Stories about Activision Blizzard continue to come out. Most recently Blizzard’s president, a principal designer, and head of human resources announced their resignations and executive Frances Townsend deleted her Twitter account.
The lawsuit still rages on and Bloomberg has recently released a report going into further detail about the problems with inequality and harassment Activision Blizzard has been dealing with for years – and just how far these problems go back.
When Blizzard was founded back in 1991, the company had very few employees, almost all of whom were men. These early Blizzard employees are described as “bookish and introverted” in the Bloomberg report, as opposed to the "frat boys" they've been depicted as more recently. After the launch of Battle.net and World of Warcraft in the early 2000s, the small developer reached a turning point. In 2008, Blizzard merged with Activision, a huge publisher known at the time for the Call of Duty and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. By then, World of Warcraft had millions of players and developers were beginning to tout huge bonuses and expensive cars.
As World of Warcraft continued to gain popularity, so did the company’s convention BlizzCon, which hosts tens of thousands of attendees yearly. According to Bloomberg, As ego filled the heads of Blizzard’s male employees, they began to see female fans as groupies. Former World of Warcraft director Alex Afrasiabi, now an infamous character in the lawsuit, accosted women in what he and others called the “Cosby Suite.” This happened the year before allegations against Bill Cosby became widely known, and as former employees told Bloomberg, was a reference to the carpet’s pattern, as opposed to sexual assault.
The attitudes male employees had towards women were not dissuaded by the company’s top brass. Two of the company’s co-founders as well as newly-former president J. Allen Brack, all courted and married lower-level female employees.
Mike Morhaime, one of Blizzard's co-founders who served as CEO for nearly 30 years, was highly regarded as a warm and compassionate leader while he was in charge, but employees made an effort to keep him ignorant of the misconduct going on in his office. He recently released a statement apologizing to female employees, saying “The fact that so many women were mistreated and were not supported means we let them down.”
Bloomberg’s report describes how Activision Blizzard’s male employees were treated like “rock stars” and makes it clear these problems have been present almost from the beginning. Hopefully the conclusion of this lawsuit will indicate a turning point for the company’s culture.
Source: Bloomberg