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I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a co

• coder-3 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why this happens? I think it's because of incentives. For-profit companies are incentivised to maximise profits. There might be resistance against doing so in unethical ways at the start but as the company grows it becomes harder to control until eventually it just does whatever is most profitable, limited only by laws (most of the time). Any CSR or ethical decision becomes a PR stunt to distract from the unethical behaviours. A lot of not-for-profits also fall into this trap unfortunately as they try to maximise revenue or as they become bloated with administrators. I think at the founder level - trying to start B-corps, keeping them small-mid and embedding ethics deeply into the culture is the way to go but that is quite different from startup culture.
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Apple is a master at this. News of its child and slave labor abuses have been brushed off because people love their products.
    • trissylegs 5y ago
      Also making a lot money off what is essentially a huge casino. (games that use Addictive Gambling Mechanics to sell Micro-transations)
      • sunshinerag 5y ago
        That is on android too. So Google too
        • trissylegs 5y ago
          It is too. (And Tencent, Epic, Blizzard, Valve, etc)
      • dannyw 5y ago
        What's the net social outcome of this? Would these people be spending money at the casino instead?
        • username90 5y ago
          No, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before. The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.
          • hedora 5y ago
            That’s a good theory, but everyone I know that’s worked with game microtransaction data says the majority of money comes from a few “whales”. Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).
            • imtringued 5y ago
              Some whales spend $1000 every weekend at the club/bar. They simply have that much money and dont care how they spend it.
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Also because almost every other tech company (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc.) make their products at the exact same Foxconn factories. Apple just gets the biggest headline.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        Cite sources for that claim please.
        • gjsman-1000 5y ago
          You can look it up online. Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting. But it also applies to others: Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules) Nintendo DS Manufacturer: Foxconn Modern Nokia / HMD Global Devices Manufacturer: Foxconn Xbox 360 Manufacturer: Foxconn AMD Threadripper TR4 Socket Manufacturer: Foxconn And so on. Apple, Foxconn. Because almost everybody uses Foxconn. So when you see those articles about "Apple factory suicide nets," calling it the whole tech industry's contract manufacturer of choice would have been more apt.
          • temp8964 5y ago
            Foxconn has lots of factories in lots of different places. Does it matter to specify which factory / place has the problem?
            • johannes1234321 5y ago
              No, it doesn't matter, as cheap labor in on fab subsidizes the other fabs, even if those would have best working conditions thinkable.
            • ben_w 5y ago
              Perhaps, but unlikely. I can’t find how many people worked at Foxconn at the time, but right now it’s employing more than the population of any of the smallest eight US states. Wikipedia’s list of suicide rates by state is from a different year than the population, but it looks like those states are about 5 times the population-adjusted rate that Foxconn had. Wikipedia also says that China’s national suicide rate is difficult to study due to political concerns, before saying the WHO says it was 9.7/100k in 2016. That would mean you should expect closer to 126 suicides per year (in Foxconn’s current workforce), rather than the 14 in 6 months that made the news.
  • blengert 5y ago
    What examples of B-corps doing this successfully do you know?
  • unixhero 5y ago
    For more alone these lines, what incentives can do to a company look no further than: The Case Of Arthur Anderson.
    • ninjin 5y ago
      Here is a link for those like me that had a vague recollection of the name, but had forgotten most of the details (assuming that you meant “Andersen” rather than “Anderson”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen
  • sydbarrett74 5y ago
    We have Lewis F. Powell and Milton Friedman to thank for this.
  • WitCanStain 5y ago
    Do you think worker-owned businesses can mitigate this? After all, one of their pluses is supposed to be that the workers can choose to prioritise things other than profit.
    • coeneedell 5y ago
      Not the parent, but I have a thought on this. While workers would be able to prioritize things other than profit, I don't think they would. From an economics analysis, we're really just redefining profit as benefits to all corporation members instead of to the owners. Imagine a middle manager has to choose between hiring a factory that is cheap but has a bad rights/ecological/legal record and a factory that will be more expensive, but is proverbially clean . At a top owned corporation they have no personal incentive to maximize profits, but if they own part of the company, their own compensation will increase if they take the less ethical option. Note: I generally think a distributed ownership model for a company leads to better health and production in the long run, but this is probably a case where it's worse. When incentives are distributed, and those incentives are perverse, you just have everyone bearing the pressure to enact unethical business prectices.
