Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale

https://www.promethean.news/news/activision-hires-notorious-union-busting-firm-wilmerhale

by dv_dt • 5 years ago

627 342 5 years ago

post_break4• 5 years ago

The problem I see with them is the brain drain if the influential people leave. They have options at other companies, and if enough people leave Blizzard they may be stuck. But this is just me looking from the outside in. This also signals they are scared of them unionizing.

failuser6• 5 years ago

Are there any influential people that might be on the receiving end of the frat boy culture?

post_break4• 5 years ago

Sorry I don't understand your comment, can you expand on it?

cratermoon11• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't there be? Gamergate generally? Also remember the example of Ellen Pao at reddit. Influential people can lose.

fvold• 5 years ago

You don't have to be the recipient of bad behavior to sympathize. I, for example, have never worked for Blizzard, yet I find these allegations to be appalling, and would not want to work with Blizzard until I knew the allegations were false or that the problem was properly dealt with.

Influential people can dislike the culture, and leave so their reputation is not besmirched by the much Blizzard is currently being dragged through.

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

Influential people book the Cosby suite.

https://kotaku.com/inside-blizzard-developers-infamous-bill-...

hn_go_brrrrr• 5 years ago

Yes. I'm extremely influential at setting technical direction where I work (not Blizzard) but I'm not a manager so I can't discipline people. I can only attempt to advocate for the culture I want to see, or vote with my feet.

babyblueblanket• 5 years ago

I already heard several lead devs have left + took their teams with them to start new studios.

tvirosi• 5 years ago

I know we don't want to say this but there might be a possibility some of the talent secretly are indeed sexist (wouldn't surprise me in the gaming world) and thus actually prefer to stay at a place that preserves the male dominated culture. That might be part of the strategy behind activisions anti walkout move here. Just a thought (I don't know).

haha1234__• 5 years ago

Shouldn't influential people push for better working conditions with all their influence?

post_break4• 5 years ago

They absolutely should, I should have clarified that my "them" is Activision/Blizzard the company, not the employees.

zamalek• 5 years ago

I'm really interested to see what happens here. Amazon busted the efforts of people with few options, people who could be threatened with bullshit/propaganda. I wonder if big law is sufficiently aware of the substantial impact that the recent years of ethical discussion have had on the gamer and game dev psyche. No matter the individual ethical stance of an employee, this sub-culture has had practice critiquing words and ideas.

It looks like the employees are almost universally on the equality end of the ethical spectrum (given how widespread the walkout was), which is even worse news for union busting.

pm90• 5 years ago

Is there any way to break the stranglehold of large studios and enable smaller studios to build high quality games? I loved Blizzard back when they made their OG triad (Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft) now it just seems indistinguishable from…EA. How can we enable more scrappy Blizzards?

cratermoon11• 5 years ago

Are you familiar with Frost Giant Studios? https://www.frostgiant.com/

babelfish• 5 years ago

Give your money to smaller studios! Check out indie gaming marketplaces like itch.io

failuser6• 5 years ago

I think it’s easier than ever. They engines are free and even individual developers can build incredible games. The harder part might be getting enough publicity.

ocdtrekkie2• 5 years ago

Even then, Epic Games will promote the heck out of a small indie launch if it's exclusive for a year. Many of the developers they've worked with are one or two person shops.

The days where being buried in the bottom of Steam listings is gone, as long as you aren't insisting on launching via Steam.

minikites4• 5 years ago

There are some types of games only a big studio with ample resources can make, like two current Blizzard titles: Overwatch and World of Warcraft.

justinpombrio• 5 years ago

https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Indie/

rapsey• 5 years ago

Supergiant makes really awesome and highly acclaimed games.

blibble2• 5 years ago

there's hundreds of fun games made by smaller studios

you can avoid EA, Blizzard and Ubisoft very easily these days

MontagFTB• 5 years ago

Runic Games (https://www.runicgames.com/) was also founded by a bunch of ex-Blizzard folk. The Torchlight series of games are great, and hold well to their Diablo-like roots.

pkaye• 5 years ago

Check out TheLazyPeon on YouTube who evaluates new MMORPG games all the time. Lots of great looking games coming out all the time but many of them never attract the critical mass of users to make them interesting.

indigochill• 5 years ago

There are plenty of high quality games from small studios. Everything Supergiant Games makes is gold, with excellent art direction and sountrack. Klei Entertainment also has a solid track record. If you're looking for the AAA cinematic aesthetic from a small team, let me introduce you to Senua's Sacrifice (back before the team that made it got bought out by Microsoft). And lest we forget, Stardew Valley was unbelievably successful and the passion project of one guy (who's even self-publishing now).

Additionally, between UE, Unity, and Godot, I don't feel like it's a lack of tools holding studios back. If you wanted even more games (but why - we're already drowning in a flood of them), one of the big steps might be to provide a stable funding solution for new developers so they didn't need to play financial Russian Roulette to create their art.

cybwraith• 5 years ago

Check out Grim Dawn if you want that old school Diablo feel

ThrowawayR2• 5 years ago

"Is there any way to break the stranglehold of large studios and enable smaller studios to build high quality games?"

Game engines are now cheap/free but what deep pockets buy are more and better artwork, level design, story writing, voice acting, sound design, background music, motion capture, etc. that are the hallmarks of AAA games. While small studios can (and do!) build great games, they can't replicate that because of the cost and I don't see a way to work around that. There's no way to automate artistry.

t-writescode• 5 years ago

Buy indie games.

That's it.

Buy indie games, usually in Early Access if the game is something you like or would like.

