Activision Blizzard assures investor lawsuit won’t hurt CoD

Every few months, the big game companies hold investor calls in which one group of the rich reassures another group of the rich that they are both still rich and that they will be, over the next few months. probably get even richer. Sometimes one of the rich hints at a new game in development. Other times they announce an upcoming Game will be delayed. Most often these are overwhelming rituals where there is no concern in the world for anything that cannot be reduced to a number. Even by those standards, however, Activision Blizzard’s latest investor appeal was particularly grim.

The company is currently at the center of a big lawsuit in California alleging widespread sexual harassment and discrimination for years. Since the news of the trial broke, many current and former Activision Blizzard employees shared their own experiences of being abused in the company and held back by its male-dominated culture. The company’s initial response was to circle the cars, calling the trial “inaccurate” and the “irresponsible” work “irresponsible state bureaucrats.”

It’s been taken since a more contrite approach, but not before employees formed a group of workers called the ABK Workers Alliance to demand things like an end to compulsory arbitration, more pay transparency and more diverse hiring. A week later, the group says that management still did not recognize these requests. All the while stories keep pouring about the pain of what some current and former employees went through while working at the company.

It was against this backdrop that CEO Bobby Kotick and his lieutenants entered the company’s final earnings call on Tuesday. During the call there was the nauseating two-beat of “we care, we listen”, but at the same time “Call of Duty slot machine go brrr. We can already see the Call of Duty Ratchet Hype Machine to tease the ad of the series’ release in the fall of 2021. Kotick and others have repeatedly acknowledged how serious the allegations are, how out of place such behavior has a place at Activision Blizzard, and how maintaining a safe and inclusive workplace is theirs. top priority, despite once again, the company does not meet any of the greatest demands of workers. Also Diablo Immortals is delayed, he said, but don’t worry, the rest of the games are going very well. Monitoring 2 has just taken an “important internal milestone.“

“We have seen a lot of headlines about the lawsuit and employee concerns,” said Matthew Cost by Morgan Stanely as he opened the question-and-answer session of the meeting. “Can you tell us more about what you have done and will do to resolve these issues? And then, second, can you develop any expected productivity impact as you work on the situation, and do you expect pipeline impact? “

“Thanks for the powerful question,” replied COO Daniel Alegre, who noted that “our people are truly our greatest asset” and pointed out that the company recently hired a law firm. accused of the offense of unionization, Wilmer Hale, to conduct an outside investigation. He said the company remains committed to diverse recruitment and equal pay for men and women. In addition, the “pipeline is progressing well” with “strong lineup slated for the second half of the year” and “several new titles on PC, console and mobile from Blizzard, as well as other great experiences from Blizzard.” Call of Duty, Candies [Crush], and Warcraft“coming in 2022.

“First of all, there is nothing more important to me than our staff, and I know Mike Ybarra who partners with me to lead Blizzard feels exactly the same,” Jen Oneal, the new co-manager from Blizzard after the sudden departure of President J. Allen Brack, said during the call. They were her first public remarks since taking on the role. “Since I joined the studio at the start of the year, I have had the privilege of working more closely with the Diablo and Monitoring teams. I see great progress on Monitoring 2 and the multiple games of Diablo universe.”

This is how the whole meeting went. Activision Investors and Blizzard executives portrayed the explosive lawsuit as something like, oh, people have said things, and they’re not good, but we’re actually doing everything we can to make this company the best place to work. And also, don’t worry, none of this will hurt our results. There was no word on how to continue to use a former Bush administration apologist for torture in a leading role in the company, strives to create a pleasant working environment. Like GameIndustry.biz news editor Danielle Parties perfectly summarized, “We have mountains of lawsuits, compensation is due, but Call of Duty had a really successful Q2.

Capitalism has trained us to expect the bare minimum from businesses and incredibly rich people running them. It is infuriating and heartbreaking that a supposedly toxic and abusive culture in one of the world’s largest gaming companies is only counted years too late, and only then because of the twist of public opinion, employee protests and the threat of litigation by the country’s largest state. And yet Activision Blizzard’s song and dance with investors managed to be even more darker than I could have imagined.

When Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft was faced last summer with a similar calculation for harassment and misconduct (which persists despite leaders’ attempts to rule it out), an investor asked CEO Yves Guillemot if he was fair unconscious or knew and did nothing. Guillemot rejected both options. While no question posed by an investor or anyone else has the capacity to address the systemic issues plaguing the gaming industry, the exchange provided a brief moment of catharsis in an otherwise hellish attack of secrecy and denial. No one has been so direct with Kotick.

PR, propaganda, hypernormalization– whatever you want to call it, the people in power collectively tell us time and time again that what we are witnessing and experiencing is bullshit and the bullshit they send back to us is what is actually true. This is partly how a company with an increasingly documented history of not treating people well—whether Activision Blizzard or Amazon.com, Inc.-can tell with a straight face that he really cares without being immediately laughed out of the room. It’s what we’d expect, but that doesn’t make it any less exhausting. And that doesn’t mean someone else has to play the game.