Activision Blizzard gets exposed for horrendous working conditions by staff

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For a company with "Every voice matters" as their motto, it seemed that only the investor's voice actually matters.

On July 21, 2021, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for their fostering of a “frat boy” culture in which female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, unequal pay, and retaliation.

A two-year investigation by the state agency found that the company discriminated against female employees in terms and conditions of employment, including compensation, assignment, promotion, and termination. Company leadership consistently failed to take steps to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, the agency said. According to the complaint, filed July 20 in the Los Angeles Superior Court, female employees make up around 20% of the Activision workforce and are subjected to a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” including “cube crawls,” in which male employees “drink copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”

The agency alleges male employees play video games during the workday while delegating responsibilities to female employees, engage in sexual banter, and openly make jokes about rape, among other things.

Female employees allege being held back from promotions because of the possibility they might become pregnant, being criticized for leaving to pick their children up from daycare, and being kicked out of lactation rooms so male colleagues could use the room for meetings, the complaint says. Female employees working for the World of Warcraft team noted that male employees and supervisors would hit on them, make derogatory comments about rape, and otherwise engage in demeaning behavior, the agency alleges.

The suit also points to a female Activision employee who took her own life while on a company trip with her male supervisor. The employee had been subjected to intense sexual harassment before her death, including having nude photos passed around at a company holiday party, the complaint says.

It was confirmed that these employees went to HR, but they did nothing about this, as some of the people in HR associate with some of the aggressors. Even two accounts stated that Blizzard President J. Allen Brack was personally aware of toxicity in his company and that he failed to take effective measures to protect his employees. The examples make Brack a key figure in the 29-page civil rights and equal pay act lawsuit brought by The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) agency against the video game publishing goliath.

The Cosby Suite (named after the former comedian, actor, spokesman, and media personality Bill Cosby) was a nickname for a hotel room at Blizzcon 2013, which was given by former longtime WoW developer, Alex Afrasiabi. He and fellow staff brought plenty of booze for female fans and sexually harassed them. Afrasiabi's Facebook profile had a photo album, with him and other developers posing at different angles as he held a photo of Cosby above his head, smiling.

At the time, these were considered purely allegations until ex-developers of Blizzard confirmed these allegations.

On February 12, Activision's market cap was at an all-time high of $80 billion ($104 per share). Following the scandal, by December 2021, its value had fallen to $45 billion ($58 per share) before rebounding to $50 billion ($67 per stock), then back to $64 billion ($82 per share) after Microsoft announced it would acquire the studio.

On March 30, 2022, a court-approved Activision's settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for $18 million.

Response

Blizzard responded by saying: "We value diversity and strive to foster a workplace that offers inclusivity for everyone. There is no place in our company or industry, or any industry, for sexual misconduct or harassment of any kind,” a spokesperson for Activision Blizzard said in a statement. “We take every allegation seriously and investigate all claims. In cases related to misconduct, action was taken to address the issue. 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. The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today.”

President J. Allen Brack released his statement on the matter and expressed how "extremely troubling" these issues were and how he had a "disdain for frat boy culture". He also mentioned how employees could talk about these issues with any manager HR legal team, or employee, which they already tried and it didn't work. It should be noted that never once did he apologize for what happened nor did he take any kind of responsibility, as shown with the Blitzchung controversy two years prior. On August 3, Brack resigned. Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra were named co-leaders of Blizzard, showing that Brack's days of making half-baked apologies were indeed over. In early November 2021, Jen Oneal left as well as part of the exodus, leaving Mike the sole leader of the company.

Unlike J. Allen Brack, however, former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime apologized and took culpability for not protecting his employees, but the fact that Blizzard's awful work culture was enabled even when Mike was in charge was something most didn't ignore.

If that wasn't bad enough, Activision Blizzard Executive Fran Townsend released her response outright denying these issues, stating that these were factually wrong because leadership was doing their utmost best to stick to good values and principles and treated their employees with nothing but respect. Bear in mind, that Fran has been with the company for over a decade, meaning that there is no way she couldn't have known about these issues.