Phasmophobia has made millions. Gunfire Reborn has made millions. Small game companies are more popular than ever. There's even a game about powerwashing out right now.

nyanpasu64• 5 years ago

I've never heard of this news group before, all they offer for contact is a Gmail address with no names, and this domain doesn't even show up when I search Promethean News. I have my doubts about this website.

cratermoon11• 5 years ago

Is this better? https://kotaku.com/activision-blizzard-hires-union-busting-f...

totony3• 5 years ago

In my experience Kotaku has not been a reliable source for much of anything, although I don't know the OP domain either

rareform2• 5 years ago

I can't even access this site at my University due to it being a newly registered domain. From WHOIS: `Creation Date: 2021-06-29T18:05:15`

Symbiote• 5 years ago

Why would a month-old domain cause a problem for access?

seany2• 5 years ago

I've never understood why people are confused or upset by these kinds of things. It's almost literally not in the companies best interest to just "let it happen" so why wouldn't they fight it?

ocdtrekkie2• 5 years ago

It probably depends in some part on the replaceability of your workforce: Burning your workers isn't a big deal if they're cashiers. But if they're software engineers, burning the company's reputation with them may not be in the company's best interest: You might end up with a company that has no unionizers but also lost all its key talent.

happytoexplain• 5 years ago

Not trying to be smart by using your words: I legitimately have never understood why this comment is so common, considering how apparently obvious the fallacy of it is. You didn't imply "the company must do X", you implied "people shouldn't be upset that the company did X". The former is a totally reasonable argument to be made. The latter makes absolutely no sense (without extenuating context). You're not really confused as to why people are upset about something a company does that negatively affects people, either in actuality or only in perception, simply because it is in the company's best interests, are you? It's pretty normal for a human not to care about the hazy future consequences of a company hurting itself by embracing some external morality over its own interests as a company, and, depending on the specifics of the case, it can even be pretty reasonable not to care.

johnchristopher• 5 years ago

It's just rhetoric clichés. I used to reply "I am surprised some people are surprised that company did X" but why bother.

seany2• 5 years ago

No I am actually confused. What normal CEO _wants_ a union? A few random ones maybe; but the average CEO? zero. I'm not even anti union, just anti "union protection" which is where we are with unions in the US under the current stat of NLRB findings + case law; which is just a fucking disaster.

pfranz• 5 years ago

I'm confused why you're confused. Making it more adversarial when it's obvious the company is in the wrong and has been negligent for so long is a great way to continue to burn your talent and reputation and doesn't sound like a great way to solve the long term problem, either. Being a public facing company a large part of this is public relations. Mediating or looking for good faith resolutions is what I would expect as a consumer or potential employee.

In 1982 someone laced Tylenol with potassium cyanide and seven people died. Johnson & Johnson within 2 months released a triple-sealed package and had a nation-wide recall. Their market share dropped from 35% to 8%, but rebounded within a year. It's often talked about as a great PR response.

I doubt Activision Blizzard feels the need to be as responsive to this situation, but I don't see this as a great reaction.

unyttigfjelltol• 5 years ago

WilmerHale is not a notorious union-busting firm. The older set might know their work from A Civil Action, and their grandparents might remember the phrase that turned the red scare, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"[1]

The marketing material is unfortunate, though, and the connection with Amazon labor work is notable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_Cutler_Pickering_Hale...

juped• 5 years ago

yeah they're just biglaw, any biglaw firm does everything

xbar• 5 years ago

This seems accurate.

Contextually, ActiBlizz is responding to the DFEH situation with a new biglaw firm.

Will ActiBlizz use WH's union-response services? I would be surprised if they don't. WH will likely sell guidance about what can be legally done to chill early unionization pressures. If unionization efforts really get rolling at ActiBlizz, no doubt they will spend more at WH.

What is good: WH's tactics at Amazon, AL were monitored and reported as disgusting. If they repeat those at ActiBlizz, there may be pressures for regulators to increase protections against corporate interference of unionization efforts.

johnnyanmac8• 5 years ago

yup. Unfortunately I think the clickbait headline did its job. Even here on HN where I'd expect better. I guess no site is immune to kneejerk reactions.

cratermoon11• 5 years ago

What does any of that have to do with whether or not the firm is notorious for union-busting? Representing a polluting corporation against citizens suing it for making them sick is 100% compatible with busting unions.

[Originally I had gotten this backwards and stated that WilmerHale represented the citizens]

rl3• 5 years ago

What does any of that have to do with whether or not the firm is notorious for union-busting?

I'm wondering the same. I suppose it comes down to the semantics of where notoriety begins, but they're representing some slimy clients regardless.[0]

Representing citizens in a lawsuit against a polluting corporation is not incompatible with busting unions.

Oh no, they were defending the polluter—Beatrice Foods—against said lawsuits.[1]

[0] https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/jamie-gorelick-amazons-a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_Cutler_Pickering_Hale_a...

lacker• 5 years ago

Their Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about union-busting. If you are "notorious" for something in this day and age, it should at least show up in ten paragraphs of Wikipedia.

The main controversy mentioned there is them representing people who are held in Guantanamo under suspicion of terrorism. It seems more like Wilmer Hale is a huge bunch of lawyers doing all sorts of things, than some union-busting hacks.

aksss2• 5 years ago

If you're someone who craves moral certainty at the expense of honest inquiry, a person/company/historical figure cannot be both virtuous and flawed. They must be all one or all the other.

disposableuname• 5 years ago

They're a biglaw firm, which has its hands in many, many fields. If WilmerHale had anything resembling a specialty, it would corporate/finance law.

walshemj• 5 years ago

Real white shoe big law wont really want to do union busting

tapoxi• 5 years ago

Also, what is this news source? Who are its writers?

I am by no means taking Activision's side here, but this website is sketchy.

tinus_hn• 5 years ago

The website ‘Wikipedia’ is sketchy? Or who is?

edit I guess you mean the news site this article is on, that is pretty sketchy indeed.

belorn• 5 years ago

Looking at the Wikipedia article, I guess that the primary reason they were hired were their connection to government. When you are sued by the government, it useful to have lawyers that has experienced from working inside the government (and possible have political connections). The connection with Amazon labor work could be part of the decision, but I wonder if there aren't then more optimal choices if that was blizzards primary concern.

lizwr• 5 years ago

From the outside this seems like some inner tension's already in place.

andrew_• 5 years ago

To folks intimate with the situation: what's the likelihood that they weather this storm like recent, similar industry kerfuffles in companies like Coinbase or Basecamp, that they implode under bad PR, or fundamentally change culture?

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

Union busting behavior is not that surprising, but talk about awful timing. Do the people at the top not consider the PR implications of this stuff?

minikites4• 5 years ago

Not enough people are going to unsubscribe from WoW for it to make a difference, enough of the public is anti-union and many of the rest don't care.

