Make no mistake: this is Bobby Kotick trying to save his job. He may well succeed. I hope his head also makes it to the chopping block.
Firstly, Brack was only president for 2 years and a lot of these incidents happened prior BUT if you're in charge you're responsible. That's part of the deal that comes with that giant pay check. You don't get to say "it's not my fault". So Brack absolutely should go because he's seemingly failed to correct the toxic culture.
You'll note the email talks about "Blizzard", not "Activision Blizzard". This is how you can tell Kotick is distancing himself from this. It's "Activision Blizzard" when things are going well and "Blizzard" when it's not. Kotick is I'm sure busy selling this narrative that Blizzard is an autonomous unit. It's not. It's fully Activision at this point.
Activision Blizzard has squandered their most valuable properties. The only thing propping up WoW is a 15 year old version of the game that's quickly being ruined with the exact micro-transactions that ruined the game to begin with. Does anyone still care about Overwatch? Prediction: Diablo 4 is going to disappoint. This is the same company that brought you Diablo 3 after all.
As for the new co-leaders, ugh... this just screams PR. One of them is a woman of course. I'm not saying she's unqualified (although both of them are relatively recent hires, interestingly). But you know given the lawsuit that this was going to happen. But the main issue is that there's two leaders. We all know countries need two presidents, armies need two commanders, etc.
So what this suggests is that Ibarra had the confidence of Kotick and the board, she would now be president. So she's co-president because of the lawsuit. It may not be true but that's how people are going to interpret it.
To get out this rot it can't stop at changing the executives. Blizzard honestly needs someone to come in and clean house. This goes beyond the lawsuit, which is no doubt a relatively small minority. This is about half the company probably being useless.
Jason Schreier had a good tweet about this title shuffle this morning. [0]
> Titles mean a lot in the corporate world. Until 2018, Mike Morhaime was CEO. When Brack took over, he was president. Now, Oneal and Ybarra are described as "co-leaders."
> A clear glimpse at who's really in charge: Bobby Kotick
Diablo 2 came out over 21 years ago; if it were a person, it would be old enough to go to the bar in the US and get wasted.
I don't think it needs mentioning. It is impossibly hard to keep the same culture at a game company two decades later, especially when the company grows so much. It's not like Valve is the same Valve that released Half-Life, or Bungie is the same Bungie that released Oni. None of these companies today could possibly have a similar culture to what their company culture was when those games came out.
Changing company culture, it turns out, is easy. Stupidly easy. I say it's "stupidly" easy because all you need to do is hire new people, and most companies already do that. The hard thing is changing company culture in the right direction.
> I say it's "stupidly" easy because all you need to do is hire new people
Don't forget turnover rates, too! The games industry especially has turnover rates that would be astounding in some other industries. Crunch culture and youth culture (both direct co-factors in the issues Activision are being accused of) leads to a games industry that is perpetually stuck "young". The median age of a developer in games has pretty much always been close to 25. (We're getting very close to the point where the median age of developer at a videogame company is younger than Diablo 2.)
It's easy to believe that videogame companies especially have short memories and cultures that lack maturity when they are perpetually stuck in an elongated sort of adolescence by mostly only retaining developers that can put up with crunch and lack of work/life balance in the name of "passion" (who by nature of those challenges are almost always going to be younger and more naive).
Even if you kept the culture perfectly intact, gaming itself has changed. Players expectations have changed dramatically. You'd need the same culture perfectly adapted to the changing gaming landscape which never happens.
I don't really think that the culture at the company to be equal to the culture of gaming overall to be honest.
In fact Blizzard and especially Activision aren't really well loved company by gamers. Didn't EA got the title of worst company multiple times? They probably have a decent competitor now.
Which is why there's the biannual Diablo 2 clone that flops, and the "horrible", "failed", Diablo III is on its 24th season and sold like gangbusters on consoles.
I'm a bit out of the loop on what has led up to this. I did a bit of searching and came up with a recent thread (within last 2 weeks) of an Activision employee (female) committing suicide after experiencing sexual harassment (involving nude photos being distributed) while on a business trip with the harassing supervisor?
