Activision Blizzard May Be Going to Hell in a Handbasket
Every workplace has its share of issues, and with the dramatic shakeup of everyday life that is the COVID pandemic, everything that was taken for granted about life is being reexamined and the necessary evils of most workplaces are being questioned to see if they were ever necessary in the first place. The entertainment industry is no exception to this, with a long history of overworking, underpaying, and generally being inhospitable to its rank and file employees. Video games in particular have hit headlines more and more due to their penchant for overworking coders and engineers with insane hours for little to no extra compensation in order to meet the needs of the medium’s demanding release schedule and feast or famine business model. This, in combination with the recent awareness of harassment and abuse of power in a lot of work settings, has led to a massive lawsuit filed by the state of California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing against Activision Blizzard, arguably the largest video game developer/publisher in the world, with ownership of franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and Destiny.
The suit alleges a pervasive culture at the company in which female employees were routinely subjected to sexual harassment, discriminatory pay, and retaliation. The lawsuit also alleges discrimination against female employees and candidates in hiring, promotions, compensation, and termination. Individual incidents alleged in the lawsuit include frequent sexual banter made by male employees toward female colleagues, male employees playing video games during work hours while delegating responsibilities to female subordinates, a “cube crawl”, essentially an office pub crawl in which intoxicated male employees would take innaproriate actions toward female colleagues, discrimination in promoting women out of concern they would miss work due to pregnancy, and even the suicide of a female employee who had been subjected to severe harassment by her supervisor.
All of these things are bad enough, but a death at the workplace is something truly abhorrent, and puts Activision Blizzard in an exceptionally bad light. The company initially responded defensively, stating that while they take such allegations seriously, “the DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past. We have been extremely cooperative with the DFEH throughout their investigation, including providing them with extensive data and ample documentation, but they refused to inform us what issues they perceived,” going on to state, “The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today.”
Evidently, Blizzard’s workers feel differently, as a large set of them staged a walkout on Wednesday to protest current working conditions and the company’s public response to the lawsuit’s allegations. While the CEO has issued an apology for the company’s initial statement, some current and former employees have also come forward to the New York Times with more details. Activision Blizzard is now faced with a PR catastrophe, plunging stock prices, and embattled and very expensive CEO, a long list of demands from protesting workers, and likely one hell of a reckoning when all is said and done. The company’s ownership of some of gaming’s biggest franchises will keep it afloat, but if the lawsuit is judged in favor of the plaintiffs, then Activision Blizzard will certainly see a great deal of financial turmoil and professional turnover. In the meantime, we will see what the company does to mitigate all the damage, and how much those efforts will backfire.
