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Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

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Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#81

Post by BlueTemplar »

ortusdux wrote: post #12
darth_avocado wrote: post #3

I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps. This is not…

> Harvard MBA Types Steve Jobs: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running…

But ActiBlizz doesn't have any monopolies ? (Unlike, say, Steam, or Microsoft.) If their games are bad, quickly enough nobody will buy them any more (regardless of how much they invested in marketing).

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#82

Post by vkou »

quadcore wrote: post #53
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For good or ill. Morhaime was also head of the company when a lot of the harassment went down.

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.

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.

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#83

Post by falcolas »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #75
stickfigure wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems hard to believe at face value. Maybe there's another side to this story?

Didn't a high-ranking guy sexually harass a woman to the point of suicide at this company? I can believe the company in which a person in leadership sexually harassed another employee to suicide can also have petty executives that demand firing when they feel thin-skinned about their wealth.

And let's not forget the Cosby room - a room dedicated to rape and sexual assault of female employees by ActiBlizz leadership.

You might argue that "those" folks are gone, yet apparently their culture has not really changed.

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#84

Post by [deleted] »

streakfix wrote: post #41
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeps the game fresh. If the game changes it gives people a reason to want to play again to figure out new combinations. Otherwise the meta gets set and it never changes and that gets old quickly.

Not necessarily. For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017. If the base is solid the players can spend their time mastering what they are given and over time it grows on you. Imagine chess buffing up the pawn and nerfing the bishop.

[deleted]

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#85

Post by JohnMakin »

You're telling me that the company that created WoW, that hosts one of the most racist and misogynistic player bases that I have ever seen, has a corporate culture of harassment, misogyny, and racism? Wow, wonder why? If they refuse to take responsibility for their own corporate culture, why would they police their players?

An example of what I'm talking about - you can spam the n word in public chat, either 1) nothing at all happens or 2) you receive a 1-3 day ban, if that. IF you're even suspected of botting, which they get wrong all the time, you'll catch a 2+ week ban. Funny enough, bots still run rampant.

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#86

Post by jackmott »

fpesce wrote: post #13

Remarkable, isn't it? Blizzard's knack for consistently managing to misalign their PR strategy with big launch events like Diablo IV is almost as intricate as their game design. There's an unexpected plot twist even George R.R. Martin would be envious of. It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs. One might argue that the co…

[dead]

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#87

Post by CharlesW »

slt2021 wrote: post #44
LaundroMat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.

nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not ju…

> nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric.

Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO.

(Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#88

Post by BlueTemplar »

aqme28 wrote: post #66
darth_avocado wrote: post #3

I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps. This is not…

> This is a company that has excellent game dev talent I'm inclined to believe that the incredible talent that used to be at Blizzard is long gone by now. Most of the original devs have their own studios or work at other companies by now.

This is what I was thinking too (more or less since 2004, I was effectively blaming it on Activision and Kotick !), but Diablo 4 seems to prove the opposite ! (I'll be only sure of it only once my honeymoon phase with it is over I guess.)

Re: Blizzard CEO denies culture of harassment and blames unions for company problems

#90

Post by alephnerd »

slt2021 wrote: post #44
LaundroMat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.

nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not ju…

Product Marketing continues to exist, especially in the B2B space.

That said, the function has increasingly merged with Product Management because GTM is critical to Product Strategy.

In the B2C space, it's hard to drive product lead growth simply because the economics are much more difficult (eg. Selling a product vision to an enterprise who will sign a multi-year contract is easier than changing the mind of millions of consumers).

As such, it's much more cost efficient to concentrate on Growth Marketing because product input and stakeholdership is simply too diffused.

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