11 ms·

I'm really surprised that Blizzard thinks a state suit against them for sexual discrimination, harassment, and a litany of odious behaviors by managers is best

• cwkoss 5y ago
  Its interesting to see how the quality of the games Blizzard produces and the company culture both seemed to decline sharply in lockstep after being acquired by Activision in 2008.
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  • Spoom 5y ago
    I remember Activision generally being a publisher of terrible licensed games in the 90s, so I wasn't too surprised by that.
    • jonny_eh 5y ago
      Even Blizzard wasn't spared from making a bad licensed game in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_League_Task_Force_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_League_Task_Force_(vid...
  • phillryu 5y ago
    After 2008 Blizzard produced Hearthstone, Overwatch and Reaper of Souls which consensus 'fixed' Diablo 3 and were all pretty great. So I can't comment about the culture but I disagree with the general narrative that Blizzard's games have gone off a cliff. That might still be coming, but it hasn't happened quite yet. Edit: snipped the bit about Hero's of the Storm since that was post acquisition
    • emptysongglass 5y ago
      In my opinion the downfall of Blizzard started even earlier in 2004. Ever since World of Warcraft their writing and worldbuilding has stumbled off a cliff. StarCraft's storyline was fantastic and its world spectacularly gritty. The weird whirring mechano-head of the adjutants and bodily entombed dragoons are just some examples of the kooky minds working at the studio at that time. With the cartoonish push that World of Warcraft presaged I saw the wider ambitions to appeal to everyone which washed out the magic for me. Blizzard wasn't alone in this but it broke my heart as a kid who grew up on Sabriel and The Book of the New Sun and Baldur's Gate and EverQuest to watch all those game companies lurch forward to a blank-eyed glossed future.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        > and bodily entombed dragoons Meh. It is an undeniable direct Warhammer 40K plagiarism: before coming up with their own StarCraft universe, Blizzard tried and failed to secure rights for Warhammer 40K setting. So it is easy to see the source of their 'inspiration'. They had many bright moments, but this one is not one they came up with themselves.
        • emptysongglass 5y ago
          Like dreadnoughts? I'd argue fantasy and science fiction is all iterating over itself endlessly and there's creative ways of doing it. Plunging dragoons into a liquid bath puts dragoons at something of a cross-section of evangelion and 40k tomb-mech. I could go on. The ghosts exhaling poison vapor with spider eyes or hydralisks vomiting buckets of saliva. Sunken colonies with their long knife-tongues; the Creep. As a whole I think Blizzard really made something special.
  • rodgerd 5y ago
    The person named in the suit was at Blizzard since 2004. This is nonsense.
• jcranmer 5y ago
  > I'm really surprised that Blizzard thinks a state suit against them for sexual discrimination, harassment, and a litany of odious behaviors by managers is best answered by calling them "unaccountable State bureaucrats," as they did in their PR damage control release. It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened. It's about ethics in game journalism! Er, ethics in government? The sad part is that I suspect many of the individuals involved actually believe that sentiment.
  • Gibbon1 5y ago
    To me it seems that of late a lot of members of the management caste are suffering from a sort of collective delusion.
    • arkitaip 5y ago
      They are in utter panic and are acting out like a bunch of toddlers.
• albatross13 5y ago
  I've been saying this, jokingly, for awhile now: Blizzard is a law firm that just happens to make video games. I'm sure they went this route because they think they can win (I mean clearly, right? Who goes to court thinking they'll lose). Anyways, not super insightful either way but they do litigate a lot.
  • mediaman 5y ago
    It's an interesting point. On the other hand, many of these state prosecutors are very afraid of losing: many of them have gone the "golden career route" of name-brand schools and law firms, and shy away from any possible failure. That's mostly bad, because they won't bring cases that are worthy but risky to their career. When they do ultimately bring a case, though, it means it's strong.
    • albatross13 5y ago
      I'm inclined to agree with you, honestly- my comment was more just me musing aloud about Blizzard's hubris in the face of the law. They've also lawyered up and ruined a lot of good vanilla WoW private servers, which I think adds to their hubris- fighting a state in court is going to be a lot more involved than telling a few nerds online to stop running a WoW server. Anyways, I think you're correct and I personally look forward to Blizzard losing.
    • astrange 5y ago
      My vague understanding is that federal prosecutors are the extremely conservative ones, but state are more likely to prosecute - for instance because the AG is elected and wants to be seen doing something.
