![]() ![]() This isn’t something you can get away from, and the reality is that for a lot of players these actions don’t actually have a moral component. Are there enough layers between those that it feels comfortable to critique the two things as separate entities? Can you create a meaningful distinction? When does one issue cross over into another? Is the fact that Overwatch 2 still lacks the PvE modes that were meant to be the central feature of the sequel (and let’s face it, are probably never coming) of a kind with the company’s hideously toxic culture? Can you draw a meaningful distinction between them?Ĭan you fence off this one company? Square-Enix operates an amazing MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV, and we’ve heard little bad coming out of CBU3… but “little” is not the same as “none.” But even that little bit hardly matters when you consider that Square-Enix as a whole is plunging headlong into an NFT project. Oh, and just for extra fun, we are a small, genuinely independently owned website, and covering big MMOs is, in fact, kind of important for our survival. ![]() Nor did I wrestle alone, nor was this new to us MOP’s editor Bree and I in particular have spent many an hour over the last few years discussing how to properly cover the games from this harassing union-busting trash fire of a company. If you go back and read my three-part impressions of the expansion, even the longest one only briefly touches on the fact that Activision-Blizzard is a truly terrible company. But I can turn the exact same lens on myself: I can talk about wrestling with this exact problem because back in November 2022 I had to figure out how you talk about World of Warcraft: Dragonflight in the exact same context. I am personally in a privileged position on the topic of Diablo because I’ve never really cared about this franchise and “we turned the saturation down like this was a triple-A game circa 2008” is not an appealing pitch to me in the first place. I’m not here to dunk on Schreier, whom I respect the point is that this is a conflict even the very best games journalists in our industry face. And yet, on the abbreviated medium of Twitter, he’s talking about Diablo IV as if it were just another game, fundamentally no different than any other big-budget release. Through his body of work and his own comments, it is abundantly clear what his position on the company’s behavior is. ![]() He was also one of the people who worked to break the story about Activision-Blizzard’s stories of sexual harassment breaking into the mainstream, after stating in no uncertain terms that he had heard about things like this for years. Jason Schreier has a game journalism career that’s at once longer and more prestigious than mine. Very impressed with Diablo IV so far (when the beta actually works) – the skill tree seems interesting, the music rules, and the new approach to story-telling is cool Because while I could just refresh that article to ask how people can be excited for Diablo IV considering all of the first two paragraphs, I’m more concerned about the calls coming from inside the house. It’s not a question with an easy answer, but… this one strikes me as even harder, and even more pertinent. Near the inception of this particular column, I wrote about the question of how can you enjoy video games when you know that people suffered to make them. It’s just the price of doing business, apparently. It seems like Activision-Blizzard has basically been digging in its heels and trusting that the people who were upset about all of this would more or less forget about it all as soon as Diablo IV rolled around as long as that game was good enough that people wanted to play it anyway.Īnd it seems like this plan was the right one because it looks like a whole lot of people who should really know better are willing to just treat Diablo IV as it if were any other game not coming out of Activision-Blizzard. For Sobek’s sake, Brian Birmingham got ousted because he rebelled against a toxic employee rating system. The internal grassroots movement attempting to fix things, A Better ABK, seems to have lost as often as it has won. We’ve watched new studio head Mike Ybarra championing slashing bonuses and forcing a return to the office for basically no reason, non-stop union-busting antics, diversity goals that have barely been touched, and our good old friend crunch rearing his ugly head. I wrote about it at the time, but since then it has only gotten worse. It’s just “ blizzard-scandal,” but that kind of says everything we need to. In July of 2021, we started a roundup tag in our tag cloud that most of us probably didn’t expect to still be using nearly two years later. ![]()
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