    • perryizgr8 5y ago
      Worker owned business can't even compete. Name one such company that is in the top 5 in any product category.
      • johannes1234321 5y ago
        This is to a large part due to worker owned business being unable to attract capital. A capital giver wants ownership or at least tcomaprable influence as consequence. At that point they aren't worker-owned anymore. Generally however I think worker-owned companies are unlikely to take risk but value the workplace of current workers over future workers. (i.e. closing a department in order to build a new market will be delayed)
      • jesboat 5y ago
        Ocean Spray. Wikipedia describes it as > Ocean Spray is an American agricultural cooperative of growers of cranberries and grapefruit headquartered in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. It currently has over 700 member growers (in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Florida, British Columbia and other parts of Canada, as well as Chile). The cooperative employs about 2,000 people, with sales of $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2013 and accounts for 70% of North American cranberry production.
  • download13 5y ago
    It's almost like there might be some inherent problem with running everything through profit motives...
    • coder-3 5y ago
      There definitely is. However, we must remember that we are enjoying a standard of living unimaginable only a few hundred years ago. I think the system has some inherent flaws, but it has still served us extremely well.
      • arvinsim 5y ago
        Humanity better find a better system soon. It's not sustainable.
    • drumhead 5y ago
      There isnt, just dont expect it to solve the worlds problems or keep things fantastic or great forever.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Apple is most certainly a for-profit company yet they are going strong. Profit is what keeps the company going. No company lasts long without some focus on profit.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    By and large I think the top level execs of these companies are sociopaths. Not the classic ones that are obvious and ultimately cross too many people. No these people are on a spectrum of being able to understand human emotions and feel them just enough to easily fool standard humans. However their 90% goal is money and that blinds them over time to things like customer loyalty, fair product for a fair price, innovation and it just becomes a money press to them and then they lose customers and throw their hands up and declare well that's just the way it is completely forgetting how their founding products and innovations got them there.
• roenxi 5y ago
  Think of it from the perspective of a zero empathy creature who favours profit maximisation over any and all human cost. What are they going to do with their life? What would need to happen for them not to end up in charge of companies? This is a standard thing that has been happening for centuries as people try organisational structures that rely on good people being in charge. Turns out that there isn't a divining rod to identify bad people in advance, but they do tend to be hard workers who try hard to get in to positions of power.
  • Clubber 5y ago
    >This is a standard thing that has been happening for centuries as people try organisational structures that rely on good people being in charge. Honestly, if your organizational structure relies on good people do be in charge, you've already lost. The trick is so that people in power never have too much power, and don't have the power to destroy it. It can be a simple system like requiring 3 keys of 3 people to launch a nuclear strike, or something way more complex, like the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. When creating the structures, you have to think of it like a video game designer to a degree. You have to always keep in mind how would a bad actor hack this to his or her advantage, then remove whatever it is you find.
• _RPL5_ 5y ago
  I don't understand why a game company is expected to have an opinion about international politics, outside of "we don't want our platform to be used for politics." It's bad enough that Facebook mods are now in charge of deciding what constitutes the truth; don't also conscript game companies into fighting idealogical battles with foreign states.
  • FridgeSeal 5y ago
    Politics isn’t _really_ a thing that you can pretend doesn’t exist and operate in isolation/ignorance of it. You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist (see the “no politics in my video games/comics please” argument used by some gamers) because it a part of, as much as a function of, any given culture. This doesn’t mean of course, that we require every company to lay out some kind of political guidelines that they’ll support/abide by, but it does mean that when something happens culturally, and the politics “rears its head” that something will need to be done, or some position will need to be made.
    • falomor 5y ago
      Companies ignore the vast majority of political events and issues. Consider a hypothetical startup where all employees are working too many hours to keep track of current events: recent political/cultural developments will necessarily be missing from company policies and products.
