Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees
Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees
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.
Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees
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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees
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
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
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
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
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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Re: Activision Blizzard being sued for discrimination against female employees
Link to article?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.
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