Blizzard employees weigh the costs and benefits of promoting the boycott

Activision Blizzard employees have spent the past few weeks mobilizing over the company’s combative response to a state of California lawsuit alleging the company allowed a toxic culture of harassment to fester and discrimination, particularly at Blizzard Entertainment.

Organizing workers condemned the responses to the lawsuit of executive Fran Townsend and CEO Bobby Kotick, staged a walkout and pledged new measures to improve the work culture at Activision Blizzard. But according to an Axios report, they’re not quite ready to advocate for a consumer boycott just yet.

Megan Farokhmanesh of Axios spoke to several anonymous Blizzard employees who argued that an effective boycott could do more harm than good to Blizzard employees. The theory supporting a boycott is that if Activision Blizzard’s financial numbers take a hit, executives will take notice and respond.

But the employees are not so sure that the logic holds. “Even if a critical mass is reached, it is more likely to result in layoffs in development teams than a change in opinion or composition at the top,” an employee told Farokhmanesh.

Blizzard’s profit-sharing bonus structure means that employees could also lose some of their earnings if such boycotts were to impact the company’s earnings. One employee pointed out on Twitter that even just losing those bonuses could affect their ability to pay for child care.

Given the retaliation fears expressed by organizing Activision Blizzard employees during the campus protest two weeks ago, it’s also not hard to see the company considering a boycott much more severely than one. work stopping. Workers who openly call for a boycott may face internal backlash if the company is able to identify them.

Boycotts sometimes play a role in the resolution of labor disputes. Recently, striking Frito-Lay workers called for a boycott of snacks and drinks sold by Frito-Lay owner Pepsi Co., as workers left a Kansas factory where they worked 60 to 80 hours per day. week.

It’s also understandable that some players want to spend their money elsewhere following the many stories that have emerged over the past few weeks. It’s hard to feel good about spending your money and feel like it’s going to reward bad actors.

There are no easy answers in this story. Activision Blizzard workers are most at risk, regardless of how gamers spend their money, and still have a long way to go before it’s clear if anything has changed after the lawsuit.