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

I’m actually seeing a lot of rage directed at them from the gaming forums I interact on, including a lot of people claiming that they’ve canceled. Completely anecdotal, I know, but it was not what I expected at all. I think this one is going to hurt more than usual.

lnxg33k12• 5 years ago

Is it something they need to be worried about? I mean Activision Blizzard has been shit all over the years, and kids still buy their games. On the other hand hiring a firm is not a proof of wrongdoing for the ongoing trial.

ggregoire2• 5 years ago

kids still buy their games

Any source on that? I always imagined the current Blizzard customer demographics in the 20-40 years old range. Kids definitely don't play WoW, Diablo or StarCraft/Warcraft. Not sure about Overwatch but I'd guess kids prefer Fortnite. So perhaps Hearthstone? You kinda need a credit card to enjoy the game tho.

But you have a point, people still buy their games, expansions, loot boxes, skins, monthly subsriptions and so on.

failuser6• 5 years ago

The might be banking on the “crush the SJWs” crowd. Who knows what their market research showed, but I think we will see soon enough.

ashtonkem3• 5 years ago

Given that their first response to the lawsuit was to complain about “unelected bureaucrats”, I think their response is being driven more by their id than by careful market research.

danaris3• 5 years ago

They're probably more worried about what happens if they have to actually face a unionized workforce than what the public might say about them hiring a union-busting law firm.

dylan6044• 5 years ago

If you're having a bad news cycle, why not just dump the rest of the trash with it. Let it all blend in together instead of clearing one cycle, then creating another. People can only focus on so much at one time. In a few months, people won't remember and order their next release.

forz877• 5 years ago

These messages are quite common. "What terrible PR, what are they thinking."

The truth is? It doesn't matter nearly as much as people think. Companies have caught on - a vocal minority will call them out, but it won't matter. People will still buy the next COD. At the end of the day, that's all anyone cares about top to bottom.

brainfish4• 5 years ago

I cut my teeth on Diablo, and played Diablo II for probably fifteen years after its release off and on as a way to stay connected with a friend who loved it similarly. More recently, I have consistently played Starcraft II since its release and enjoy a sense of mastery over that game unparalleled by my experience in any other.

I haven't purchased new Blizzard products since the Hong Kong censorship debacle[1] and quit playing Hearthstone at that time. However I had still played some of my other old favorites, reasoning that I was not providing them further financial support. The recent announcements about their terrible, sexist culture had challenged that notion for me, and I was not sure what to do.

This news is the straw that breaks my back. That Activision/Blizzard would double down on their despicable behavior and stance in this way is completely beyond the pale, and I for one will never again fire up those games that I loved so much.

Thanks for ruining that for me, Blizzard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy

runawaybottle4• 5 years ago

They don’t really care that much about the American market anymore really. Something like 90% of League of Legends players are in China. The mobile gaming market is massive over there, hence Diablo Immortal.

China does not care about the West’s uproar over most things. Blizzard does not care if you buy Diablo 4, they care if the East buys Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal.

biryani_chicken• 5 years ago

It's dystopian to see Chinese people consume American products at the expense of American workers.

aeoleonn3• 5 years ago

Check out Path of Exile 2 -- it's the spiritual successor to Diablo 2. And it's freemium

dimitrios1• 5 years ago

It's a great game, but if you are concerned about Freedom in Hong Kong, Grinding Gear Games is owned by Tencent, so you are still sending money to support an authoritarian regime that is still finishing up their latest installment of ethnic cleansing and re-education camps.

ggregoire2• 5 years ago

Path of Exile 2 is still in development, you probably meant Path of Exile? By the way, they just released a new free expansion so it's a great time to check the game out. It's considered by many as the greatest ARPG.

dylanz• 5 years ago

I’d recommend Grim Dawn over PoE personally.

scrollaway4• 5 years ago

Hades is a better Diablo than any of the Diablo games imo. I feel like it's the perfection of the mechanics that diablo's dungeon runs were supposed to be.

adkadskhj• 5 years ago

jchrisa• 5 years ago

The myth of shareholder value is roundly rejected by the people who's job it is to think about these things: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

whatshisface• 5 years ago

Ie why would Blizzard be okay with workers unionizing for better work conditions? It seems unlikely that would favor Blizzard in the short term[1].

Well, if everyone reading about Blizzard's malfeasance decides to not do business with them, as some commenters in this thread are doing, then they will suffer a problem in the short term as well.

brainfish4• 5 years ago

My hope is that I can contribute in my small way to making moral behavior more profitable than immoral. IE voting with my wallet.

I'll also vote for policies and representatives to enact sensible (opinions will differ, obviously) legislation to enforce better morality and better safeguarding of the commons, especially with respect to externalities -- as I see those as a major source of the failings of capitalism.

Beyond that, I don't really know. And I'll readily admit that looking around at where we as a society are and where we seem to be headed, especially with respect to things like climate change, those seem like very small measures. I just don't know what else to do.

RangerScience2• 5 years ago

AFAICT, this is one of those counter-intuitive cases. Mission-driven companies tend to (AFAIK) do better than pure profit-driven companies; similarly, AFAIK, companies that take morality seriously tend to do better. A significant aspect of this (IMHO) is employee empowerment, which relates to the common theories as to why Silicon Valley happened rather than the Boston corridor (legal situation advantageous to employees).

Other things that come to mind: "Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice." https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ags - "If the stock market made any sense, you'd be able to exploit that sense and capitalize on it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

So it makes "logical sense" IFF short-term improvements/non-losses of control, power, and position lead to profit, and that's not something that's logically provable. Rather, that's something that's got to be observed experimentally, and AFAIK it ...isn't.

If your goal-metric is money, you run into both what SMBC is pointing out, and Goodhart's law. If your goal-metric is something else, money is an "easy" by-product.

how can we work to promote moral behavior?

IMHO sociological studies examining this. "Seek money, make nothing. Seek to make, get money twice", or something.

Icathian• 5 years ago

My experience has been almost identical. What a crying shame that they've fallen this far.

x3iv130f• 5 years ago

A company is only just a shell. It is the creative people that work for a company that make the actual products.

