I don’t think they’re removing the flirts and censoring stuff by choice. It’s to fight off the lawsuit, and I don’t know what could happen if they don’t beat it. Blizzard might be worse off if they lose. A huge fine, which may force them to lay off even more people. It might even lead to closure, meaning no more patches for WoW, No Diablo 4, no OW2, no nothing. Or worse, the state might take control and do the clean up themselves, and they might do an even worse job.
I see this as a regrettable but nessesary sacrifice to make to keep the government off their backs.
As Briselody pointed out, it’s probably not productive to assume everyone at the company who has spoken out about this is lying. Everything we have right now supports the narrative that this is something that is being pushed internally.
We can disagree with the changes themselves and talk about why they are bad, but assigning an argument that they have to make these changes also implies that they’re making them in bad faith, which leads us down conspiracy rabbit holes that just aren’t worth following.
First of all, outside of the monetary damages from the lawsuit (which are meant to serve as reparations for the harm done to employees, not out of punishment for having offensive content), the government won’t be getting involved.
Second of all, if we have Blizz employees telling us they want these changes, and you’re saying the actual reason is that they’re just afraid of the government, wouldn’t said Blizz employees still be lying?
There may well be employees at the company who disagree. I’m not saying these changes are being made democratically. But the official blue post states that they set up internal lines to identify “offensive content” in August that any WoW developer could use. They’re making changes based on that feedback, and yes they’re probably prioritizing the devs who take offense over the devs who don’t, even if the former accounts for a minority of the team.
That still doesn’t mean the government, or fear of the government’s reprisal, is the reason for these changes.
I’m not starting any argument. That’s the natural conclusion of the thoughts you are expressing. There needs to be a basis for believing that there is a reason other than the very specific reason that the team has expressed. Otherwise we’re dealing in conspiracy theories.
The lawsuit is more of the trigger that led to the organizational restructuring which brings us to the current state of things where certain dev’s felt the need to ‘scrub’ aspects of the game that they were uncomfortable with. Do I think this is part of some grand cultural conspiracy war? No. It just sounds like a new work culture and they’re trying to set a tone.
What I care about more is whether new-Blizzard is going to be more efficient and productive. Although with the amount of open positions they’re trying to fill, and accounting for productivity loss and time to retrain new employees… it’s not looking very good.
Devs have come out on social media saying they wanted these changes in response to players saying nobody asked for these changes. It was their, the devs, choice to make the changes.
Yes, it has to do with the lawsuit. Only the idiots thinks the two happening at the same time is coincidence.
But it is not about fighting the lawsuit as they cannot hide the stuff that was in the game, it is about demonstrating change in hopes of mitigating damages.
While a huge fine is pretty likely, it is unlikely to be so huge it forces Blizzard to close its doors. After all, if the doors are closed, there will be no money to pay the fine.
There is no threat to public health and safety so no.
Yes, it’s not by choice. It’s cooperate panic, many other companies have done similar… removing things that in the end will do nothing but remove “content” for their customers.
TLDR, this is the equivalent of Blizzard trying to avoid getting canceled on Twitter. Literally all it is.