the sad thing is wow is still probably one of the better active mmos.
that should tell you about the state of the genre.
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so… as the board is “standing by him” in being a perpetrator…
does that mean the board themselves … did this sort of thing too ?
hmmm suss…
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Yes, full-stop. Maybe not to the same extent or even the same category, but you can tell by the solidarity that they are all terrified of being held accountable for their behavior.
I’m sure they’re not all Kotick-tier when it comes to being terrible humans, but he’s the canary in the coal mine for the baord. After all, consequences are for “normal” people, not them! If they let the community of unwashed plebs dethrone Bobby on pure outrage alone, then what’s to stop us from trying the same thing with them when they fire another 200 people for the next fiscal year or get outed for working their employees to the bone?
It’s not even about money, either… because if it was, he would’ve been gone as soon as the first scandal hit. Can you imagine a better scapegoat than a guy like him, if they could’ve marched out a few days after the news dropped to announce that it all happened under his watch and that they fired the bad man, leaving us all morally absolved to keep shoveling mountains of money into their pockets?
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Anyone who plays the game could write their own version of this ‘leak’ and be mostly correct. Insert your own fanfic into the other parts after that and we’re back to WoW Madlibs. We all know things aren’t good. I don’t need a leak to tell me that.
From a business standpoint? My 2 copper is that like most companies, they are going to try and hang on to Kotick through all of this as long as they can. Not necessarily because they want him to remain, but because they want to present a united front and consistency/stability in the upper mgmt areas while all of these lawsuits and investigations are occurring.
Not to mention, who knows what he knows? By keeping him in his position, he’s obviously not going to fully engage with state/fed investigators, etc and instead, choose loyalty to The Company. Right now, he is simply more of an asset than a liability.
Businesses, boards, companies are very predictable by and large. The moment the scales tip towards him being more of a liability, he will be gone.
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No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It’s a business decision.
P&L, margins, revenue, et al. This is what the Board is looking at right now. Is he making them more money than he’s costing them? Are they considering ousting him? More than likely they are. It’s just not a decision they would make in 30 seconds. There is a lot to account for when making it. (not the least of which is his ‘golden parachute’)
Yes, people are ‘walking out’. Yes, people are canceling subs. People are doing all of those things, but none of us have access (AFAIK) to their quarterly or annual statements. The Board is hedging bets on Kotick (as I point out in my post up there^) because he’s just more of an asset than a liability at this point.
‘Large ethical companies’ are a new thing. I hate to put it that way, but it’s true. Most mega corps will operate based off bottom line. A local business (i.e. - not a multi-million dollar company) will operate more ethically because they will always be held to a different standard and be judged by a local community, which can take them down faster.
A-B is a beast of a company. Decisions they make have to be thought out, including legal ramifications.
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What the hell is going on in here
bobby kotick should be a skinnable mob
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As greasy as he is, you’re better off vendoring the hide
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Blizz board is thinking
“All this happened under Bobby…AND HE STILL MADE BANK WITH A STORE MOUNT”
Yea theyre gonna keep him
I haven’t even logged in since like 2 months and a half ago
Oof, I meant 4vmonths hyperbolic time chamber lmao
Does the game still bring you joy to play? Do you still enjoy doing things within it?
Then that is enough.
Only you can know where the line is.
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I won’t speculate on the leak since there’s basically no way for me to confirm or deny any parts of it, but I just hope that their walkout lasts longer than the last one. I don’t think they should be working on content of any kind until their demands are met.
Blizzard isn’t some factory where you can just ship in scabs from the next town over; since game development is so highly technical and specialized, the people there right now are effectively irreplaceable, and given how word-of-mouth appears to work among game devs, I have a hard time believing they’d even be able to find scabs in the first place.
From where I’m standing, Blizzard devs have all the power here. They just have to use it.
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The one thing that I noticed in the leak is they spelled Jailer as Jailor which makes me side eye the whole thing 
Sure some of it is plausible but idk
Anyway reading about the whole screw up with O’Neal and Ybarra just makes me face palm. You’d think while in the midst of a sexual harassment and gender pay inequality lawsuit you’d pay your Co-leaders the same??? This is just so embarrassingly sad but tragically funny how obviously bad these decisions were.
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Stuff like this is getting to the point where I’m like…
I guess I don’t want the AAA industry to just, like, collapse overnight or anything, but it’s getting harder and harder to name a AAA developer that even has, like, a positive reputation. Square Enix, I guess? Bethesda, sort of? Valve? Do they even really count as game developers anymore?
I get that the average gamer doesn’t follow any of this and will just play something because it has a shiny trailer, but I can’t think of another hobby where vast swaths of people in it hate the guts of almost every major company that caters to it.
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On the one hand, that terrible Avengers live service was Square, right? (Though making a repetitive, deceptively monetized game isn’t nearly as bad as all the things Blizzards done of course)
But on the other hand, they gave us Sora in Smash. Oh and also some other game about being a catgirl that kills false gods and fights against imperialism/colonization or something.
Square did Yuji Naka’s ideas dirty with how rushed Balan Wonderworld was, I will die on this hill. But that’s not really a moral failing.
And to its reliance on the “rule of cool”. WoW never had an overarching story/plotline, most likely because Blizzard didn’t expect the MMO to last more than a few years. TBC really didn’t lead in from Vanilla, and Wrath really didn’t lead in from TBC. I think MoP to WoD was the first time they actually tried to make the story flow from one expac to another.
it’s one thing to decide “we’re going to have the stories interconnect from now on each expac”. It’s another to try to go back and fix the storylines from past expacs. I think they should have said, “We’re not going to try to make old expacs’ storylines mesh with the ones going forward,” and been done with it.
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I know it’s reddit but this post sums up my thoughts a bit on this
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qw1ezp/jen_oneal_says_she_was_offered_equal_contract/hl0dk2b
Especially that last point they make about Bobby. I don’t work in compensation or anything but having a competitive specialized labour skill, I know a few bare basics (and have access to Blind) that I know that for individuals your wages are usually determined by a number of factors like market data, local and now abroad competitor wages, cost of living bleh bleh bleh and that usually applies to most people that aren’t some executive level CEO basically.
Yet generally my understanding is high level sec 16 type executives, their wages are generally determined by the board of directors (since they normally get paid through stock anyway). So in this case, like the comment said, this isn’t a Jane or Jack thing from HR like some of the other Reddit comments seem to interpret this reveal as.
Yet from the very top from people like Bobby and the Board and even Shareholders that, yep, did not pay their female co-lead equal to their male counterpart in the midst of a sexual harassment and gender inequality pay lawsuit lmao.
The top is poison, Bobby, the Board and the Shareholders are all poison and need to be remedied.
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while i’ve been told the XIV team is great, other parts of square i’ve heard are uh. not so much. specifically nomura. my heart goes out to nomura being overworked as hell.
anyway the point isn’t to say “don’t like square” but don’t go and put them on a pedestal during all of this. you will only be hurt in the end.
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