If you like a game, keep bookmarks on the people who made it and follow them around the industry.

my_usernam3• 5 years ago

Dreamhaven & frostgiant are the ones I'm following (and super hyped for), is there anything else I should be aware of?

MikeTheGreat• 5 years ago

This is a really awesome point, and one that I hadn't considered before.

This is how I normally find new books to read (by following authors) for some reason it just hadn't occurred to me to follow individuals in the gaming space. (Except for the Mode 7 Games, which put out Frozen Synapse, the awesome turn-based RTS [0] )

I'm curious how you follow people when so many games are made by teams of people - how do you find them, how do you decide which ones to follow, etc. I'd love to hear more

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Synapse

acituan3• 5 years ago

I for one will never again fire up those games that I loved so much

That is a very confusing argument to me.

Not only you’ve already given your money to them and received your end of the transaction, whether you make use of it or not, is this the most robust way to conceptualize the identity of a corporation? No temporal limitations, no account for the actual people that make up the corporation at a given time?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying keep buying their games or give support to what they do but if the people who made your beloved Diablo aren’t the same people responsible for today’s shitshow, what’s the point of your gesture?

The inverse concern applies too, VW, IBM, Hugo Boss among many other had affiliations with Nazi Germany. Should they be condemned today, if so for how long more? What determines the cutoff?

This is a classic Theseus’s ship problem, if you change every board of a ship one board at a time, is it still the same ship, how do you define the identity functions.

Sounds like this is less about the identity of the corporation you affiliated with and more about identity of you through what you choose to/not to affiliate with.

brainfish4• 5 years ago

Sounds like this is less about the identity of the corporation you affiliated with and more about identity of you through what you choose to/not to affiliate with.

There is certainly an element of this, I am sure. But frankly it is that I don't want to give them even the millionth-of-a-cent of value that they could derive from my +1 to their active player numbers. I don't want to contribute anything to their advantage.

dharmaturtle• 5 years ago

I've slowly stopped playing video games after college... but I deleted my Blizzard account after Blizzard doubled down on Blitzchung. Banning the casters for six months... that still gets me riled up. It makes zero sense to ban the casters for the player's conduct.

LegitShady2• 5 years ago

I deleted my blizzard account at the time as well and I had most of the products they had ever offered. Aside from missing playing starcraft2 occasionally, I’m not sorry.

These companies are organizations who can change rapidly as management and staff turn over. Blizzard from last year isn’t the same as blizzard from 5 years ago isn’t the same as blizzard from 20 years ago.

The veneration of brands based on their inheritance from what the brand used to be distorts people’s view of reality, and leads to brands that feel they don’t have to continue in terms of excellence.

Personally I think the start of WoW was the end of an age for Blizzard. Similarly the release of Fallout Shelter was the end of an age for Bethesda. Beyond those points the organizations were distorted by the success and profit they encountered there, and basically shifted to new companies with different priorities yet still holding the brand name.

jorgesborges• 5 years ago

I'm leaning the same direction although I can't bring myself to leave Starcraft. But who knows. For those unaware there's a new company Frost Giant Studios founded by some of the best game developers from Blizzard and they're devoted to creating the next big RTS [0]. One can speculate about their choice to depart from Blizzard and their reasons are probably myriad but it can't be unrelated to the horrible culture there. Here's an interview with some of them on The Pylon Show hosted by Artosis [1].

[0]https://www.frostgiant.com/

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As2tPggQaZc

ScoobleDoodle• 5 years ago

I also haven't purchased any new Blizzard products since Blitzchung. I uninstalled the Activision Blizzard game launcher last night, hopefully others are doing the same and adding to the dent in their KPI scores and financial bottom line.

kelnos3• 5 years ago

I don't really understand this attitude, or line of reasoning, or whatever you want to call it.

Sure, if a company does something that you find reprehensible, not giving them further money (or attention) is certainly a reasonable -- and honorable! -- thing to do.

But if you've already purchased a standalone[0], non-subscription product from that company, and that company doesn't gain any benefit from your further use of that product (or lose anything from you stopping use), I feel like you're only hurting yourself if you stop using it.

I will concede that if the act of playing one of these standalone games makes you think of the bad thing the company did and makes you angry/upset, I guess it makes sense to stop playing them. But unless the bad thing they did is something personally/viscerally important to you, it feels like that's a bit of an odd trigger.

[0] If the game is multiplayer, and connects to a company-run server, I guess you could make the argument that they benefit in some way from their active-users numbers being higher. I personally don't find that argument all that compelling, but everyone can of course decide where the cutoff of benefit is for them.

XMPPwocky• 5 years ago

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to feel weird about watching old DVDs of the Cosby Show, for example. With the "benefit" of context, the vibes are sort of irrevocably off.

donmcronald• 5 years ago

Maybe it’s just a normal thing as you get older, but knowing the company mistreated people sucks the fun out of it for me. I’m not completely against playing the stuff I’ve already paid for, but they won’t get another penny from me.

I’d like to have a database that tracks the C-Suite employees. I’d personally boycott any company that hires any of them. Their careers should be over IMO. I wish we could take away Bobby’s money too, but that’ll never happen.

ctrl-j• 5 years ago

One of the things that companies rely on these days is engagement and playerbase. If you don't find that compelling, that's up to you, but Blizzard invests millions every year into maintaining their playerbase - so at least they find it compelling.

Just by being a part of the starcraft community, you are providing support to activision blizzard.

If we were talking about offline-only non-community driven content, sure... but this is a company that is almost entirely driven off of multiplayer games.

bakuninsbart• 5 years ago

Some of the best fiction was written by people with absolutely despicable opinions like Francois Céline or Knut Hamsun. You can see it in their art, but their art isn't limited to it, and still holds a lot of value. Friedrich Nietzsche's opinions on women and politics are plain dumb, yet his other thought can be extremely compelling, and he is rightfully one of the most influential thinkers of modern times.