The state of California has announced a week or two ago that it is suing Blizzard over a lot of different sexual harassment cases (including the one you've brought up) after conducting a 2-years long investigation and gathering evidence.
Which prompted a (justified) mass outrage and more people coming out with more evidence and relevant situations within the company.
“ Brack was only president for 2 years and a lot of these incidents happened prior BUT if you're in charge you're responsible. ”
Surely moral responsibility cannot be assigned like that? Legal, technical perhaps, but people by and large won’t assign all responsibility to the last person in a line of hot potato. Especially since the person in question didn’t actually have 100% freedom to change the organization as he wanted. There was, and still is, a board of directors above him who has to sign off on any big changes. Responsibility should go with whoever or whatever has the substantive decision making authority, and if that’s shared then …
Moral responsibility isn't, but a company's policies, policing, and enforcement are. These were well documented things, involving numerous employees; why were they not noticed and acted upon? -That's- a corporate failing.
The CEO runs the company. If the company does stupid things on their watch, it is their negligence that let it happen. Given that they get paid so much, taking responsibility for things that happen under them is an earned hazard.
saying "Given that they get paid so much, taking responsibility for things " sounds exactly like a paid scapegoat. Also what constitutes a "watch"? CEOs aren't omniscient, they aren't observing everything their execs do.
Being responsible for the company under them is far more than just being a scapegoat, but yes, it includes taking ample blame when things go terribly wrong. No one needs to be omniscient, and maybe Bobby earned his salary through concentrating on other things, but he certainly didn't earn it by shaping company culture. The chief executive is supposed to see risks and mitigate them, or hire people that can, and if they don't, it's their screw-up regardless of who elses it is. I'm feeling repetitive here, but the difficulty and importance of the job is why they get paid many multiples of other employees, ostensibly.
Launch-time Diablo 3 actively felt bad to play. It had about 20 hours of fun Diablo content, and then it turned into this horrible experience that was half: inspecting the dozens of crap items in your bag looking for something someone might buy on the AH/looking for items to buy on the AH, and the other half was trying to play a "Bullet Hell" style game using click-to-move
Since then, they've completely cleaned up their act. Diablo 3 today is a lot like Diablo 2 in that you can just keep enjoying the core Diablo gameplay as long as you want
I'd really prefer not to give them any success metrics right now TBH. I'm not someone who was actively making microtransactions a month ago so I can't hit them in the wallet - but I am abstaining from using any of their products at least.
That's part of what I'm saying - while abstaining from D3 doesn't hurt their income it does still hurt their metrics. Every gaming company in existence tracks DAU on their products to know how much to continue to invest in it - while they might not actively care about upping D3 DAU due to the lack of any upcoming expansion they are still watching it.
If you think the game was a disappointment, doesn't that imply you already gave them the money? It is not a service. If you bought it 5 years ago, you don't have to pay more to play it.
But you can avoid having some information brought to light specifically because of their abuse from turning you into a DAU. If their userbase goes up as a result of this scandal it's the market responding in a manner that encourages further behavior of this sort.
Re: Oneal, it's true she's new to the Blizzard executive staff, but she's a 17-year veteran of Vicarious Visions where she rose through the ranks to be Studio Head before they were moved under Blizzard earlier this year.
And Vicarious Visions has been doing great work for a while, if anyone can turn it around it's probably the two outsiders, but I doubt that they will be given the tools to actually fix this.
We'll see I guess, I know I won't be spending any money on Activision-Blizzard in the foreseeable future, there are more than enough games out there.
Activision didn’t ruin Blizzard. Blizzard ruined themselves by giving up control of their destiny to another. Such things affect the way you think, to be not independent.
At current iteration LFR is nothing but an improvement for the game IMO. Everyone who wants to play on a high level, have no reason to visit LFR. LFR is very easy to implement, as it's the same raid with nerfed numbers, so it takes very little resources for development. And apparently there are enough people who want to experience game in a story mode, so they get that content.
There was time when LFR was boring, yet necessary for hardcore players, but that's just bad game tuning, not failure of LFR mode itself.
