World of Warcraft development grinds to a halt following Activision Blizzard's statement
Workers have been left "mad and traumatized" following Activision Blizzard's response to the findings of the Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
Activision Blizzard has recently come under fire following a lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. According to one developer, Activision Blizzard’s response to these allegations has caused the development of World of Warcraft to stop.
Senior System Designer Jeff Hamilton took to Twitter on July 25, 2021 to express his thoughts and feelings concerning Activision Blizzard’s response to the DFEH lawsuit. According to Hamilton, the general morale of developers working on World of Warcraft is low, with workers being “mad and traumatized” to the point that they’re “rendered unable to keep making a great game.”
Activision’s response to this is currently taking a group of world-class developers and making them so mad and traumatized they’re rendered unable to keep making a great game.
— Jeff Hamilton (@JeffAHamilton) July 25, 2021
A lot of statements have surfaced over the past few days, though it’s likely the one reported on by Jason Schreier is what caused the most consternation for the workers.
An Activision Blizzard spokesman sent me a lengthy statement calling the allegations "distorted, and in many cases false" and referring to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing as "unaccountable State bureaucrats." pic.twitter.com/L9RINw0uZ9
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) July 22, 2021
The statement, linked above in Schreier’s Tweet, is from a spokesperson who says the Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s lawsuit includes “distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past.” The statement goes on to claim the DFEH “rushed to file an inaccurate complaint” which Activision Blizzard will “demonstrate in court.” The statement also says, “We are sickened by the reprehensible conduct of the DFEH,” in regards to the firm’s mention of a previous employee who committed suicide.
Hopefully today’s statement by Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will help improve the morale of the team, though more work and action will invariably need to be taken. The official Warcraft Twitter account also released a statement claiming that in-game changes will be occurring to “remove references that are not appropriate for our world.” Bryant Francis of Gamasutra writes that it could be the removal of NPC Field Marshal Afrasiabi, who is named after Alex Afrasiabi, a former lead designer on WoW who was named in the DFEH lawsuit.
A message from the #Warcraft team. pic.twitter.com/3gWCz1gu8T
— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) July 27, 2021
This will no doubt be a long process, so anticipate updates on this moving forward. You can keep up to date on the situation via Shacknews’ Activision Blizzard page.
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replySam Chandler posted a new article, World of Warcraft development grinds to a halt following Activision Blizzard's statement
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“Hopefully today’s statement by Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will help improve the morale of the team”
Are you serious?
1. Highly doubtful, he cares about shareholders more and only issues that statement when stock dropped 9%
2. Really not the important thing here either, people’s metal well being and establishing equality matter more than keeping the development gears grinding. -
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When it comes to WoW, what bothers me is how they release mid-expansion content updates. They typically release 2-3 of those per expansion. The last one (9.1) was released 8 months after the Shadowlands expansion (9.0) release, which was the slowest release of such an update in WoW's history. Now, it seems like this trend will continue and players will end up getting really bored after a few months.
I think the WoW team needs to transition to releasing smaller updates more frequently. Things like the new M+ rating system or more the more significant class balance updates did not need to be bundled with the 9.1 content update. -
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I don't profess to know how it all works, but my thinking is that there's a core reason that this happens, and seems to happen across a lot of the larger development studios. Why is there always these pulls of terrible humans? Or, what takes a less terrible human and causes this behavior? One common factor is how long of hours they pull to get these games made. It's especially bad with crunch time since they're almost living in the office. So, the culture of crunch time is driving the behavior.
The other part that I talked about in a thread yesterday is how hiring practices need to change too. There is NOTHING in game making that specifically requires terrible human males to make a AAA game. Non-male creators, animators, designers, producers, etc. Could have equal talent and skill to produce the same game. If hiring practices are sticking to these candidates because of a false believe that you have to hire these kind of terrible humans to make that kind of game, then hiring practices need to change and that goes back to leadership.
Either way, it all starts with leadership. -
yea i think daggots just piling on
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