      • ben_w 5y ago
        Being ignorant of politics isn’t the same thing as being able to operate in that state. Imagine your hypothetical team had been (over)working on a game which was all about the “valiant mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan fighting off the Soviet Union” when 9/11 happened? Or they started working with the likeness of any of Prince Andrew, Rolf Harris, Kevin Spacey, etc. before they became personae-non-grata? Just because some politics is trivia doesn’t make it all trivia.
        • falomor 5y ago
• neartheplain 5y ago
  Fun fact, Bobby Kotick (the "zero-empathy, profit-maximizing creature" who runs Activision Blizzard) was listed in Jeffrey Epstein's black book: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/dfsrt3/activision_ceo_bobby_kotick_linked_to_jeffrey/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/dfsrt3/activision... Hard to draw further conclusions, but it's definitely not a positive.
  • sehro 5y ago
    Bobby Kotick was accused of exactly the sort of behavior in the current Activision/Blizzard allegations in 2007, by a flight attendant on his private jet.
• JustARandomGuy 5y ago
  Agreed with all of this. I'm a big fan of Blizzard products, played the original Starcraft when I was younger and still play some of the more recent games. It's blatantly obvious for a long time Blizzard has been sitting on its' laurels and not innovating. The linked article does a great job of pointing out the major Blizzard mistakes, but I'll add one more: Blizzard's storywriting ability has fallen off a cliff. I love Blizzard games because of their great stories, but for years now the storylines have become muddled and clearly written by their D-team. An example would be this story, but there are many more I could point to: World of Warcraft's latest cinematic is a narrative disaster and players hate it https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-latest-cinematic-is-a-narrative-disaster-and-players-hate-it/ https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-latest-cinematic-...
  • alasdair_ 5y ago
    The writing in WoW nowadays truly is appalling. Playing a horde character, I spent the entire expansion forced to perform actions that made no sense internally and were the opposite of what I would have liked to do. There is zero player agency and zero empathy. Quests were garbage and made no sense. I’m a player who has played wow since beta sixteen years ago and I am finally at the point where I am giving up.
    • Jare 5y ago
      Fellow beta player here, I never cared about the overall story (although I like jokes and good scenes / subplots when they happen), but the design, timegating, and a large chunk of the art in SL killed the game for me. So it's really a disaster in all areas.
  • pharmakom 5y ago
    Blizzard writing and storytelling has always been crap. I think expectations were just lower back then.
    • ReptileMan 5y ago
      I disagree. Both Starcraft and Diablo I had good writing. For me the decline came with Warcraft 3. Both the visuals and story of this game were shit. And after that WoW became juggernaut and for some reason Blizzard decided that only pre teen david Eddings fans are their audience and never bothered to check the real demographics afterwards. Such a juvenile writing could only be achieved deliberately.
• hmwhy 5y ago
  > I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better. I used to think like that, but I now think that's a skewed view of the world that I used so that I could feel better about it. I don't have any doubts that some founders "genuinely want to make the world better", but I now believe that they are just the minority. Most founders are just after the fame and money—some are even adept at putting on a facade so that you would happily give them money. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just not the world that I would like to live in.
• eric-hu 5y ago
  I quit at exactly the same time, but from Starcraft 2. I think many corporations do this, but with Blizzard it was particularly egregious. I also pin some blame on the CCP, which is a power-at-all-costs machine, rather than a profit driven one. For me, Blizzard was on a disappointing but tolerable money grabbing path before Blitzchung.
• cletus 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why this happens? Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. They want a formula to produce content that can be predicted, projected and tracked. Here's another key point: everything you do as a company either adds to or subtracts from your brand value. For example: Square Enix giving discounted subscriptions and a general mea culpa around the original FF14 release, brand value add. Blizzard adding micro-transactions to classic TBC? That's nothing more than the short-term extraction of brand value into money. It's a bit like delivering pizza. You're trading long term car depreciation and maintenance for short-term cash. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s
  • thrashh 5y ago
    I think you’re more explaining what happens than why it happens. Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be. When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to. There’s no replacement for passion.
    • acje 5y ago
      Once an organization has grown to multiple layers of management the people on top will eventually become those who are good at climbing the ladder. How we choose our leaders is IMHO one of the most important problems we yet don’t really understand. It’s partly a function of how we structure our organizations.