I don't see the issue with LFR. If you want to join a guild and run raids you still can. However, some of us don't feel like joining a guild and would rather just queue up every now and then.
To be clear - I support LFR but here's why I think some people don't like it:
There was a "golden age" of WoW where things were new, and hard. It was a perfect balance of difficulty and grind made bearable by the newness and marvel of it all. I liken it to finding a new programming project which you are stoked on. The effort/reward loop is finely tuned.
LFR was part of a bunch of changes, spanning years, that evolved WoW but moved further and further away from that initial magic.
The gripe many have/had is that LFG/LFR removes the community building element of having to find a group, or find a guild. You had to really work to get a group, and work even harder to get (and stay in) a guild. I remember when I first stepped into SSC. I had spent months working for that. To then work with that guild to clear SSC and move on to Hyjal was thoroughly amazing.
Yes, you can still "do" that (get a guild, hardcore raid) but there was something about knowing that other people hadn't even seen what you were seeing, that was thrilling.
I think some people also don't like that the same gear (or nearly the same) models are available to LFR groups. Back in the day, if you saw someone walking around with a full T3 set it was something magical. Nowadays, everyone kinda looks the same.
I remember that I first started feeling that way when LFR was introduced.
My experience as a Final Fantasy XIV player is that Duty Finder (the equivalent of LFR) is such a massive necessity for quality-of-life that I'd never ever be able to go back to an MMO without it. I used to play EverQuest back in 1999-2000, and I ultimately left after a year or so because everything about that game was an exercise in frustration despite the cool concept. I didn't get back into MMOs until I discovered an MMO that actually respected the player's time and didn't require everyone to jump through hoops and sit around and wait for people to bite just so they can play the game.
And, mind you, Duty Finder in XIV isn't just a raid thing: every single piece of instanced content uses it, even levelling dungeons, and that applies whether you're queueing solo, queueing with a partial party, or entering content with a fully premade party (even right-clicking on a dungeon entrance just opens up Duty Finder). XIV doesn't just respect the player's time: the entire design of the game is built around respecting the player's time at a fundamental level.
Yea I fully appreciate this. In fact, when I do pop back to WoW I am always grateful that LFG and LFR exist. That system is a godsend for casual gamers (like myself).
I just used to be a hard core gamer so I share the sentiment that some may feel which is that the glory days of WoW are long passed. What we have now is objectively “better” in every way, and yet, you can’t help but miss the past.
That's the curse of all long-running MMOs, though.
You have to have power inflation, for any of the common content models to work.
And you have to also provide a fast lane for new players, otherwise no one is going to join, only to be a decade behind where everyone else is now.
It's unfortunate because it screws existing players. But ultimately, that's only because they believe the myth that MMO stats / levels / gear actually have value.
Totally. I don’t fault Blizzard really at all for the evolution of WoW over the years. It had to evolve, and so it did. It just meant that for me, a lot of the magic was gone. But I had also grown up a lot, and had dramatically less free time, so I don’t even think I could ever support that “golden age” of WoW gaming even if it had never changed.
All in all, they grew up with their player base and I don’t fault them for it in the slightest. Sure, minor gripes here and there but generally speaking, they have made the right calls.
I actually think their current model works pretty well. You have a fast track to the current content but the current content has levels of difficulty that you can work on.
So this scratches a big topic of what's wrong with WoW.
In short, WoW has transitioned to being run by people who don't play the game, don't understand people who do play the game and are targeting the game at people who don't play the game at the expense of those that do.
LFR undermines both the aspirational part of the game, which is extremely important, and the social aspect of building relationships, which is super-important and the real reason most people stick around.
Now we have 4 raid levels (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic), which is too many. The differences are largely cosmetic and minor ilvl bumps. There are some unique items in higher tiers, to be clear.
Lastly, LFR is essentially an interactive cinematic. It's part of what I like to call "conveyor belt content". There's no choices to be made. The outcome is almost certain. You may as well be watching a cinematic. This probably goes well beyond LFR.
