I’m actually curious how will they deal with their own employees who are in full riot mode now. Will they silence them or is this mess going to continue for a good while?
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Management is rewarded based on financial performance, thus they often do everything in their power to maximize their compensation. Blizzard’s business (and revenue) model today is an amalgamation of predatory microtransactions and triple A game publishing cycle.
Consistent and high cash flow comes from microtransactions. Subscription revenue is also substantial, but absolutely not the large bulk since only one Blizzard game, World of Warcraft, has a subscription in the first place. They incentivize customers to pay as many microtransactions their wallets can handle.
Additional cash inflows are received from releasing expansions, and to a lesser extent content patches. Expansions come in tiered pricing at a couple to few year intervals and require a HEFTY marketing investment to go with them. Blizzard seems very good at generating and maintaining hype up to and right past each release. The content patches on the other hand have recently seen a marketing push for, e.g. 6 month subscription bundles customers are incentivized to get due to volume discounts and digital rewards.
Now, microtransactions is where the money is. That’s why you’ve seen a massive increase in such monetization mechanisms in Blizzard games over the years. They are essentially benefiting on the same strategies that made mobile gaming such an incredibly lucrative business to triple A gaming. If you check their annual and quarterly filings and reports, they will tell you this first-hand.
People like to blame things they don’t like on whatever bullcrap they want to see vilified. But when it comes to businesses, especially publicly listed companies, ALWAYS FOLLOW THE MONEY. Revenue growth and profit margins are the only ultimate goals that they are trying to reach, year after year. They don’t give a damn about you as a customer and the only reason they don’t want to upset is because you might stop bringing them dollars, NEVER forget that.
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as a game industry worker myself, i work at art division… good work environment = quality of content… u cant make good stuff while being harrassed or hearing some is harrassed. corporate dramas are making most damage to end product, especially in games.
games are made with chain of production… if one part of chain has a problem, whole thing breaks. most of time irrepairably, or takes too much time to repair. its a cooperative profession.
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If they do try and silence them. It will be a huge mistake on their part imo. Imagine the army behind their employees from outside the company now. Not to sound disrespctful to the person who took her own life but this is going to turn into a positive thing for the average worker at Blizzard if this case goes bad for them.
I’m worried Activision is going to step in and try to fix everything with an iron fist.
What will probably happen is the most notorious offenders are going to be removed and they will give everyone a few courses summarizing “don’t be a jerk”.
I don’t think they will go big on salary raises, they can invoke a ton of reasons why they can’t do that.
Eventually they will all go silent and everyone will go back to a hopefully better work environment.
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Oh please. Show us these.
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oh yeah, im not saying that this is proof that they abandoned wow or something like that. its just all i could find on this matter. 
meh… doesnt matter to me anymore, i unsubbed again. Sub runs out in 14 days… i just had enough for the moment.
Only played tbcc and retail i didnt play since february.
To me i dont see a good future for this game at all. Im not even sure 10.0 will be something i return to… and that would be a first for me since i started 11 years ago.
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If this is true, in this case i don’t mind it at all, and find it the opposite of disturbing. They obviously need time to take care of the legal stuff that comes with being sued, etc. After that, they will have to take time firing, replacing people, creating a safe work environment where people are actually motivated to work instead of stressing about the possibility of being harassed everyday.
To be honest, i wouldn’t even mind if 9.1 would be the last patch of Shadowlands and they would announce that they will start working on the next expansion after all these things are done. It kind of gives me hope that this situation will result in Blizzard producing quality games / expansions again. Actually, i don’t even want this expansion to have a .2-3 patch. It’s built on crap. They can only make it less annoying, which is not really good enough. I would rather have a proper developer team start from scratch and make a new expansion even if it takes 2 years from now.
Because if WoW’s development continues this way, i can already tell you that 10.0 would be about a different story with an irrelevant world, spamming m+ keys and doing raid once a week while farming a stupid currency from boring content while the community would suffer from systems that nobody asked for.
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I am of the view this is no real shock given the massive magnitude of the end of the last week and the scramble to go on a PR damage limitation exercise by them the team in question would down tools and who the hell can blame them all for doing so. They have been putting up with this for years and finally, the cat is out of the bag the public knows and is cheesed off for them as well.
We owe the WoW team the time they need to get sorted out and back to what they should have been all along the people who are guilty of this are now under an intense microscope along with the firm I am sorry but if this two-year investigation is as wide-reaching in its scope this could be a long wait whilst the legal motions are played out in court. I mean really would any of us want to turn up back in that office after this has happened at the weekend I think not I certainly would not I feel for all the decent hard-working souls on the WoW team.
We need to cut them some slack the ones who are innocent and likely scared about what the future holds for them as for those who are guilty of this the onus is now to root them out-kick them out blacklist them and make them a real example of and that perhaps this time real lessons will be learned.
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nuu.
https://i.imgur.com/y9FkemX.png
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you’ll get fired by dawn’s light then sweetie
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Holyoppai critical hits the internet for 999999 overkill ! For what we would get a bone to gnaw here and there ,just a note that it is a pretty stupid thing to announce and then to do, you do not tell when you are on trouble it just makes the shark even more hungry now everyone will go in a frenesy and it makes the cutomers go away. One mistake after the other blizzard.
Look like that Asmongold guy was definitely the smartest and felt the wind turn going for ff 14 over retail,tbc classic or others mmo.
Last if you think holdin us up wil make us sympathise with you blizzard you can keep dreaming ! I hope justice remain served !
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There was a wow development?
How many of the US population have been double vaccinated against Covid-19…and what are the wild fire forecasts this year, given the heatwave over there?
Not enough and not good. 
The US has low vaccination rates among Latinos, and they make up a large percentage of the population of California.
The heat is likely going to beat records again. California is like Molten Core.
I think the expectation is also record wildfires, since the season started much sooner this year.
Does it all affect WoW? I don’t know. By this time I would assume that Blizzard have learned to adapt to their new ways of working. So it is what it is.
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Hmmm…that ain’t sounding good then.
I’d be curious to know if Blizzard would mandate vaccinations for its workers. I believe they can.
But at the same time you’d expect that group of people to be very inclined toward vaccinations anyway, so that’s probably not the issue.
I don’t know, it’s hard to say.
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Nein, since the job is still done, in a way. A really dirty way though.
Found some figures for the vaccination rate in Cali:
52.8% Fully vaccinated (either double Pfizer or Moderna, or single Janssen) but it varies from 19.3% (Lassen) to 72.3% (Marin) depending on county… Irvine is in Orange County, which is 55.8% Fully vaccinated (LATimes, 24th July).