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It's the difference between a Walmart, which everyone expects to be pretty low ethically, and Blizzard, which has been using things like LGBT in their marketing

It's the difference between a Walmart, which everyone expects to be pretty low ethically, and Blizzard, which has been using things like LGBT in their marketing (showing their lead Overwatch character as gay [outside of China at least]). You can't have it both ways. You're either progressive in marketing and action, or you're a hypocrite and deserve the market's backlash when you show your greed over ethics. It's why Lebron got pummeled so hard for his HK remarks.

yourbandsucks 7y ago
If a streamer had said something, for example, anti-LGBT, Blizzard would have shut them down the same way and everyone would be applauding. Depending on your personal politics, any given corporate action is either 'brave, standing up for principles' or 'obviously a sellout to the corrupt bad guys'.
- gpderetta 7y ago
  That's consitent with parent's point. The act of shutting down is very often a political act claiming no politics is allowed is hypocritical.
- SuperFerret 7y ago
  Yes bad ideas are criticized and good ideas are celebrated. That's the way it's supposed to be.
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    Its obvious what is good and bad here. But do some roleplay; Its 15th century CE, and you (and all the people) have been conditioned since your childhood that the christian god is one true god and that the christian god is good. Now if a person declares something "blasphemous", everyone will think that the person is on the "bad" side. Setting a precedence lead to ugly slippery slopes and keeping to the absolutes in the guidelines is generally more inclusive.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  "If they had done something good instead of bad, I bet you'd be cheering them on!" Yes, brilliant catch there, you really got us.
  - yourbandsucks 7y ago
    'Good' and 'bad' in your sentence are subjective. Millions of mainland Chinese Blizzard customers feel differently on the HK issue than you do. You can think that they're totally, obviously wrong, but that's politics.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - chme 7y ago
      There is a difference between saying 'Freedom for X people' and 'X people are retarded' that has nothing to do with a subjective feeling of 'bad' or 'good'.
      - baddox 7y ago
        There’s also a difference between saying “freedom is great” and “violent separatism is great,” even though both phrases could be used by different people to refer to the same situation.
        chme 7y ago
        And if someone actually calls for violence against someone else, then this would also be a different matter. Saying: "I want people to just get along together" doesn't imply that one group should be murdered for that to happen.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        Are you not aware of the violent protests in Hong Kong?
- gambiting 7y ago
  The point is that there is political messaging that Blizzard is ok with, and political messaging that Blizzard isn't ok with. If you were a Polish streamer and made a comment pro-LGBT, that would absolutely be political in Poland because of the currently ruling right wing party that has called LGBT movement and "gender philosophy" a "cancer" and "rainbow disease" many times - but Blizzard would almost certainly allow it because it alligns with the political views that they are ok pushing. But then as we saw with Hong Kong, there are other political stances that Blizzard heavily punishes, and that's not ok.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    I feel blizzard wouldn't really give a damn if you said "sodomites should be illegal stop the gender agenda!" either. The only issue they saw was displeasing the CCP, it's blatantly obvious.
    - LanceH 7y ago
      They probably wouldn't be ok with it. But they also probably wouldn't claw back winnings. That person would just find themselves uninvited in the future. Part of this fiasco is how blatantly it is implementing a government's crackdown on speech.
- pjc50 7y ago
  It matters what the actual political content is, yes.
- unethical_ban 7y ago