Going back further in time will only make you miserable if you hold the work closely accountable to the person. Terrible people can still say really good things, and I don't believe it is different with games or modern entertainment in general. Old Blizzard games are still good, and old Louis CK sets are still funny.

supercanuck• 5 years ago

In 2021, your attention is a more valuable currency than you're wallet.

aeturnum• 5 years ago

I think for many people, but certainly not all, the wider culture of an escapist work is important. Looking at a fanciful image doesn't automagically distract you, there needs to be some amount of collaboration between your mind and the media you're consuming. You need to accept what it offers as an alternative. That can be harder for people when they learn about how things were really made. It would be hard to take a work arguing against slavery seriously, for instance, if it used slavery to produce it.

I also think that these kinds of products, because they are indivisible creative works, suffer from rotting from within. Where you might be able to use the "reasonable" parts of Facebook or Google, once you start to think about a core element of a narrative as being in-geunine or compromised, that can undermine the other elements of the story.

Especially in this golden age of game development, I think there are many other alternatives to Blizzard's games that allow people to think less and escape more.

minusSeven• 5 years ago

You buy a game not just to play it but also to support developers. If you don't give a shit about this part you can always pirate it. By telling the company you will no longer use their product you are sending a clear cut message about that you a paying customer will no longer use their product.

beebmam3• 5 years ago

I was sexually abused as a child, and having learned in the last week that Blizzard management has actively protected and covered up the sexual abuse and harassment that some of their high level employees have enacted on others, I have felt extremely sick to my stomach and it has been highly triggering for me.

Seeing that they're making literally no changes at all to management or executive leadership, I'm having a hard time describing the rage that I feel inside. These people who knew and covered up the harm deserve prison, not just being fired.

I've been a huge fan of Blizzard games since I was a child. When I see Blizzard pushing back by aiming to crush internal protest, these feelings I have about this corrupt anything good I ever felt for these games. These people in leadership positions and the HR department that covered this up are criminals and should be seen as such.

mrits• 5 years ago

I hear you. We need a better way of society to punish the individuals. The company is made up of mostly innocent people. Interns new to the industry, people that just got promoted and had dinner with their family last night to celebrate, and the actual victims of this behavior.

I never feel good about boycotting a company. I certainly understand the people that do though.

meristohm• 5 years ago

I got hooked on Diablo, and the memory of anticipating Diablo II (for which I built a computer) is almost tangible. WoW was the next drug/escape, and Hearthstone my last Blizzard slot-machine until I became a parent. I never thought I’d move away from games, and now I don’t miss them, turning instead to gardening and exploring with my kid. I still have a lot of emotion bound up in that game time, and perhaps they were useful in the absence of a counselor (in person or through books) who could help me cultivate a sense of purpose.

I still play a couple games (Hell Let Loose as a 3-person tank crew is great) but only as a way to spend time with distant friends.

sdwr• 5 years ago

Don't know where the downvotes are coming from. People don't want to acknowledge life without gaming?

bpiche• 5 years ago

One thing about the non-rts Blizzard games, is they're basically all loot piñatas. Diablo 1/2/3, WoW, even Hearthstone to some extent are basically loot piñatas that prey on addictive behaviors in very much the same way that loot boxes and freemium mobile games do. Personally, I prefer a well crafted single player story over that sort of 'game'. And if you have your ear to the ground it's clear that they're going to make Diablo 4 a real Genshin Impact loot box nightmare as well. I don't know what demographic they think they're selling to anymore but it's sad.

alex_c• 5 years ago

"I haven't purchased new Blizzard products since the Hong Kong censorship debacle"

I don't think Blizzard has released any new products (other than game updates) since then anyway, so I expect most people can say the same :)

By the way, check out Grim Dawn with the Reign of Terror mod if you want a "Blizzard-free" Diablo 2 experience.

breakfastduck• 5 years ago

I think that's a purposeful misinterpretation of the post at best.

They clearly mean they have purchased no further Blizz products since the news.

jmcgough• 5 years ago

Same - I was a heavy Hearthstone player since beta, and was ranked within the top 500 for about six months towards the end when I was pushing to compete. But the Blitzchung incident left such a bad taste in my mouth that I quit the game and haven't returned to it. They didn't just penalize him for what he did, they BURIED him and effectively ended his career.

If he'd held up a sign for ending apartheid in another country he probably would have gotten some small penalty, it was clearly motivated by Blizzard's relationship with China. And it was so over the top and unprecedented that a ton of casters and pro players spoke out against it.

dmead• 5 years ago

what the hell am i supposed to replace starcraft with?

wayeq• 5 years ago

i hear Hula Hoops are making a comeback

mcdevilkiller• 5 years ago

It was the developers that made those games, not "the company".

tarsinge• 5 years ago

The Blizzard that made Diablo and Diablo 2 is not the same as the Blizzard of the today, the key people have moved, so I don’t see the issue with playing their older offline games.

falcolas2• 5 years ago

Ironic, the mention of those two. They've both been (or are about to be) re-released (and - as I've heard - have replaced the originals in the launchers). As such, they are both still revenue generating products for ACTI.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

I think at the time when Starcraft 2 was released the company changed significantly.

I remember Bobby Kotick TD in SC 2. If he hits you, you lose money, if you hit him, you lose money too. It was banned after a short time.

I enjoyed SC2 very much, but I left their platform shortly after. Most of my friends stopped playing too.

a1pulley3• 5 years ago

"At WilmerHale 1st year counsel makes $350,000. The 24 year old 1st year summer associate still in law school walks into the office in a $1,500 Burberry suit and makes $202,500 that year. Those Amazon workers they swindled out of higher wages make less than $30,000 a year."

The 200k figure is for a first-year associate who has graduated and passed the bar exam [1].

It's interesting to me that you can only hope to crack 300k at a top law firm after working for five years and going to law school for three. I.e., not until you're over 30.

The majority of SWEs at FAANG companies get there in two years. I.e., at age 24 [2]. Some might say the potential upside of becoming a partner outweighs higher early career SWE income, but I would retort that making director or VP are comparable accomplishments; not everyone makes partner.

Social status hasn't caught up to income, though; family and friends outside my tech circle still respect law and medicine more than engineering.

[1] https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/careers/lawyers/entry-level-or...