      • zpeti 5y ago
        Just trying to play devils advocate, im not sure it’s possible to do it differently. You simply can’t replicate true founder attitudes and mentality and choices with a management with stock options and fiduciary responsibility. Steve Jobs seemed to be very concerned about this and spent a lot of time trying to create an innovative organisation independent of him. What have we got since him? A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone. It’s really depressing but I’m not sure as humanity we can do better really. The entrepreneur is just someone who starts with nothing and creates something. You can only go so far in recreating that in a large organisation.
• brundolf 5y ago
  > I think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better. > When they step aside, however, the people who take over after them tend to be terrifying: zero empathy creatures who favor profit maximization over any and all human cost. Seems to me like this has more to do with going public. When a company starts being treated as a money-printing machine, and its actual business is nothing but the implementation details of that machine, it either crumbles or it becomes a destructive force. Almost all companies whose products thrive and/or have a net positive effect on society have somebody at the helm who cares about what the company is actually doing. At a public company, investors are the ones at the helm, and they usually just want money. The company tends to switch from value-creation to value-extraction. If their dominance is entrenched enough that innovation and quality aren't very important anymore, they become vampiric. If it isn't, they slowly whither away.
  • unishark 5y ago
    I think you're taking for granted all the benefits to society provided by those profit-seeking public companies. The baseline is all of us starving to death with no possessions or food except what we can grow ourselves or scrounge, not the local supermarket/retail/etc. stores always being there to provide for our needs efficiently.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      That's not the baseline. That's currently the most probable medium term outcome.
    • LocalH 5y ago
      The baseline is nature. Society has pushed the effective baseline so low that countless people are absolutely miserable, and we're slowing losing our connection to the natural world, to our detriment
• pkphilip 5y ago
  I think it is possible that many people who start new companies are also passionate about making a difference in a specific field and that is what pushes them to go through the trouble of starting a company from scratch. The people who take over from them, on the other hand, are likely people who don't quite have the same level of passion and who see success purely in monetary terms.
• nathanvanfleet 5y ago
  I think that's how you get to the top of an organization (besides creating it like a founder). You have to be a pretty cold individual, and it's not about making games or Coca Cola. It's about consolidating your power as you rise to the top of a large corporation and build people who are loyal to you. These guys have no vision about what a new game should be like. They want to get bigger, they WANT to make bigger deals and bigger markets. That's why they want to open up into China at all costs.
• nindalf 5y ago
  The one Blizzard game that I was fond of more than any other was Warcraft III. It holds a special place in my heart because I saved money for several months to be able to buy it for myself. It was a big deal to me. And wow, that game was everything I had hoped it would be when I finally got it. A couple of years ago Blizzard thought they’d re-release the same game with updated graphics to cash in on the nostalgia. If it had been even half decent I would have bought it. But it was an unplayable mess. They couldn’t even release a playable version of a game that already existed. That’s when I knew Blizzard had died. I’m done with them. I’m sure they’ll survive for a long time with their CoD and WoW, but I want nothing to do with them.
• bsd44 5y ago
  Does it feel "right" giving money to a company that would side with the American killings of civilians for oil and profit? Just trying to understand how morals work.
• foresto 5y ago
  My experience mirrors yours almost exactly. Quitting Blizzard meant giving up my primary source of entertainment at the time, and having a lot less contact with some dear friends since then. It wasn't easy, but the right choice for me was clear: I am unwilling to support a company that silences/punishes people for promoting human rights. I won't even touch their free-to-play games any more, since that helps populate their servers. I'm not sure what my point is here. Maybe just to acknowledge that it's somehow comforting to know I'm not alone. Thanks for sharing.
• JoeyBananas 5y ago
  I'd rather have a western company obey the CCP enough so that they can make money in the largest nation in the world than see them give the Chicoms the middle finger and be kicked out. If they get barred from of China, Chinese gamers will just have to play games by some "Yes man" company that grovels at the feet of the CCP. By building up a reputation in China, Blizzard would over time gain leverage to expose Chinese gamers to Western products and build a relationship that benefits everybody. This kind of dilemma is actually something I see a lot in many situations. Someone thinks that the larger organization is wrong, so they disobey the rules and get fired. Then, some "yes man" is hired and no improvement is made. People should remember that the only way you can do good and potentially get changes to be made is to not get fired in the first place.
