Again, what needs to happen is the employees need to unionize. Go on strike. Demand better wages, better conditions, better benefits, etc… A big company like Activision-Blizzard wouldn’t even notice WoW shutting down; they make more off Candy Crush.
Giving vocal support somewhere visible to the people who work at Blizzard? That’s not virtue signalling. There is nothing we can tangibly do to help other than offer our support to the employees and encourage them.
So how about you go make your own company and pay everyone what you think should be acceptable. That’s how it works. You only make yourself out to be the bad person by complaining and not actually doing anything to make things better.
I hate to tell you this… but the entire world has been ruled by the rich ever since the first caveman found pretty rocks that other cavemen were willing to trade things for.
I don’t know about that. If enough people cancelled their subscriptions for this exact reason, Blizzard might listen. Usually businesses will start listening when they get hit in their wallet. But not many people will cancel their subscription. It’s easy to complain (virtue signal) on the forum.
If you like playing good video games, then you should want the companies who make them to pay their employees a competitive wage to attract new talent. Otherwise you get less skilled and less experienced people who are willing to work for less. If the CEOs are just pocketing the “record profits” and not using them to reinvest back into the company to make good games, you get crappy games. There’s no point in supporting a gaming company making record profits if they’re not using any of that money to make good video games and the CEO is just pocketing it.
While that’s true, World of Warcraft is only one IP, belonging only to one Studio under the Activision umbrella. If WoW lost all of its subs over how the employees were being paid, I can already see someone like Bobby Kotick deciding the answer isn’t to pay his employees more, it’s to cut jobs and shut down WoW to reduce financial loss.
There really is no we. I’m personally not fond of what’s going on, but I’m not going to virtue signal and pretend that speaking out here will do anything. You can vote with your wallet and for yourself. Personally, I will be playing Shadowlands. Call me selfish, call me awful, but I can’t spend my life worrying about checking every single thing I purchase and information behind it. This is the Capitalism world we live in.
That said, though this will sound hypocritical, I too have my list of companies I won’t give money to. I can’t do everything or everyone, so I pick and choose who I will and will not be giving money to.
OP, that’s your prerogative. But no “we” need to do this or that.
My biggest issue with this topic or similar topics is that we don’t know the whole story and we are just hearing one side. Instead of wanting to hear the whole story, people are ready to grab their pitchforks and torches and who cares what the other side has to say.
Aside from that, then I start thinking about a big piece of the pie. Are they so called starving because they are not making enough to survive, or are they so called starving because of other factors.
If you are living outside your means, that’s not the company’s fault. Maybe the company isn’t to blame and there needs to be some self reflection. Especially in the department of needs vs. wants.
You need a place to sleep, you need to have food in your belly.
Do you really need to have take out every meal? Do you really need to have that really expensive phone? Do you really need to have Starbucks every day?
My guess is that you would like to have those, but you don’t need those to survive.