Frankly, I am over hearing about your internal issues publicly. Many of us are. In case you have forgotten, you are a VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT company. At what point do we turn the discussion back to, I dunno, video games?
Sorry to rain on any employee’s parade, but you do realize that a lot of this is coming off as REALLY disingenuous - from both sides. For the average employee, if things REALLY were as bad as you would suggest, a rational person would have left a long time ago and sought employment elsewhere. If you REALLY were the fantastic, marketable treasure you think you are, the market would recognize that and offer you any one of a dozen jobs.
The reality is - you are working at Blizzard Entertainment. You know you have the opportunity of a lifetime that many would dream to have. No rational person feels sorry for you. I ain’t saying bad things never happened. I am sure they did. I am also pretty confident that the bad actors are now gone. It’s time to move on. At this point, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a BUNCH of you are simply using this situation for self-aggrandizement.
In the end, the ONLY thing that matters now is the games. Period. If you don’t deliver on those, soon - not a single one of those whiny employees will even HAVE a job, much less think they are in the position to continue to make demands. So I say to Mr. Ybarra: if you truly care about the employees and the gaming communities, like you say you do, get back to making games and end this revolving door of public embarrassment you all just seem content in walking around in.
Back to trust - You can start by delivering on broken promises. Fix the WC3 reforged campaign. Deliver on the promise that was shown at the Blizzcon reveal. I don’t care if it makes you lose money on that project. Frankly, maybe it should. If you know anything about business (and I would hope you do, being the lead of such a massive company), you know that goodwill has an actual extrinsic monetary value that can often outweigh profit, particularly in the case of where you are with public standing.
Yup the company drama is a black eye no doubt, but the game being in the state it’s in is the reason of the great migration…
More open conversations with the community like the vids you shared throughout legion development where you made specific threads to gather player questions would be a great start…
The players care that your company is a safe place to work, but they will not subscribe to a product that isn’t good.
We want the game to improve and it can’t without proper communication.
Do they? Do they really? From reading these forums, they seem to forget how long it takes a company to investigate the offensive parties and deal with them. Many were fired, and rightfully so, but this has been disruptive to the development of the game.
If the players really cared about a safe work environment at Blizzard, wouldn’t they have understanding and patience as Blizzard worked through all this crap?
Nope, it’s a “fix this or I quit” situation on these forums every day. Nice empathy, give them a chance the make the company a place people want to work, and the quality of the product will return.
Lack of trust isn’t the problem. The problem is that Blizzard’s games are terrible right now.
If they want to fix their problems with their players, they just need to go back and look at the games they made back in their heyday and use those as a template moving forward. It wouldn’t fix everything but it would be a great start.
I don’t think many really know. Between work stoppages and blaming covid. We’re at a content patch close to a year per. Ow2 possibly stalled and d4 possibly stalled.
But all those things can be fixed. How fast is the question.
It just kind of seems to me they lost focus on making video games by gamers, for gamers. It’s just some mindless husk, meant to line pockets. In the process of giving up what made this game awesome, they’re losing the customers that were drawn to the original premise.
Also, Mike Ybarra and all the other people working at Blizzard are… well… people. They’re not “a video game development company”. They are people, with needs and experiences, and their lives are more than - and worth more than - just what they can produce on a video game.
And they are paid, by people, who are tired of paying and receiving less and less product as time goes on. My point is - if your people want to remain EMPLOYED people - they may want to get back to being productive people. The market is not kind to non-performance.
While the issues we’ve heard about are egregious, I can’t help but agree to some extent with the OP that at this point a lot of the drama is being used to push agendas instead of actually fixing issues or genuinely make it a safe working environment.
Again, Riot’s situation was WAY worse, $100 million settlement vs an $18 million settlement. But they didn’t get nearly the attention or agenda pushing that we’re seeing amplified here with Blizzard. It’s also really telling that they’ve chosen Raven as the hill to die on, while they all remained silent when hundreds were being fired despite record earnings a couple of years ago.
The offenders and bad faith members of the Blizzard Work Force and upper management have all been pushed out of the company. Even Bobby is going to be gone in less than 2 years. What IS the endgame at this point?
