Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Wain
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Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by Wain »

In case you haven't caught up on the news, Activision Blizzard is being sued by California Department of Fair Employment over discrimination against female employees. Wowhead have an article on it here:
https://www.wowhead.com/news/activision ... ale-323503

It seems that multiple big names may be involved, including employees both past and present, and some cases stretch back to before Blizzard was purchased by Activision.

A number of women who work, or have worked for Blizzard have been sharing their experienced on Twitter, and it's deeply troubling, especially when it's been the shared experience of *so many*. Hopefully justice is served in this case, and anyone currently employed there who was involved is removed from the company, and never again holds any position of authority over others (a pipe dream, I know).

As a man, and someone who doesn't work for Blizzard, I'll leave it at that. Read the experiences of these women and give them your support.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by Wain »

I will also add that some people have decided to cancel their subscriptions and move to other games as a result of this. Others have not. Both decisions are valid, please don't harass anyone for what they choose. Personally I'll continue to play WoW, at least for now. Firstly, WoW is the product of hundreds of good people who have created a brilliant experience despite these arseholes, and many of these women continue to work there, hopefully under improved conditions. Secondly, from reading some of the shared experiences, the problems aren't specific to Blizzard but are part of a much wider problem in the industry. Hopefully this lawsuit leads to action being taken at other companies as well.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by GormanGhaste »

I had to stop following some Blizzard company accounts and individual employees on twitter because of the pervasive alcohol consumption in their posts.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Only because Im curious and nothing else
A) is it true that blizzard put a stop to all develeopment due to this? And if yes what will this mean for WoW?
B) any numbers on how many users blizzard losts?

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by GormanGhaste »

Blizzard's statement in response to the lawsuit was awful, and almost a thousand former and current employees have signed their names to this letter:
blizzard employees wrote:To the Leaders of Activision Blizzard,


We, the undersigned, agree that the statements from Activision Blizzard, Inc. and their legal counsel regarding the DFEH lawsuit, as well as the subsequent internal statement from Frances Townsend, are abhorrent and insulting to all that we believe our company should stand for. To put it clearly and unequivocally, our values as employees are not accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership.


We believe these statements have damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry. Categorizing the claims that have been made as “distorted, and in many cases false” creates a company atmosphere that disbelieves victims. It also casts doubt on our organizations’ ability to hold abusers accountable for their actions and foster a safe environment for victims to come forward in the future. These statements make it clear that our leadership is not putting our values first. Immediate corrections are needed from the highest level of our organization.
Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action -- and the troubling official responses that followed -- we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests. To claim this is a “truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,” while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable.


We call for official statements that recognize the seriousness of these allegations and demonstrate compassion for victims of harassment and assault. We call on Frances Townsend to stand by her word to step down as Executive Sponsor of the ABK Employee Women’s Network as a result of the damaging nature of her statement. We call on the executive leadership team to work with us on new and meaningful efforts that ensure employees -- as well as our community -- have a safe place to speak out and come forward.


We stand with all our friends, teammates, and colleagues, as well as the members of our dedicated community, who have experienced mistreatment or harassment of any kind. We will not be silenced, we will not stand aside, and we will not give up until the company we love is a workplace we can all feel proud to be a part of again. We will be the change.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Maria wrote: Mon Jul 26, 2021 4:25 pm Only because Im curious and nothing else
A) is it true that blizzard put a stop to all develeopment due to this? And if yes what will this mean for WoW?
B) any numbers on how many users blizzard losts?
A) They have put a stop to development for now, which means that 9.1.5 or 9.2 will be delayed as a result. This also likely means that updates to Classic will also be delayed. But this does not mean that WoW is canceled or is going to die off.
B) Right now, there isn't any information of how many WoW subscribers Blizz has lost due to this, and honestly, there wouldn't be a way of really figuring that out. There wouldn't necessarily be a way of determining whether someone canceled their subscription due to all of this or whether it was due to something else like not having enough time or money to play.

Also, in regards to that letter, that was from Activision Blizzard, not from Blizzard themselves. Thus far, many of the big names at Blizzard have been sending in letters of apology and/or disgust at what has happened. Unfortunately, however, more information has been coming forward that has shown that some of these Devs that have been apologizing or showing disgust at this behavior may also be or have been part of the problem.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by Bulletdance »

I played since Vanilla, but decided to end my sub after this news. At least the Overwatch team seemed to have been spared all this nonsense. I'm hoping Jab gets fired. Only then would I consider going back. It's very frustrating. I feel terrible for everyone who works there who isn't a bad person. Hopefully they find other jobs if WoW goes under.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Is there a real chance that WoW will go under? I agree with Wain that this issue does not seem restricted to a single company but sadly a worldwide issue in many institutions, politics, sport etc

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Maria wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 1:19 am Is there a real chance that WoW will go under? I agree with Wain that this issue does not seem restricted to a single company but sadly a worldwide issue in many institutions, politics, sport etc
I suppose that it is always possible, but I don't think that WoW is going to end up dying or anything. For that to happen it would require a very large portion of the devs to be part of what is happening and then for them to lose their jobs because of it. If that happened, then there wouldn't be enough people to keep WoW running, unless another company ended up buying it or something.

It is a problem throughout the video game industry, yes, and has been for a long time. Sadly, it has only been relatively recently that efforts have been made to change things and to right things that have been wrong for so long. It isn't a problem that can go away over night, and it likely won't ever fully go away. Ghostcrawler, a former WoW dev, posted a series of tweets regarding a panel he was apart of back in 2010 and the response they gave to a female WoW player regarding how women are depicted in WoW. Someone responded to one of his tweets mentioning how most Eastern MMOs depict women in a far more sexualized manner and, in comparison, WoW is doing reasonably well. The point of mentioning this is that change is going to take a long time, especially for certain areas and markets within the video game industry where women are highly sexualized.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Maria wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 1:19 am Is there a real chance that WoW will go under? I agree with Wain that this issue does not seem restricted to a single company but sadly a worldwide issue in many institutions, politics, sport etc
I think in all likelihood they will settle something in court and we won't hear much about it again at all. There's only a very tiny tiny chance it could go under and that's if the people at Activision start to wonder if they're risking Call of duty somehow by having Blizzards reputation attached to it. Activision themselves were a big part of the lawsuit though so WoW will probably be fine, but just lose some players.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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FF14 was through something similar in 18 or 19 i think.. but never heard more of it than that.. so yeah prob settle.

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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what time is that in european central time?

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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The protest starts at 1800 CEST, and the logout is at 1900 CEST.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Im Neutral in all things politics and do not participate in any demostration so I myself did not participate (if super curious pm me why) but I thought I wanted to show you how many there were a couple of minutes to deadline on my server. As I said im neutral so I have nothing else to say

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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I've modified the Petopia and Warcraft Mounts home pages for the day. It was a quick modificaiton and hopefully nothing breaks. The links to the regular site indexes are at the tops of each page.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Nothing look broken to me.

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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

Unread post by Bulletdance »

Kotaku just put out a very disturbing article with very disturbing pictures of Ghostcrawler and other devs holding up a picture of Bill Cosby in a hotel room full of alcohol and worse.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Part of what is sad about all of this is the Blizz devs that have come forward and said how disgusted they are with all that Alex did, but in the end it turns out that they also had a part in it all.
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees

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Bulletdance wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 7:14 pm Kotaku just put out a very disturbing article with very disturbing pictures of Ghostcrawler and other devs holding up a picture of Bill Cosby in a hotel room full of alcohol and worse.
Link to article?

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