When this happened and it happened late in the history of the company, they were hoarded by Activision's people already. Morhaime kept the company from the usual bosos for as long as he could, but he had sold shares in the early days so it was only a matter of time before his dream haven would fall to evil.
No, I'm sorry. People want to assume the people that made the games they like aren't responsible for the harrassment, and the people who made changes to the games they didn't like are responsible, but there's plenty of the classic blizzard people who have been involved in the abuse, yet at the same time I haven't heard anything bad about the behaviour of the likes of Ion, lead designer for BFA/Shadowlands, or the "Do you not have phones?" guy, as poorly received as their game design decisions have been.
The thing is that the vast majority people just don't care about the culture of harassment in the company. And honestly, I don't see why they should, as it does not affect them as consumers.
Making shit products is something that affects consumers, and they will complain about that.
It's one thing if they don't care about the abuse, but they should be honest (including with themselves) on that. It's another to reassign the abuse to people they have different reasons to dislike.
A lot of things I love were made my people that I find personally despicable. If I have to weight how much I like the creators and companies behind everything I consume, that will be recipe for a very tiresome and frustrating life.
This is not to give a pass to Blizzard. The scandals there are pretty bad. But it's up to the employees (and perhaps to the judicial system) to do something about it.
Some of the employees were the perpetrators, some were the victims, and some decided putting food on the table was more important than making the moral stand.
Management will do as much about this as the market incentivizes them to.
Ultimately the ability to produce incentives is in the hands of consumers most directly, and through the judicial system, (so, pretty indirectly) voters.
I dunno. I like classic rock and movies. So I probably consume some art created by assholes. But it isn’t something I’m proud of.
I buy things produced by companies know to make use of slave labor and pollute the environment. I enjoy art made by people that honestly deserve to be punched in the face everyday.
It's not about being proud or ashamed about anything there. If the powers that be refuse to punish people and corporations that deserve to be punished, I think it's ultimately unfair to offload that responsibility onto consumers.
In the case of Blizzard, I won't play Diablo 4 because I really think they have been making shit games for more than a decade. But I don't fault anyone that will play Diablo 4. People like what they like.
The cases of abuse and harassment at Blizzard are known and well documented. If the powers that be refuse to act in order to punish the people and corporation involved, why do we offload that responsibility onto consumers?
I don't fault anyone for making choices different from mine.
> why do we offload that responsibility onto consumers?
I don't view it as offloading anything onto customers. I view it as me deciding what sort of company I'm willing to keep and what sort of behavior I'm willing to support.
I think this line of thinking, assuming the rock stars can do no wrong, is what lead Blizzard down the way it did. Morhaime has acknowledged that he was leader when much of this stuff went down and that he bore responsibility. Alex Afrasiabi was hired in 2004 so we can't just blame this on Activision's people, he was part of the old Blizzard guard.
Most of the problem people that have since been fired were not 'late in the history of the company'. They've been doing this crap since the early '0s, which was completely under his watch. He turned a blind eye to it.
It's not like Bobby Kotick was getting on a little red telephone, to let Mike know that Afrasiabi is a major rainmaker and creative genius that shouldn't be messed with.
It's one thing if the problem happened a few months before Mike's retirement, it's quite another thing when he sat around and did nothing about it for a decade. Which is what he did.
