The internal toxic workplace culture (that I sort of alluded to in the past) that has plagued Blizzard Entertainment (and Activision) has FINALLY come to a head with this lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (aka DFEH).
Bloomberg Law reported the details of the 2 year long investigation regarding the “frat boy” culture at he company (no surprise here, this is unfortunately widely prevalent in the gaming industry across multiple studios AND publishing companies). The biggest issue is toxic behavior at the senior management and executive levels at these companies including Activision and Blizzard Entertainment. The culture at Blizzard Entertainment itself predates the merger with Activision. The company was filled with the prototypical male gamer that lacked social consciousness (many became promoted up the chain sort of like what happened at Riot). Take a look at streaming platform Twitch as another example. Some communities there are cesspools and dealt with poorly by the company (because some in “leadership” roles at the company are the same toxic assholes who don’t see an issue); some management clown even decided that it was a great idea to have a hot tubs and gambling section (I don’t have issues with the hot tub content; it just should be on platforms more suitable for that type of content). But I digress…
Former Blizzard executive and WoW designer Alan Afrasiabi (he left quietly in June 2020) aka Furor was named as a “serial harasser” in the complaint. During his days playing Everquest, he was a known toxic guild leader and player (similar to former Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan). While that 2009 blog posting covers his so-called “rehabilitation”, Afrasiabi didn’t really change; he was essentially protected by what was then a near solid wall of old school veterans at Blizzard Entertainment (a wall that has cracked as many long time veterans have left in recent years).
The company has been running on corporate inertia where it is taking a long time for the big ship to negatively course correct from all of its internal struggles and adapting to changes in the gaming industry (designers not seeing the hand in front of them while constantly ignoring the community while giving lip service about how they do listen, Blizzard Entertainment being absolutely MIA in mobile when it was the thing to be in, relying way too much on World of Warcraft, the mentioned “frat boy” culture).
And now the chickens are finally coming home to roost. While the details in the complaint weren’t the main driver for what can be considered my own boycott of Blizzard Entertainment (when I stopped playing after BlizzCon 2015 and have since refused to purchase anything from them), these long running problems detailed in the complaint did manifest itself in the toxic attitudes (specifically the “chip on the shoulder”, the “we can’t do wrong and we know better” crowd) of some designers in their various teams. Wyatt Cheng’s “do you guys not have smartphones?” comment is a mild version of some of that coming to the surface. It’s the more worse behavior however that created a far more corrosive environment (and people wonder why the quality level of many of their games have been going down over time).
With all of the recent screwups at Blizzard Entertainment along with many WOW players finally reaching the point of giving up, this may be what pushes things over the edge with taking even more off from Blizzard’s already tarnished brand image (I am still an ATVI shareholder BUT I have been reevaluating that for several months now given the stream of mishaps; I already knew that I had ZERO intentions of purchasing D4 or D2R. As this news becomes more widely covered and delved into by the financial press though, there is going to be a chilling effect (how long until that latent effect kicks in is anyones best guess) where more may begin rethinking their patronage of the company (including Activision properties).