  You're pulling this moral relativism play. The point is that Blizzard is an American company, with a largely liberal employee base and has explicitly shown support for certain causes. They should take a stand. You can't please everyone, so it might as well be those with the right values. And people who think that Muslims should be interred or that HK should cede all political freedom are wrong.
  - RomanBob 7y ago
    >so it might as well be those with the right values. By 'right', you mean of course YOUR right. You can't please everybody, so you should please ME.
    - unethical_ban 7y ago
      Yes! What values do you hold? Aren't you disappointed when an organization goes against them? Much less, when they have previously stated they agree with you? Fascism and the removal of political freedom should not be taken lightly. This should not be controversial.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > with a largely liberal employee base Corporations are chartered to act on behalf of the interests of their shareholders, not, insofar as the two groups are different, their employees.
    - unethical_ban 7y ago
      1) Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company. 2) The article specifically references employees, so I also added that angle.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company. Sure, but literally anything can be “acting with values”, depending on the value system chosen. There's no particular reason that would be determined by the political preferences of employees. It would be more natural for a corporation interested in sacrificing near term returns for some kind of ethics to do so based on the shareholders preferences than employers (or, if the gesture at ethics was intended as a long term business health approach, to do so based on what it was expected potential future customers would respond well to in the corporate story.)
- tannhauser23 7y ago
  Yeah that's why you need to be able to distinguish between the morality of supporting a democratic movement and shitting on a vulnerable minority. This is not hard.
- yazaddaruvala 7y ago
  Hate towards people should not be tolerated. Comments criticizing a person or group of people should not be allowed. Comments criticizing corporate or governmental entities should be encouraged.
- filoleg 7y ago
  Well yeah, because being pro-LGBT is one of their explicitly stated principles. If they act according to their stated principles, why would there be an outrage. But if they go against their stated principles, like "oh yeah, let's erase all traces of our pro-LGBT stances we care sooo much about in games for Chinese and Russian markets, because uuuuuuuuh... reasons", you bet people would get upset.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
manfredo 7y ago
Do people really expect blizzard to be ethically positive? At least among my friends (which admitted skews toward hacker types) Blizzard is notorious for being for the game industry what the RIAA or MPAA is for the music industry. The company has sued 3rd party implementations of games network protocols and engines, even when no assets were distributed. They even tried to sue Valve over DOTA 2. And to top it off now they've pivoted to a loot boxes monetization model.
- iamaelephant 7y ago
  Blizzard are the Apple of the gaming industry. They can pretty much get away with anything because the people that like them REALLY like them and those that don't are just not very interested. And due to this they can get away with some really, really shitty things, and have done. But this particular event may be their reckoning.
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    =3= Mmmm, Nintendo's more "the Apple of the gaming industry". Super-closed, walled garden ecosystem, stubbornly oblivious of and draconianly IP-protective in response to online phenomena of game streaming (to the frustration of their more aware American branch), etc. Also, did any computing company eventually turn their products into slot machines? Because Konami would be the THEM of the gaming industry: https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/12/20911313/silent-hill-slot-machine-konami https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/12/20911313/silent-hill-slot...
    - aphextim 7y ago
