood is needed. To be honest I think the studio is lost, we can only hope that some of the spin off studios will turn out to be great.
A lot of the original Blizzard people have said the company's just dead - it's Activision now. Everything and everyone that made Blizzard good has gone. And it shows - they're botching games in ways completely uncharacteristic of the old company. Not even a vague sense of culture made it through to the new company.
And mark my words, this won't be the last instance of severe employee mistreatment and harassment.
Readit News
They fired 20 people, not the CEO, and haven’t disclosed who it what reason these people were fired for.
Smells to me like major scrapegoating.
Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.
Deleted Comment
Is this a typo of "scapegoating", or a conscious neologism to indicate "scraping (the bottom of the barrel) to look for a scapegoat"...?
cough cough massive severance package cough cough
My bet is on security engineers and QA. If I could bet on this - I would have my money on those people being fired. Always annoying at meetings, constantly being downers /s
Not disclosing a reason is the opposite of scapegoating. It's downplaying to avoid a fresh news cycle with lurid details.
No doubt the culture there is rotten to the core, the rumors of the horrible work environment and harassment are widely known, however, I predict you won't see too many of the exec team having to leave. It'll be all low level expendable IC's that the CEO won't have to encounter at the country club after the sacking.
Nope, probably not. Kinda sad to see that’s what it took to motivate them to take action. I’m not a gamer and have no horse in this race, but what initially seemed like a change of pace turns out to be the entirely laughable status quo of management giving lip service to these issues.
Given the timing, there should be no question that this was done in direct response to the acquisition, and only expendable tokens have been remove from play. Meanwhile, the management that led this shit show will avoid any consequences and laugh themselves all the way to the bank.
Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...
I think you might be underestimating how many man hours it takes to create the content for an AAA game.
it's enormously difficult to make a game and not a repeatable business model.
> I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster.
To create the products they're making the big dogs are leveraging years and years and years of tech R&D development and tooling and enormous amounts of manpower.
To be able to create a hit AAA without any of this is relying on capturing lightning in a bottle.
If one stumbles upon some novel gameplay that propels your game to notoriety, the design will be copied by the big AAA devs next release cycle.
An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.
This isn’t a fish.
And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
Are you familiar with the concept of 'metaphor'?
> This isn’t a fish.
> And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
The metaphor isn't about "rotting away", it is about "rotting and stinking". The head definitely goes first. Many languages have this phrase as "the fish stinks from the head".
Dead Comment
Bobby has to go, no matter if this is "his fault" or not. Shareholders lost a lot of money, Blizzard lost a lot of reputation. It happened on his watch and new blood is needed. To be honest I think the studio is lost, we can only hope that some of the spin off studios will turn out to be great.
Dead Comment
And mark my words, this won't be the last instance of severe employee mistreatment and harassment.