Final Fantasy XIV has been experiencing constant growth since Shadowbringers came out in 2019, and in the last few months has absolutely exploded and obliterated WoW's numbers even before the harassment allegations came to light, and yet XIV's instance system is thoroughly built around an LFR-esque system called Duty Finder.
The original version of XIV wasn't like this at all, and that version was a massive flop, but then it was rebooted into its current incarnation by Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida, who has extensive experience playing MMOs for decades from Ultima Online to EverQuest to old-school WoW (I would recommend watching Noclip's documentary on XIV [1] [2] [3] for more on Yoshi-P's background and the decision to completely reboot the game). It's precisely because of his experience with the warts and frustration of old-school MMOs that XIV is so streamlined and committed to not wasting the player's time, and XIV is massively, head-over-heals successful for it.
It turns out people really, really don't like forced socialization, and when an MMO comes along that does away with it, people flock to it in droves. The facts don't bear out your allegation that forced socialization is "the real reason most people stick around": XIV's runaway head-over-heels success is due to the fact that it so thoroughly eschews forced socialization that it's often described as a single-player JRPG punctuated by multi-player instances and a completely optional set of social side content.
> WoW has transitioned to being run by people who don't play the game
Current game designer Ion Hazikostas is a hardcore raider, guild leader and completed every raid in game on the highest difficulty. I don't think it's fair to qualify him as not playing the game. Of course I have no idea about their internal chains, that's only a public high-ranked figure.
I'm generally agree with your stance and I don't like many changes either. But I can accept that those changes actually were necessary for the game to survive, as current playerbase is completely different from those who played the game 10 years ago.
Yeah and the raids are generally good but everything else is, well, trash. Coincidence?
Also, Blizzard tends to over-focus on the behaviour of Mythic raiders who are like 1% of the population. And I don't mean they cater to their needs. I mean they burden everyone because of perceived "abuse" that would otherwise occur were something not in the game (eg conduit energy).
Classic was "hard" because of organizational challenges, patience requirements, and most importantly lack of information. Access to information has completely changed the game, explaining why it took people virtually zero time to beat MC this time around. The classic of reading some sketchy material on forums to understand raid mechanics and raiding with keyboard turners is gone and can never be recreated.
That's missing the point though. Its introduction was a marked change in server/player culture that only accelerated over the next decade; players didn't want to put effort into something that took time, they wanted it now.
I went back and played a little while ago. Dungeon Finder was near instant, and would stick me in a dungeon I had zero context for. Magically transported there. Nobody was from my server. No conversation/chat. The encounters/dungeons themselves were utterly without context (I never had a clue where they were) and felt like clicking through to get loot with no sense of storyline.
For me, that's a huge negative. I remember that the dungeons on the shattered plains (i think) specifically revolved around the shattered hand orcs or whatever. They synced with the area and the quests I'd been doing locally. It felt like a cohesive world I was involved in.
I cannot argue that the new system isn't efficient. It got me playing and it got me loot. But I never learned anything about anyone. I never engaged with the story. I'm just old I guess xD
I don't see it that way. I'm cool with things that take time like moving up the ranks in Mythic+.
What I didn't like was the forced socialization. I'm fine with my IRL friends, I don't want a bunch of people pinging me when I login to Wow. I just want to login, group up for a Mythic and log off.
And some people are lonely and would prefer the game design which forced them to socialize with others (or forced others to socialize with them). You can't please them all.
The fact that they have two "co-leaders" and one of them is a woman makes me really wonder if they went for the two leader approach just so that they could have a woman without making a woman the sole "leader". As in, did they really want Mike Ybarra but were scared of being torn a new one by the Internet and their employees?
Has Blizzard ever done this before without being in middle of a massive shitstorm?
> But the main issue is that there's two leaders. We all know countries need two presidents, armies need two commanders, etc.
I can sense the sarcasm here, but I'm curious as to why this isn't the case? I'd imagine having two leaders provides more stability and thoughtfulness especially when it comes to executive decision-making, so what's the problem?
I'm going to share a story my mom told me about when she was in high school in the '60s.