[2] levels.fyi

boromi• 5 years ago

Those FAANG are also in HCOL locations. SWE roles in smaller towns and other states then the coasts don't command nearly as high a salary.

a1pulley3• 5 years ago

Associates at top firms live in HCOL areas at similar rates as SWEs at FAANG companies.

andreilys• 5 years ago

Not to mention the upside of owning equity in a startup that IPO’s.

Plenty examples of doordash/airbnb/etc. SWE’s with less than 5 YoE making +$1M TC thanks to their equity

filmgirlcw• 5 years ago

The majority of SWEs at FAANG companies do not make that. Depending on company and location, they might get a sign-on stock grant that could theoretically get them approaching that, but that doesn’t take into account vesting schedules and cliffs. It’s assuming a best-case scenario and certainly not “the majority.” And even then, a new hire low level SWE straight out of college isn’t often going to get a $500k stock grant on-hire, no matter what levels says. And certainly no matter what Blind says.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

I would bet the per hour compensation is much higher, and general quality of life is much higher across similar age groups. Not to mention avoiding expenses of law school.

a1pulley3• 5 years ago

Perhaps "majority" wasn't the right word. Other than Levels (see below), I don't have evidence to back that up.

However, you're not comparing apples to apples. The pools of students who are targeted for FAANG or top law firm recruitment go to the same universities. People who would be able to get through law school and get an offer from a top firm can get a solid FAANG offer. I believe that those students get > $200k total comp offers from FAANG right out of college.

Vesting cliffs have been replaced with immediate monthly vesting at many companies, including at least two FAANGs, making that part of your package as similar to cash as stock compensation can get.

I agree that Levels has a data problem: sometimes people report numbers from W-2s (counting stock appreciation), sometimes they report offer letter numbers. Moreover, the numbers there suffer from selection bias; people with high numbers are more likely to report them.

But let me offer some anecdotal evidence: everyone on my team and sister teams received > 200k offers right out of college; we are generalist SWEs at a FAANG. Same for all my friends at similar companies.

jakear• 5 years ago

levels.fyi shows 300k+ salaries for senior engineers at FAANG’s. Senior engineers are typically not 2 years out of college. Some exceptions I’m sure, but certainly not the majority.

screye5• 5 years ago

I am usually against unions in tech because the free market tends to allow a proper balance of supply and demand. However, gaming might just be the perfect sub-domain of tech to benefit from unionization.

The supply is massively saturated, with dreamy eyed programmers ready to give their lives to work in gaming. On the other hand, a very small group actually gets to make any of the creative decisions that every gamer has dreamt of making. The wages are below what the market pays, hours are exploitative and the companies are making massive profits. It is really difficult to compete with the AAA studios, because Indie games take years to make and working without a wage for a decade isn't possible for many. On the other hand, medium sized and successful indie studios get acquired before they can grow to a decent enough size to serve as any real competition. There is also a lot of shady practices with monetization, where the employees do not get a say if the company should or shouldn't indulge in said practices.

We've already seen soft-unionization of this type in a similar industry : media production. It works.

AAA game development in the US has been quite stale for the last decade. The big EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft have not come up with a single quality game in this time. Even Bethesda, Bioware seems to be on a decline. Rockstar,Valve and Id software seem to be doing fine, but no where close to the hit-after-hit that certain japanese studios are producing. Naughty Dog and Super giant would be the only 2 American studios creating 10/10s consistently, but both have an order of magnitude fewer employees than standard AAA studios.

The industry is in dire need of shake up. I hope this goes the employee's way this time around. It's about time.

nynx• 5 years ago

What exactly do you mean by proper balance? What you said later in the comment basically applies to all large companies:

The wages are below what the market pays, hours are exploitative and the companies are making massive profits

barry-cotter2• 5 years ago

It is impossible for the wages at all large companies to be below what large companies pay. What large companies pay is what defines the market rate because most people work for large companies.

screye5• 5 years ago

If I am unhappy with how Google/big-N tech company works, there are other options. If I feel exploited, I can start my own consultancy and consult with just a couple of clients. I can start a startup and raise money quite easily in this VC market. I can built small POCs for a few customers within a few months and scale up from there. I can switch companies and go to a competitor. Hell, switching is almost always the more lucrative option.

I do not need a huge amount of money to enter or move around in the market, and even if I do, it is readily available. That's a 'free-ish' market.

Getting funding for an unmade indie game is substantially harder. The first demo takes years instead of months. The employee has zero leverage, because their access to the market is artificially limited through only a few hyper competitive AAA channels. There are many such broken markets, gaming is just an extreme case of it in our tech world. SpaceX worked in almost exactly the same manner. The free market doesn't work, because the market is not free.

In such a non-free market, the one who controls the supply (AA dev) can easily set up an almost ponzi scheme-esque revolving door of hyper exploitative setups. (modern academia with post-doctoral adjunct revolving doors is a similar example). The AAA studio is taking advantage of information asymmetry, and massively profiting from this use-n-throw setup.

Unions are a way for the demand side to combat the latent asymmetry of information and power in the non-free market. AAA studios make big promises to starry eyed new-grads who have served their purpose by the time they realize they were lied to and are disillusioned. (ie. Contract workers don't get made permanent. Crunch, hire-n-fire, lack of upwards mobility in the structure are endemic and permanent afflictions in the industry)

Unions can force companies to enforce the promises they make. No more than x% crunch. No un/under-paid interns. Path from contract-> fulltime. Some level of ethical standard for exploitation of school children using gambling techniques. Profit sharing ?

If the union's demands are too unreasonable or not reflective of their leverage in the industry, they will get left to die. (see the political unions at Google) If this was truly an information asymmetry situation, where game devs were paid lower than they were worth, then the union will flourish and sustain itself in the interest of the employees.

The realities of the unfree-market do not change, but the union makes sure that demand side (people who want jobs) can negotiate in a manner that actually reflects the cards they hold.

My opposition to unions in general comes from my general opposition to unnecessary bureaucracy. Bureaucracy should be avoided in don't fix what's not broken situations. Big Tech's free market looks healthy. Don't need unions. Gaming does not. Maybe Unions will help. Simple as that.

Frondo• 5 years ago

Unions are a part of the free market, unless you'd like to remove people's freedom to associate just because they all happen to work at the same place.

okhuman2• 5 years ago

media production. It works.