      The vibe I get from the Nintendo direct showcase is at least straightforward and honest. You have some middle aged businessman in a suit who clearly doesn't play any video games. They shove game after game at you without too much fluff or politics. They don't explicitly say this but in my head I hear, "We want to sell a shit ton of games and make a ton of money from you, look at this game, this game and this game! Oh we aren't done check out nostalgia game 1 and 2!!" I find that sort of honesty refreshing when companies like Blizzard, appear to champion social causes in order to gain a mass following to sell games, rather than sell a good solid game without the political fluff piped in.
drharby 7y ago
Thats where we need people to have a conduit of accountability for the double standard. My ethnicity and sexual orientation is not their marketing soundbyte.
- ordinaryradical 7y ago
  Exactly. What this should reveal to us is that the "wokeness" of corporations is mostly disputable. Yes, they sense the winds of change, etc., but look a bit more closely and you see that it's often cynically adopting the language of the majority culture to garner broad appeal, not real ethics at work.
  - toxik 7y ago
    So let me understand what you’re saying: Blizzard should not try to be inclusive or otherwise progressive because they are not always? I think we should acknowledge that companies try to abide by the norms of their market and that their main concern has always been to make money. Them displaying any kind of opinion is just a byproduct.
    - cwkoss 7y ago
      Blizzard should try to be inclusive, but consumers should realize that their progressivism is rooted in cynical self-serving greed much more than a sincere desire to improve the world.
Reedx 7y ago
Marketing != ethics
Paradigma11 7y ago
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/tracer-is-infact-still-gay-in-china-so-is-s76/414806 https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/tracer-is-infa...
grawprog 7y ago
>It's the difference between a Walmart, which everyone expects to be pretty low ethically, and Blizzard, The only ethics corporations have are making sure their share holders maximize profit as much as possible, any other ethics they pretend to have exists because they think it will lead to that or they're forced to. Corporations are mandated to do this. If it's a choice between ethics and shareholder profits for a corporation, the latter will always come first because that's why corporations exist. Corporations never have and never will have ethics as long as they exist in their current form where their entire purpose is maximizing profits. I have no idea why people seem to forget this these days.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  One reason is that it's not true. Corporations are limited in their ability to say "screw the shareholders", but they aren't required to be unethical whenever they stand to make a profit from it. Even apart from that, it just seems like an overly reductionist perspective. Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line?
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line? Well if it did you'd think corporations would act ethically, whereas reality says otherwise and they don't unless forced by government or public pressure. The world's totally fucked right now because of corporate greed. Every day I read a new story about how some corporation is acting completely and utterly unethically. It https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation >There are two levels of corporate duties to shareholders. First, corporate boards and officers deal at arm’s length with outsiders, and here, their responsibility is governed by the so-called business judgment rule, which protects them against suits by shareholders so long as they follow appropriate procedures in reaching a decision and act in good faith to maximize shareholder value. This rule both constrains corporate insiders but also protects them from liability if their good faith efforts turn out less well financially than expected. Indeed, if officers had to make good on every loss that occurs when deals go sour, no one would take on such roles. And second, whenever corporate officials enter into any kind of self-dealing transaction, the standard of care is much higher, given the conflict of interest. For such transactions, insiders must analyze whether corporate shareholders received “fair value” from the transaction.
RaiseProfits 7y ago
Who tf thinks blizzard is better than walmart? They are being cucked hard.

