If you were here a few years ago you might recognize this guy as forums user AndyB, the community manager who used to be behind most of the pinned posts on these forums
Breaking my silence to share a fun fact: when we planned OW2’s steam launch, my team warned (months in advance) that we’re going to be review bombed. We begged for more information, more details, and more resources to help us with the anticipated influx, all flatly denied.
Moderation of steam was put on the community team (not a function of community at Blizz), despite my refusal to want to expose members of my team to that level of toxic content/posts. When asked whose decision it was to launch on Steam with no additional help: Bobby
This is only one example of the culture Kotick bred at AB: [stuff] flowed downstream, usually landing on the lowest paid and most overworked individuals. Management was too busy reacting to wildly vacillating direction and decisions that made zero sense.
At the end of everything, player experience/worker meant nothing to CSuite and exec leadership. It was all about that quarters earnings call
So the gist of it seems to be that the community management team knew the steam launch was going to be a disaster and the higher ups just didn’t care. It reads a tad over-dramatic, but I wasn’t there so I can’t say.
But one source for optimism is that this confirms that Bobby Kotick was personally still micro-mismanaging overwatch as recently as recently as the steam launch around 4 months ago, so there’s more reason to believe things start to improve with him gone
Management (ie. Bobby) expected like 3 people - Andy and his two subordinates - to review and moderate all Steam reviews and forum comments. They warned that the game was going to be review-bombed and that:
They would need more assistance
The comments would mostly be abusive. You may shrug this off, but you’ve never had to read literally tens of thousands of abusive comments directed at you and you work.
As predicted, the game was review bombed - it received more reviews in a single weekend (about 150K) than Baldurs Gate 3 - the literal game of the year - received in a week. For comparison, The Finals (another F2P FPS) has received about 94K reviews since it was released earlier this month. The numbers were obviously not organic. The reviews were mostly abusive. The executives were warned, they did nothing to prepare.
Andy and his team were ignored and thrown to the wolves. I don’t blame him for quitting. Screw that. It isn’t within the capability of a tiny community team to moderate and compile tens of thousands of abusive reviews and it’s not safe for a team leader to expose staff to abuse like that.
Yeah it’s a huge loss for Team 4. Given the way he and his team were treated I don’t blame him for leaving. Hopefully the change of management is enough to bring him back but otherwise, I hope he’s found some place that treats them employees better.
It’s also ironic and cathartic that half the total reviews are from angry Chinese players that had their game access unfairly cutoff for “certain reasons”.
This is AAA game development in a nutshell. And then they have the common courtesy to dangle their lowly employee’s jobs over the heads of gaming fans:
“The game’s not doing well, guess I’ll fire them!”
This whole industry needs to crash and rebuild already.
Value means nothing to a C-Suite exec who doesn’t know sh*t about anything and knows this generation of gamers have such low standards they’ll buy anything.
They’re blaming Kotick for the game getting bad reviews, and not the game being a steaming pile of dog doo for the past year? Oof.
I’m not saying he wasn’t a major factor in it because he most likely was, but just…yikes.
It is scummy that he forced them to release and refused to give them the resources necessary, though. Assuming this would only tackle fake/abusive reviews and not legitimate ones.
is it not?
if you’re constantly being mentally exhausted by a bumbling and incompetent man child, would that not affect decision making from the development team? is that not tangentially related, at the very least?
i don’t think it’s as black and white as you seem to be implying it is
i can’t speak for others, but i do know when ive been mentally and emotionally spent, i can barely speak straight, let alone find motivation to do my job above the bare minimum
The same community manager who peaced out off these forums knowing that he and his team were selling a scam? Whether that was a choice or not doesn’t earn my sympathy.
Blah blah blah. You act like he was watching over their back at every turn. We’ve all had bosses we didn’t like. The mentally strong get over it and do their jobs properly while weak people cry and quit and use it as an excuse for why they stink at their jobs.
Kotick is gone now and I guarantee you this game will continue to be trash for years to come which will prove it was never his fault.