There was an academic achievement award at her school, given based on objective criteria. I don't remember exactly what this award was called or what the exact criteria were (and my memory of the exact details of her story is hazy enough that I'm wondering if she was talking about being named her class's valedictorian). For the school's entire history, only boys won the award. Until my mom came along. She qualified for the award based on the objective criteria by a decent margin. And so, beginning with that year, her school decided to start issuing two awards: one to the top-performing girl and one to the top-performing boy.
So even though she won, she still had to share the award because the school suddenly changed the rules in response to a girl finally winning.
I find that when making soup, adding a second chef improves the quality. I also routinely change horses while crossing rivers and streams. Usually about half way.
Sarcasm aside, when there is a disagreement between coleaders, whose point of view prevails? When you know that then you know who is really in charge.
You misunderstood the idea. These aren't two leads with the same power. The decisional power is split between them and each has and bring their own responsibilities and specialities.
This is about Ybarra feeling he has a claim to the role and not wanting to pass him over for what would be seen as a PR reaction. This is pretty typical, and the companies I’ve seen be successful with these types of overhauls send a message loud and clear to their executives: expect to be passed over for promotions more than you’re used to. Building the right executive team in 2021 includes diversity of experience as an aspect, and you may be passed over for promotions you’re qualified for because we are building the best performing team, not locally optimizing for the best individual performers.
Sure this causes turnover, but it’s usually the kind of turnover you welcome during a culture shift. Especially with the transition to remote work, empathy and diversity from senior leadership will only become more important to recruiting and retaining the best talent.
I like the bit about building the best performing team at the expense of the individual. Seems like something you could say to let down a report in a 1 on 1. Im going to use that from now on, whenever it serves my purpose. Thanks!
The parent poster is implying that Activision itself believes Oneal is unqualified.
That if Activision truly believed in Oneal, that she'd be president just as Brack was, rather than share the role.
Of course there are various examples of multiple leaders being successful, but that implies you trust Activision and Bobby Kotick to give them the opportunity to do right, which the poster does not.
Right next door to this post is another where the ebay CEO escaped responsibility for his employees' harassment of an e-commerce news letter publisher.
The Ebay CEO was fired (or asked to resign, I don't remember), which are the same consequences that Brack has faced so far. Also, from what I can tell they are both facing civil lawsuits, not criminal, although one is being brought by the government and the other by the victims.
So at this point they both appear to held accountable to the same degree, whether that is sufficient or not.
Make no mistake: I will not be stopped. Not by you, or the Confederates, or the Protoss, or anyone! I will rule this company or see it burnt to ashes around me.
Firstly, Brack was only president for 2 years and a lot of these incidents happened prior BUT if you're in charge you're responsible. That's part of the deal that comes with that giant pay check. You don't get to say "it's not my fault". So Brack absolutely should go because he's seemingly failed to correct the toxic culture.
You'll note the email talks about "Blizzard", not "Activision Blizzard". This is how you can tell Kotick is distancing himself from this. It's "Activision Blizzard" when things are going well and "Blizzard" when it's not. Kotick is I'm sure busy selling this narrative that Blizzard is an autonomous unit. It's not. It's fully Activision at this point.
Activision Blizzard has squandered their most valuable properties. The only thing propping up WoW is a 15 year old version of the game that's quickly being ruined with the exact micro-transactions that ruined the game to begin with. Does anyone still care about Overwatch? Prediction: Diablo 4 is going to disappoint. This is the same company that brought you Diablo 3 after all.
As for the new co-leaders, ugh... this just screams PR. One of them is a woman of course. I'm not saying she's unqualified (although both of them are relatively recent hires, interestingly). But you know given the lawsuit that this was going to happen. But the main issue is that there's two leaders. We all know countries need two presidents, armies need two commanders, etc.
So what this suggests is that Ibarra had the confidence of Kotick and the board, she would now be president. So she's co-president because of the lawsuit. It may not be true but that's how people are going to interpret it.
To get out this rot it can't stop at changing the executives. Blizzard honestly needs someone to come in and clean house. This goes beyond the lawsuit, which is no doubt a relatively small minority. This is about half the company probably being useless.