Does it work? Wasn't it medium (or someone) who when faced with unionization pivoted the company (left severance packages) to a substack like model?

cmorgan312• 5 years ago

Media production such as film, tv, etc. The online world is not indicative of the benefits brought by the media guilds. I am no expert on their benefits but thought it would help to clarify what media has historically had soft power unions.

elicash• 5 years ago

Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market." It's just a smarter way to negotiate (more power collectively) and the end result is a contract between a company and a group of workers. It's not like, say, a minimum wage where government sets a price.

mbostleman• 5 years ago

>Collective bargaining is not at all incompatible with a "free market.">>

For what it's worth, collective bargaining is, from an economic perspective, a monopoly. In anti trust terms it would constitute an illegal combination in trade if it weren't for statutory exemptions that explicitly give it a pass.

screye5• 5 years ago

I actually elaborated on that in another comment in this thread.

Unions are bureaucracy. Adding politics, people and power to any structure inherently adds inefficiencies.

If individual bargaining is working just fine in an industry, then I would not push for collective bargaining. Because, it is tradeoff is between 'bridging the information asymmetry between how much power you think you command, vs what you actually command' and 'inefficiencies added by bureaucracy'.

Gaming has clearly crossed that tradeoff threshold. IMO, big tech has not.

stale20026• 5 years ago

Collective bargaining takes away my right to bargain for certain agreements for myself.

That is definitely a free market restriction on my rights as a worker, to have a mutual agreement with that specific company.

Manuel_D2• 5 years ago

The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.

Also the EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft studios do consistently deliver quality games: COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc. Formulaic, perhaps, but it's tough to claim that these aren't quality and popular games. Valve, on the other hand, have only produced Half Life: Alyx in the last decade (you could include Artifact, but it flopped).

screye5• 5 years ago

Dota 2 has been in continuous development since 2011. The players have been kept quite happy.

VRay• 5 years ago

the alternative isn't "no job", it's a higher-paying but perceived-as-boring web dev job

908B64B197• 5 years ago

The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job.

Wait until you hear about the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA.

cs702• 5 years ago

Clickbait title for a highly opinonated piece that would never see the light of day in a respectable publication like the Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, Economist, etc. WilmerHale is a well-known top-100 law firm with a long history -- it's definitely not a "notorious union-busting firm." I'm flagging this story because it doesn't belong on the front page of HN, IMHO.

gotostatement• 5 years ago

Their own website lists one of their areas of expertise as "advising on union awareness and avoidance"

https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/solutions/labor-and-employment Under "Executive and Workforce Training" tab

johnnyanmac8• 5 years ago

yes, one of their areas. Now what area are activision utilizing?

beebmam3• 5 years ago

A quote from the article: '"Wilmerhale’s own site advertises its expertise as "union awareness and avoidance."'

Therefore, yes, it is accurate to define them as a "union-busting firm". They fulfill other roles than just that, but they do act as union-busters, and they even describe themselves as such.

sixstringtheory3• 5 years ago

Edit: wound up finding the text, it is there. The link in the article doesn’t take you right to it though.

pirate787• 5 years ago

There's nothing "notorious" about a maintstream legal practice representing corporations against unions, and "busting" is pejorative. It's opinion click-bait.

bagacrap2• 5 years ago

But are they notorious for that? Are they notorious at all?

pdabbadabba• 5 years ago

Maybe it's accurate. But isn't it irrelevant? Based on my read of the article, WilmerHale was almost certainly brought in to review Activision Blizzard's policies relating to sexual harassment and discrimination with a view towards tightening them up. This is a common thing for a big firm like WilmerHale to be hired to do. If so, the headline and the article's description of WilmerHale's "union busting" is just a gratuitous attempt to bias readers.

johnnyanmac8• 5 years ago

It's as accurate as calling Walmart "an expert on firearms", just because SOME stores sell firearms in certain cities.

WilliamHale covers just about every area of law you can think of. Saying they are here to purely union-bust is a huge exaggeration (and outright wrong once you see who they _actually_ hired).

djanogo• 5 years ago

"respectable publication like the Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, Economist, etc" I am not sure if you are being /s.

Overton-Window• 5 years ago

in a respectable publication like the Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, Economist, etc

Your assessment is a decade out of date.

jdmoreira• 5 years ago

What world is this where companies hire union-busting mercenaries? Is this the Pinkertons in 2021? What kind of lawless place is the US where you can hire services to stop unionisation?

leereeves5• 5 years ago

What world is this were companies hire union-busting mercenaries? Is this the Pinkertons in 2021?

Excellent example of how this headline can mislead people. They're lawyers "hired to review Activision’s policies", not armed thugs who bust union skulls.

r00fus2• 5 years ago

No, they just advise what internal tactics to use, and where to hire said external resources.

rtkwe• 5 years ago

The modern equivalent is much less violent but it's still very aggressively union busting by disrupting organization.

hemloc_io• 5 years ago

Ha! The Pinkertons are still around in 2021, and working quite hard.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...

cbanek• 5 years ago

As a woman who worked for Blizzard in the past, I have to say, I'm very disappointed. I'll just leave it at that.

brailsafe• 5 years ago

What was your experience like? Surprised/not surprised?

Justsignedup• 5 years ago

100% fully expected. If 1000 people could unionize independently for a walk-out. They can unionize for a union.

Well. Time for employees to make WilmerHale have another fail on its list.

cletus• 5 years ago

The Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] strikes again. The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.

This effort seems like it's part of the ruthless approach to controlling costs that slowly strangle a company from within.

I believe WoW is the #2 property (after CoD) at Acti-Blizzard and it's clearly changed from one of delivering a game to simply extracting as much money as possible from each customer much like how almost all mobile games do.

The state of California's complaint is bad. I mean really bad. The fact that 3-4 different people from AB all released different statements in the last week should tell you exactly how bad it is. That's classic panic mode. There should only be one.

This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits.

Honestly, the heads of J Allen Brack and Bobby Kotick in particular should roll over this lawsuit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM

EDIT: commenters have noted (correctly) that I overlooked Overwatch. This was a significant release but it seems to also have waned in popularity and Overwatch 2 is inextricably going in some weird PVE direction.

