How the Mighty Blizzard Have Fallen - A Look at Blizzard's Recent Actions
31Blizzard, when you hear that name you used to thing of legendary PC game developers who made some of the very best games ever, Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, a holy trinity of PC games that would inspire other games companies to be more like Blizzard...
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Timecodes
0:00 - The Legendary Blizzard
0:15 - The Fall
1:00 - Sexual Allegations & Misconduct
1:55 - Underpaid Staff
2:27 - Bobby Kotick
3:03 - Hearthstone / Blitzchung / China
3:36 - Warcraft III Reforged Problems & Lies
4:24 - Diablo Immortal "Don't you guys have phones?"
5:04 - Diablo III - Real Money Auction House
5:27 - World of Warcraft Monetisation
6:33 - WoW Prize Pool Scam & more Monetisation
7:23 - Summary
Old school Blizzard could do no wrong, fast forward to today and we've lost nearly all the older developers, in some cases their games are borderline scams, they're all about milking their players for every possible dime, and recently there's been loads of sexual allegations with Blizzard's staff. This might all seem a bit petty to some but this is really serious and has escalated to the point where even Playstation, Nintendo and Xbox head's are condemning Activision Blizzard's business practices and the head himself Bobby Kotick. Seriously if you just google this guy you come across pictures of him as the devil, that says it all. I want to have a look at what Blizzard has been doing recently, why they've been in the news so much lately, and why all of this has had negative effects on the games produced by these once legendary developers.
You often see game studios starting off and they're awesome putting out top quality games, but the larger they become the more business focused and corporate they become. People who don't know anything about games or game development run things and It's no longer about designing and developing the best games first but money becomes the priority and the players and games suffer.
Blizzard have managed to go a step further and build a workplace riddled with sexual misconduct and discrimination. Initially 20 staff were fired regarding this. But every week since there's bee n more fired and some new awful development with Blizzard, there's now multiple organisations trying to sue them for the misconduct, and as mentioned, even Playstation, Nintendo, and Xbox's heads are calling out Blizzard, Microsoft are even threatening to re-evaluate their relationship with Activision Blizzard . Xbox's Phil Spencer commented that he and others on the management team are “disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions at Activision Blizzard".
Blizzard made my favourite games for a while and it's really sad to see this happen, it's no wonder their games are a shadow of what they used to be when their work environments are so toxic. But Blizzard themselves have had a history of treating their staff poorly. For me there was a time where the idea of getting a game development job at Blizzard was the dream and it was for many others. Blizzard exploited people's passions and people worked their dream jobs in exchange being underpaid, many of the lower employees like QA Testers suffer wages that barely cover their living expenses in that location.
Despite the massive profits Blizzard have made, Blizzard recently laid off around 200 employees, while in the same year they gave their head - Bobby Kotick a $200million bonus.
Bobby's a real great guy, To combat the sexual harassment and discrimination, a zero tolerance policy has been put in place, anyone found to have committed sexual harassment or misconduct has been fired on the spot, but when Bobby Kotick's own antics were unveiled the rules don't apply to Bobby.
The sexual allegations and discrimination have been a breaking point of some of Blizzard's long time fans. Let's have a look back at just some more of the shady things that Blizzard have been doing.
With the warcraft based card game Hearthstone we learnt that Blizzard don't care about basic human freedoms anymore and they're desperate to appease China to make use of it's markets. Blizzard held a big Hearthstone tournament in 2019. The winner, Blitzchung had the chance to say some words and he voiced his support for Hong Kong protests. Blizzard inhumanely punished the player on the spot, banned the player, undoing his win and forfeiting his prize money, they also fired the two casters who interviewed him. This was so bad it was even featured in the news and the goverment eventually got involved.
Warcraft III Reforged, the original Warcraft III was my favourite real time strategy game of all time...
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