  • mcphage 5y ago
    > By building up a reputation in China, Blizzard would over time gain leverage to expose Chinese gamers to Western products and build a relationship that benefits everybody. That’s been the US’s policy towards China for decades, and it hasn’t worked out the way we expected. Rather than Chinese consumers demanding western freedoms, we’ve gotten western companies doing whatever the Chinese government has wanted.
    • JoeyBananas 5y ago
      My point is not necessarily that western products have the capacity to create demand among the Chinese for a western lifestyle. Whatever the goal is (profits, maximizing freedom for the Chinese, whatever) withdrawing from China completely does the opposite of helping to achieve that goal. It's a bad strategy anyway that you look at it. Pulling out of China completely is the sort of thing that only sounds good when you are in the moment and acting out of pure emotion.
  • sellyme 5y ago
    There's a very very large gulf between "don't get banned from the entire country" and "actively support said country's human rights violations". Plenty of game developers do not support the CCP, yet have their games available there. Blizzard chose wrong.
• kktkti9 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why this happens? One hardly needs to theorize; Bobby Kotick is on record saying he wanted to take the fun out of game development a couple decades ago now. Management like him, Mitt Romney, need people generating the right statistics. Their families expect the good life. It’s our nation state past-time to extract financial profit, to support the political choice decades ago to force the dollar down the worlds throat.
• toss1 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why this happens? Unless it is continuously and actively minimized with explicit countermeasures, large organizations tend to degrade into filtering sociopaths into top positions. The tendency to prioritize financialization over product also doesn't help. As you mention, once both the founders are gone and the organization is large, watch out...
• secondaryacct 5y ago
  Human rights in Hong Kong let's not exaggerate. Except in american news, our human rights are still okay, thank you very much... Maybe press freedom is a bit damaged, political expression more difficult, but we still have 1 millionaire in 7 people, are immensely prosperous, and let's not even compare to the average Chinese. Human rights in Hong Kong, psh, we probably have more protection than the US... And what does it have to do with a video game company in the first place, people are insane :D
• christophilus 5y ago
  My theory is this: founders want to build something. They are creators. Their motivation is building something new / cool / useful. The second generation of leadership is motivated by power / money. They don’t create. They climb ladders built by creators. The difference in motivation is not subtle. The outcomes are generally positive in the first case and sociopathic in the second.
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Your delta by itself doesn't really matter to anyone but yourself but all those deltas add up over time and I think accelerated. Bad reputation gets around. I swore them off myself.
• nobodyandproud 5y ago
  > Does anyone know why this happens? Where to start? Every organization that grows suffers from this. At some point as you’ve noticed the ones that rise to the top excel at consolidation of power and expanding influence, by projecting success and gaining a network of support by carving out influence to cronies. Part of this is because it’s necessary: The skills for building and running a small company isn’t the same as for a large one. But this is where things fall apart: The same skills that took the small org to a large organization is also more rewarding and remains more rewarding than the core skills and values that was fundamental to the business in the first place. The few orgs that succeed tend to keep someone who could be or was part of the core workforce calling the shots. Even this isn’t a guarantee of success though (disruption). Sun Microsystems didn’t lose their way, but they didn’t adopt.
• arnaudsm 5y ago
  It's darwinian, founders are selected over product success. New CEOs are selected for their finance skills. The first tend to be creative and empathetic, while the latter prefer cost cutting and lack of empathy.
• GuB-42 5y ago
  The most impressive part is that Blizzard managed to give everyone a reason to hate them. For you, it is international politics. For others, it is about employee treatment. Others may have something against loot boxes and microtransactions. And for most, it is simply the massive drop in quality of their games. Concerned about ethics? Blizzard bad. Who care about ethics, I just want good games? Blizzard bad. They don't seem to have any idea about their core market, they can't even do damage control properly. I understand that shareholders want profit but here, it is as if Activision wanted to deliberately destroy the Blizzard brand. I don't know about how shareholders think, but a once well respected brand like Blizzard must have some value.