      • benglish11 5y ago
        These state Human Relations/Civil Rights board are headed by appointed officials from the executive branch (not the AG). They generally pass on many cases (when you want to sue your employer you have to submit your case there first and they pass on the vast majority even though many of those cases have strong merits) so if they’re picking up the case that generally means it’s strong
• duxup 5y ago
  Yeah I'm flabbergasted by some PR releases lately. It's like some rando VP or someone decided to slip their personal ideology in there. How many hands did that pass through and nobody was brave enough to strike that line? It adds nothing positive.
  • tomilola39 5y ago
    Have you seen this one from Google from earlier this year (https://blog.google/products/news/google-commitment-supporting-journalism/ https://blog.google/products/news/google-commitment-supporti...)? Yikes.
    • rhacker 5y ago
      Wow, yikes indeed. This kind of thing reminds me of ebay from last year: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees-charged-aggressive-cyberstalking-campaign-targeting-natick https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...
    • fumar 5y ago
      What about this is bad? Attacking Microsoft?
    • romwell 5y ago
      This from Kent "need-to-know" Walker? AKA the guy that single-handedly turned Google's culture from transparency-first to siloing-first by making looking at "need-to-know" information a fireable offense[1]. The Catch-22 here being, of course, that you don't know that you didn't need to know until you know. That's to say, the only way to know if you have violated this policy is by violating it. The result was, unsurprisingly, that where sharing permissions for documentation were default company-wide earlier, it quickly became "you need to know the right people to ask to get access to it". Google, with its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", thus made its own technical documents unsearchable in internal engines (and thus, disorganized), inaccessible, and therefore, useless. Everything that drops from that person's mouth is toxic. [1]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google-execs-internal-email-on-data-leak-policy-rattles https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/google...
• Qw3r7 5y ago
  Bobby is your guy if you want great your company's stock to gain value. I personally would never want him as a leader, yet alone a CEO. Ethically, I wouldn't be okay.
• nostromo 5y ago
  You can support MeToo and also agree California does have a problem with unaccountable state bureaucrats run amok.
  • duxup 5y ago
    You can but mixing both thoughts at once is kinda weird. In this case they're kinda pulling in different directions and ... I dunno probably best to just stick to one topic as far as a press release goes.
    • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
      The point of defensive press releases is often to confuse the public about the matter. People don't remember what they don't understand.
      • duxup 5y ago
        The only confusion I have is how Blizzard would release such a wonky press release... that's it. I don't think the public reads press releases otherwise.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  Another day, another situation where the best way forward was “we don’t comment on ongoing litigation”. Less glib, this past year has taught me that a lot of companies are led by genuinely unintelligent people. The number of short sighted, self destructive, and downright childish behavior coming from the C suite of even some big companies has been nearly endless. The idea that Blizzard is led by someone so impulsive that he basically goaded the state into suing him is unsurprising.
  • jonny_eh 5y ago
    And yet the leadership is compensated as if they're the only ones fit to lead.
  • darth_avocado 5y ago
    You'd be surprised how many people in upper management have very fragile egos, regardless of the company. Childish behavior is very common in the industry. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've had to call senior members out and the only reason I could do that (unfortunately) was that I am a dude. I really sympathize with anyone who has to deal with these people.
    • throwaway98797 5y ago
      might be that sensitivity to stimulation is key for getting shit done … until it isnt.
    • cletus 5y ago
      Hypothesis: what you're labelling as "childish behaviour" is in fact "narcissism".
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • krageon 5y ago
        I think it's a little far-reaching to apply a pretty serious psychiatric evaluation (i.e. something meant to diagnose a significant mental deviation from the norm) to a pattern of behaviour that's incredibly common. Because it is so common, it becomes the norm. It is therefore more reasonable to assume it really is childish behaviour.
• taurath 5y ago
  This is what paying someone $150 million in a year gets you. Try the $10 CEO I’ll bet it’ll go better.
• randyrand 5y ago
  was MeToo something significant? I thought it was just a hashtag “movement” like countless others.
  • azornathogron 5y ago
    It seemed significant in the media arena to me. I mean, it basically took down Harvey Weinstein, right? That's not nothing.
    • munk-a 5y ago
      It also managed to absolutely torpedo an incredibly popular series - don't forget that Kevin Spacey went down during MeToo as well. I know that women still feel frequently disempowered in the workplace but I hope the movement helped them feel like they've got more widespread support than they did before. Once upon a time sexual harassment claims were seen as direct attacks on the success and health of a company "Gosh Susan, if you just told us in private we'd deal with it - instead you've cost all these people their jobs" - I think that impression has very much shifted. If you're being harassed then the company is failing at it's mission, any ill effect that comes to the company as a result of the report is a consequence the company should've (and failed to) protect themselves from by having a more robust and responsive HR department.
  • nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    Due process is coming back into fashion.
• pcwalton 5y ago
  > It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened. They've also seemed to have forgotten that they're located in California. This is the type of thing you might say if you were in Texas and wanted to politicize the issue in the hopes of getting Greg Abbott to take your side. But here, it's just digging a deeper hole. I'm dumbfounded that any PR department would sign off on this.
  • projectazorian 5y ago
    They may intend to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and with the court's current composition, there's an excellent chance they win and even get the underlying statute neutered or struck down.
    • pcwalton 5y ago
      If the executives think it's anything remotely resembling a reasonable use of company assets to fight workplace discrimination laws on constitutional grounds, the board should fire them, and if they don't, the shareholders should fire the board. ATVI is a large publicly traded corporation. It's not Hobby Lobby.
    • an_opabinia 5y ago
      ??? That’s not how this stuff works at all. This is a dispute over the facts, and how much money the facts are worth, and to whom. Someone in California DOJ had a 15 minute meeting with their people and ATVI people and already decided that ATVI is going to face a fine to be paid to its female complainant former employees, the next three years of lawsuit is a ceremony enacting that.
      • p1necone 5y ago
        If you think the Republicans care about facts I've got a bridge to sell you... Even on HN every time the concept of misinformation online comes up the hordes of "free speech" absolutists favorite argument is some variation of "but you can't actually know what the truth is" or "how could we trust someone else to decide what the truth is". (I'm putting free speech in scare quotes because I think this behavior is actively harmful to the actual existence of free speech and freedom in general, and at this point has just turned into a right wing dogwhistle, at least in anonymous internet discussions)
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Bobby Kotick settled a sexual harassment lawsuit against him, personally, in 2010. Kotick fired a woman who was not interested in being the "arm candy" for his private pilot. https://kotaku.com/activision-boss-loses-legal-battle-over-sexual-harassme-452575586 https://kotaku.com/activision-boss-loses-legal-battle-over-s... Perhaps that makes him the "right guy as CEO". You know, culture fit. (It's not all Bobby's fault though: pre-Activision Blizzard folks are named too.)
• ecf 5y ago
  > this crisis is massively destructive of shareholder value So far the markets haven’t reflected that. How long does it normally take for serious allegations to start affecting the stock price?
  • oblio 5y ago
    In practice? Never.
• anonymousab 5y ago
  > It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened. I see it more as them either waking up to the relative supremacy of and latent unaccountability afforded to the modern Big Corporation, or finally being bold enough to drop the pretense of being an "equal" member of society. There is no need to be polite when your company's position is secure and permanent. That is, the government and society being mad at them does not matter, for their profits are still guaranteed. The only question is whether the stock will go up right after losing the lawsuit, or a few days later.
• dillondoyle 5y ago
  PR has changed in them last 3 years dramatically. Now the standard is just a flat out lie. Used to be either no comment or getting the shit out yourself with apologies appeal to emotion and move on. There are so many Trump-style statements I read in news every day. An article from ProPublica today on China's extra judicial kidnappings abroad had quotes from CCP that could have been Trump but flipped. It's scary that the truth doesn't matter anymore to a significant %, and another significant % are just so flustered and overwhelmed they move on.
• blibble 5y ago
  kotick lost a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2010 additonally, a phone number of "Kotick (Activision)" was photographed on Epstein's rolodex
• spamizbad 5y ago
  > It's like they think it's 1995 and MeToo never happened. Maybe they think their customers are more Gamer-gatey types, and will side with them over a bunch of underpaid, sexually-harassed female employees.
• dfadsadsf 5y ago
  If there is one lesson from me too movement then that fighting back is often the best strategy. Kavanugh fought back and is now justice. Matt Gaetz fights back and is still in congress. Biden did not even acknowledge accuser and is now president. People who apologized or resigned often suffered much more dire professional consequences. Blizzard could have misjudged situation but may have also acted strategically that settlement will bring onslaught of bad publicity and new cases.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    me too didn't achieve much I think. I doubt it did convince anyone and there is still some bad aftertaste with the Kavanaugh process. Some said they didn't care about sexual harassment from certain political parties and just used it as a political cudgel. Those that genuinely fought for reproductive rights got completely shafted and I think they are even worse than before.
• Proven 5y ago
  > by calling them "unaccountable State bureaucrats," Is that what they said? OMG that is great! I love it! They should stop funding them by moving the HQs to a republican-dominated state. Of course, I do not condone sexual harassment, but usually it's just some nasty emails or water cooler talk, and not physical harassment.