yourbandsucks 7y ago

If a streamer had said something, for example, anti-LGBT, Blizzard would have shut them down the same way and everyone would be applauding. Depending on your personal politics, any given corporate action is either 'brave, standing up for principles' or 'obviously a sellout to the corrupt bad guys'.

gpderetta 7y ago
That's consitent with parent's point. The act of shutting down is very often a political act claiming no politics is allowed is hypocritical.
SuperFerret 7y ago
Yes bad ideas are criticized and good ideas are celebrated. That's the way it's supposed to be.
- z3phyr 7y ago
  Its obvious what is good and bad here. But do some roleplay; Its 15th century CE, and you (and all the people) have been conditioned since your childhood that the christian god is one true god and that the christian god is good. Now if a person declares something "blasphemous", everyone will think that the person is on the "bad" side. Setting a precedence lead to ugly slippery slopes and keeping to the absolutes in the guidelines is generally more inclusive.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
"If they had done something good instead of bad, I bet you'd be cheering them on!" Yes, brilliant catch there, you really got us.
- yourbandsucks 7y ago
  'Good' and 'bad' in your sentence are subjective. Millions of mainland Chinese Blizzard customers feel differently on the HK issue than you do. You can think that they're totally, obviously wrong, but that's politics.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - chme 7y ago
    There is a difference between saying 'Freedom for X people' and 'X people are retarded' that has nothing to do with a subjective feeling of 'bad' or 'good'.
    - baddox 7y ago
      There’s also a difference between saying “freedom is great” and “violent separatism is great,” even though both phrases could be used by different people to refer to the same situation.
      - chme 7y ago
        And if someone actually calls for violence against someone else, then this would also be a different matter. Saying: "I want people to just get along together" doesn't imply that one group should be murdered for that to happen.
        lonelappde 7y ago
        Are you not aware of the violent protests in Hong Kong?
gambiting 7y ago
The point is that there is political messaging that Blizzard is ok with, and political messaging that Blizzard isn't ok with. If you were a Polish streamer and made a comment pro-LGBT, that would absolutely be political in Poland because of the currently ruling right wing party that has called LGBT movement and "gender philosophy" a "cancer" and "rainbow disease" many times - but Blizzard would almost certainly allow it because it alligns with the political views that they are ok pushing. But then as we saw with Hong Kong, there are other political stances that Blizzard heavily punishes, and that's not ok.
- riffraff 7y ago
  I feel blizzard wouldn't really give a damn if you said "sodomites should be illegal stop the gender agenda!" either. The only issue they saw was displeasing the CCP, it's blatantly obvious.
  - LanceH 7y ago
    They probably wouldn't be ok with it. But they also probably wouldn't claw back winnings. That person would just find themselves uninvited in the future. Part of this fiasco is how blatantly it is implementing a government's crackdown on speech.
pjc50 7y ago
It matters what the actual political content is, yes.
unethical_ban 7y ago
You're pulling this moral relativism play. The point is that Blizzard is an American company, with a largely liberal employee base and has explicitly shown support for certain causes. They should take a stand. You can't please everyone, so it might as well be those with the right values. And people who think that Muslims should be interred or that HK should cede all political freedom are wrong.
- RomanBob 7y ago
  >so it might as well be those with the right values. By 'right', you mean of course YOUR right. You can't please everybody, so you should please ME.
  - unethical_ban 7y ago
    Yes! What values do you hold? Aren't you disappointed when an organization goes against them? Much less, when they have previously stated they agree with you? Fascism and the removal of political freedom should not be taken lightly. This should not be controversial.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > with a largely liberal employee base Corporations are chartered to act on behalf of the interests of their shareholders, not, insofar as the two groups are different, their employees.
  - unethical_ban 7y ago
    1) Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company. 2) The article specifically references employees, so I also added that angle.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Corporations and their boards are not blood-bound to do everything in their power to maximize value. They can act ethically, and it is easily (and morally) defensible that acting with values is in the long term interest of the company. Sure, but literally anything can be “acting with values”, depending on the value system chosen. There's no particular reason that would be determined by the political preferences of employees. It would be more natural for a corporation interested in sacrificing near term returns for some kind of ethics to do so based on the shareholders preferences than employers (or, if the gesture at ethics was intended as a long term business health approach, to do so based on what it was expected potential future customers would respond well to in the corporate story.)
tannhauser23 7y ago
Yeah that's why you need to be able to distinguish between the morality of supporting a democratic movement and shitting on a vulnerable minority. This is not hard.
yazaddaruvala 7y ago
Hate towards people should not be tolerated. Comments criticizing a person or group of people should not be allowed. Comments criticizing corporate or governmental entities should be encouraged.
filoleg 7y ago
Well yeah, because being pro-LGBT is one of their explicitly stated principles. If they act according to their stated principles, why would there be an outrage. But if they go against their stated principles, like "oh yeah, let's erase all traces of our pro-LGBT stances we care sooo much about in games for Chinese and Russian markets, because uuuuuuuuh... reasons", you bet people would get upset.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

manfredo 7y ago

Do people really expect blizzard to be ethically positive? At least among my friends (which admitted skews toward hacker types) Blizzard is notorious for being for the game industry what the RIAA or MPAA is for the music industry. The company has sued 3rd party implementations of games network protocols and engines, even when no assets were distributed. They even tried to sue Valve over DOTA 2. And to top it off now they've pivoted to a loot boxes monetization model.