Other than that you have a poor received Diablo sequel, a series of lackluster to bad WoW expansions, a disastrous Warcraft 3 remaster and complete abandonment of the RTS genre that propelled them to success in the first place.

WC3 Reforged ("Refunded") was significant in that it was not only underwhelming and plagued with problems it made the original game worse with a forced download and loss of functionality.

The most significant change however was Blizzard not wanting a repeat of missing the MOBA boat with Dota 2 by adding a condition that all the IP for third-party maps belong to Blizzard, completely killing that ecosystem.

__john• 5 years ago

Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years

A quick search tells me that Overwatch has 6M players, which seems significant.

LeSaucy• 5 years ago

A note that Jeff Kaplan the director of the title resigned in May. He was heavily involved from its inception and throughout the development of Overwatch 2, and was a huge part of the community.

milkytron• 5 years ago

Haven't played Overwatch myself, but isn't it very similar to the other games that came before it?

From a layman's perspective, it seems like a copy of Paladins, TF2, etc.

Upon it's release, it didn't seem like something original (at least not to me), but rather something to compete with the unique games other studios had already created.

blibble2• 5 years ago

there is absolutely no way that Overwatch has 6M active players

when I was playing a week ago (not anymore), more or less every single game I was matched against the same 20 or so people after a 8-10 minute wait

and it was the same 20 people in month in month out

and if someone quit the 6v6 mode while a game was ongoing (leaving it 5v6): the leaver's position wouldn't be filled most of the time

Panoramix• 5 years ago

Damn, I'm not an Apple fanboy but that soundclip by Jobs makes so much sense; I've seen that play out like a hundred times. Here's a related one by a former IBM CEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cHVgA2tgWI

kazen44• 5 years ago

it resonates so closely with this[0] excellent article by berthubert.

[0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

vkou• 5 years ago

If the adults in the room have 'taken over' Acti-Blizzard, it wouldn't have been ran like a frathouse.

The reality is that over the years, Activision has kept their hands off their golden goose, and that the company's rot originates with the original management team. Notice how most of the harassment, and the retaliation that followed took place under the leadership of Mike Morheim (And that he's been personally called out for the latter.)

bhelkey• 5 years ago

The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.

Hearthstone was release March 11, 2014. Overwatch was released May 24, 2016. Both of these were hugely popular titles.

cratermoon11• 5 years ago

hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years.

Let's talk about Heroes of the Storm. Not as a counter to your argument, but as a perfect illustration of your points.

First thing to know is that HotS started out as a Starcraft II arcade game. It uses the Starcraft II engine. Nothing new there.

Next, for those who don't know, HotS is a MOBA. Just like DotA (and DOTA 2), and League of Legends. DotA was a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, created by the community. League of Legends is a standalone game inspired by DotA.

In HotS, all the player heroes are Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo heroes. It's free-to-play. After a brief legal spat with Valve over rights to the name DotA and Blizzard trademarks, the two companies settled.

It's a decent game, but it's just repackaging Blizzard assets for a type of game that emerged out of Blizzard in the first place. To me, HotS is exactly the sort of thing a company coasting on its franchise would release.

Epitaph: AB completely abandoned the game three years after release, to the complete surprise of the small esports community that had grown up.

johnnyanmac8• 5 years ago

This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits.

it doesn't unless you know the exact peopel hired are the union busting ones. It sounds like this is their HR consultants.

People really need to read past their title. This is a century old firm that has been on all sides of the fence for a signifigant part of American history. They don't have an agenda to regress society (no more than the legal system does).

brendoelfrendo• 5 years ago

Interesting fact: the current director of World of Warcraft, Ion Hazzikostas, worked for WilmerHale before joining Blizzard.

gnicholas• 5 years ago

This makes it much less surprising that they picked WH to represent them. He would know the firm and their specialties, and they would have pitched him for this business.

What's really surprising is that a former BigLaw attorney is now the director of WoW!

https://lawyers.justia.com/lawyer/ion-hazzikostas-1414500

lmilcin• 5 years ago

Seems like good place to work.

Complaining you are being bullied? Let's hire a company to bully you some more, this time professionally.

aejnsn• 5 years ago

Well this company is DONE.

dylan6044• 5 years ago

Mark this on your calendar and see how well it ages. Companies have survived much worse.

filereaper• 5 years ago

Funny that WilmerHale has diversity and inclusion as a "principle" while they actively undermine others and are paid to do so.

"Our commitment to diversity and inclusion starts at the top and cascades throughout the firm. WilmerHale is one of very few AmLaw 100 firms with a woman co-managing partner, and part of an even smaller number of such firms that have had both a woman and a person of color as a co-managing partner. Our diversity and inclusion journey is one of continuous assessment, progress, and partnership with others committed to advancing these principles in the legal profession."

https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/about/diversity-and-inclusion

TaylorAlexander• 5 years ago

Sadly the whole industry is like that. They make a lot of noise about "doing better" but they still suppress any effort to gain worker power.

stephc_int13• 5 years ago

Huge companies like Blizzard benefit from a tremendous inertia, so it can be difficult to see them declining, but I think they started doing so more than a decade ago...

At some point Blizzard was my dream video game studio, but the people did the hard work and built it are long gone.

loourr• 5 years ago

I've spent a lot of time hiring software developers and I usually receive about 25 male applicants for every 1 female applicant.

Achieving equal representation across the entire industry is going to be literally impossible without a huge influx of woman into the industry.

Further, because the big tech companies are pretending this is not the reality and strive to have equal representation in their workforce it means even sub par female developers are able to get jobs at the likes of google and facebook, further depleting the remainder of the workforce and causing wage inflation disincentivizing smaller or less well funded companies from hiring them because they can find better and cheaper male counterparts.

Not defending "bro culture" but I think the industry needs to come to terms with the realities of the situations. Legal action will do nothing to change this.

myohmy• 5 years ago

Oh look, its the hiring manager at Activision! Good job confusing equality for equity. A decent manager could easily achieve gender equity with a "25:1" ratio. Unfortunately it seems that might be beyond your capacity as a sub par hiring manager

project2501a3• 5 years ago

I am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise

Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale

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