How dare you
Well, if we learned anything about Blizz-Activision this year it’s that their darkest issues were there since the start. They pulled Afrasiabi in from EQ GMing – birds of a feather and all that.
WoW was great for its time but many of the people making it and Blizzard as a whole was not.
Mega-corp shenanigans aside, this could be the best era yet for its culture and employees.
2 Likes
Yup. Even back then Afrasiabi had a reputation of being a complete tool. And they chose to keep promoting this toxic trashpile of a Human being all the way to head of CDev. So this living garbage can had access to power over other people in the real world, and not via virtual spaces.
2 Likes
Yeah I keep seeing people all over Twitter and Reddit trying to tie in the sexual harassment stuff to the newer, less liked WoW expansions and decisions. Rampant sexual harassment was part of the culture even when Blizz was at its peak of popularity and good will with the gaming community.
It’s not lost on me that if all this news had come out around the time of Lamergate, a lot of the people currently speaking out against Blizz would have gleefully sided with them just to stick it to the feminists and the ess jay double ewes. The Cosby Suite would probably have turned into a beloved gamer bro meme. Popular streamers would have released multiple videos about how the womenz are trying to start a witch hunt at Blizz and ruin a bunch of nice guys.
Social media and the forums would be full of comments like, “Uh, you don’t actually believe that stuff about men at Blizz stealing breastmilk from nursing employees, right? Bet you read about it on Kotaku lololol top kek.”
It’s depressing but honestly Blizz is only being held accountable by the public at large because they were already crapping the bed in more mundane ways for years, and burning through all the good will of the kind of guys who would have normally defended them to the death.
7 Likes
(Sorry for the censor I just need to bow down to the forum mods-gods.)
It’s funny that you say this because I have been saying this since it first came to light.
Something came out about Square Enix around the time the ABK scandal first came to public light (I believe a woman receiving inappropriate texts from a superior?) but then it never gained much traction.
And then one needs to look at Riot and their history, and then see how well Arcane did.
3 Likes