iamaelephant 7y ago
Blizzard are the Apple of the gaming industry. They can pretty much get away with anything because the people that like them REALLY like them and those that don't are just not very interested. And due to this they can get away with some really, really shitty things, and have done. But this particular event may be their reckoning.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  =3= Mmmm, Nintendo's more "the Apple of the gaming industry". Super-closed, walled garden ecosystem, stubbornly oblivious of and draconianly IP-protective in response to online phenomena of game streaming (to the frustration of their more aware American branch), etc. Also, did any computing company eventually turn their products into slot machines? Because Konami would be the THEM of the gaming industry: https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/12/20911313/silent-hill-slot-machine-konami https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/12/20911313/silent-hill-slot...
  - aphextim 7y ago
    The vibe I get from the Nintendo direct showcase is at least straightforward and honest. You have some middle aged businessman in a suit who clearly doesn't play any video games. They shove game after game at you without too much fluff or politics. They don't explicitly say this but in my head I hear, "We want to sell a shit ton of games and make a ton of money from you, look at this game, this game and this game! Oh we aren't done check out nostalgia game 1 and 2!!" I find that sort of honesty refreshing when companies like Blizzard, appear to champion social causes in order to gain a mass following to sell games, rather than sell a good solid game without the political fluff piped in.

drharby 7y ago

Thats where we need people to have a conduit of accountability for the double standard. My ethnicity and sexual orientation is not their marketing soundbyte.

ordinaryradical 7y ago
Exactly. What this should reveal to us is that the "wokeness" of corporations is mostly disputable. Yes, they sense the winds of change, etc., but look a bit more closely and you see that it's often cynically adopting the language of the majority culture to garner broad appeal, not real ethics at work.
- toxik 7y ago
  So let me understand what you’re saying: Blizzard should not try to be inclusive or otherwise progressive because they are not always? I think we should acknowledge that companies try to abide by the norms of their market and that their main concern has always been to make money. Them displaying any kind of opinion is just a byproduct.
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    Blizzard should try to be inclusive, but consumers should realize that their progressivism is rooted in cynical self-serving greed much more than a sincere desire to improve the world.

Reedx 7y ago

Marketing != ethics

Paradigma11 7y ago

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/tracer-is-infact-still-gay-in-china-so-is-s76/414806 https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/tracer-is-infa...

grawprog 7y ago

>It's the difference between a Walmart, which everyone expects to be pretty low ethically, and Blizzard, The only ethics corporations have are making sure their share holders maximize profit as much as possible, any other ethics they pretend to have exists because they think it will lead to that or they're forced to. Corporations are mandated to do this. If it's a choice between ethics and shareholder profits for a corporation, the latter will always come first because that's why corporations exist. Corporations never have and never will have ethics as long as they exist in their current form where their entire purpose is maximizing profits. I have no idea why people seem to forget this these days.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
One reason is that it's not true. Corporations are limited in their ability to say "screw the shareholders", but they aren't required to be unethical whenever they stand to make a profit from it. Even apart from that, it just seems like an overly reductionist perspective. Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line?
- grawprog 7y ago
  >Why couldn't an honest commitment to act ethically help the bottom line? Well if it did you'd think corporations would act ethically, whereas reality says otherwise and they don't unless forced by government or public pressure. The world's totally fucked right now because of corporate greed. Every day I read a new story about how some corporation is acting completely and utterly unethically. It https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation https://www.hoover.org/research/what-purpose-corporation >There are two levels of corporate duties to shareholders. First, corporate boards and officers deal at arm’s length with outsiders, and here, their responsibility is governed by the so-called business judgment rule, which protects them against suits by shareholders so long as they follow appropriate procedures in reaching a decision and act in good faith to maximize shareholder value. This rule both constrains corporate insiders but also protects them from liability if their good faith efforts turn out less well financially than expected. Indeed, if officers had to make good on every loss that occurs when deals go sour, no one would take on such roles. And second, whenever corporate officials enter into any kind of self-dealing transaction, the standard of care is much higher, given the conflict of interest. For such transactions, insiders must analyze whether corporate shareholders received “fair value” from the transaction.

RaiseProfits 7y ago

Who tf thinks blizzard is better than walmart? They are being cucked hard.