Both ex-developers, current developers, and fans of Blizzard were furious by these responses since it was obvious the company was just trying to save face and didn't care for the well-being of their staff, as well as the fact that they were playing the victim card and trying to justify their horrendous atrocities. In response, many developers of both Blizzard and players themselves decided to protest against them, like Mark Kern, a former employee of Blizzard who was disgusted by the toxic conditions so much that he erased the company's name he used to work for on his Twitter account's bio, and Jesse McCree, whose name inspired the Overwatch character of the same name and was set to be director of Diablo IV up until the lawsuit came to light.

Many players of World of Warcraft started to protest by having their accounts “sub locked,” which means that they have pre-paid active game time on their account. Some showed up to say goodbye and wish their fellow role-players good luck, and decided to move on to other MMO games like Final Fantasy XIV. Others at the sit-in used the opportunity to vent anger and frustration with specific Blizzard employees named in the suit, speculating in the in-game chat as to which executive wrote the company’s immediate response. Asmongold, a popular WoW player, was the most vocal of these allegations, and he was responsible for the mass exodus of the popular game he used to play before moving on.

As for the employees, nearly 1,000 employees signed an open letter to Activision Blizzard calling the company’s response to the discrimination lawsuit “abhorrent and insulting." On July 28th, it was announced that over 2,500+ employees were going to do a walkout in protest of the company and listed their demands from the company as well. These included:

1. An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current, and future.
2. The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion organization
3. Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company.
4. Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK’s reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick went into full damage control by writing a letter saying "Every voice matters", which was seen by many fans (including ex-employees) as blatant virtue signaling. It was also shown that Activision's stock had significantly dropped as of late. In fact, the company went so massively low that they got hit by a second lawsuit, this time from investors of Rosen Law Firm, who grew frustrated that Kotick was gaining too much money fast.

On August 26th, 2021, the HR department was caught deleting evidence and shredding documents to cowardly avoid cooperating with the state even more and trying to deny their actions, which is flat-out illegal.

On September 20, 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) subpoenaed Activision Blizzard and several current and former employees, including CEO Bobby Kotick. On September 27, Activision Blizzard settled its harassment lawsuit with the EEOC for $18 million.

On October 22, 2021, Activision Blizzard's request to pause its lawsuit with the DFEH was denied.

In late October 2021, Kotick announced that he would have his salary lowered to the state's minimum level and cancel his bonus until the company resolved its lawsuits.

The company would make five major changes: a zero-tolerance harassment policy, increasing its employment of women and non-binary people by 50 percent in the next ten years, waiving required arbitration of sexual harassment and discrimination claims, equal pay for all genders, and regular progress updates. At the time, 23 percent of Activision's employees were women or non-binary. On November 9, Activision Blizzard announced that contractors would earn a minimum $17 hourly rate. Employees would have 13 paid holidays a year, sick leave days, and new learning and development programs.

On November 2, 2021, Blizzard announced that it had delayed the releases of Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 until 2023. Despite this, Overwatch 2 had a release date set for October 8, 2022.

On November 16, 2021, several years-old accusations came forward. In September 2021, Jen Oneal sent an email to a member of Activision's legal team, stating that she professed a lack of faith in the company's leadership to turn the culture around. Oneal, who is Asian-American and gay, confessed that she had been sexually harassed earlier in her career at Activision and that she was paid less than Mike Ybarra.

Dan Bunting, co-head of Treyarch, was accused of sexually harassing a female employee in 2017 after a night of drinking. The company launched an internal investigation in 2019, but Kotick intervened to keep him. Bunting was given counseling and allowed to remain at the company.

In 2006, Kotick called an assistant and sent a death threat to her (which was settled out of court). In 2007, a flight attendant on his private jet sued him for sexual harassment (which was settled for $200,000).

On November 18, 19, and 23, Jim Ryan (the president of PlayStation), Doug Bowser (the president of Nintendo of America), Phil Spencer (the executive vice president of gaming at Microsoft), and the Entertainment Software Association (the United States trade association for video games) all called out Activision, while Microsoft was re-evaluating its relationship with the studio. Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization for women in computer science, also terminated their partnership with Activision Blizzard.

At a November 19 meeting with Blizzard executives, Kotick told senior managers that he would consider leaving Activision if he could not quickly fix the culture problems at the company. Activision formed a Workplace Responsibility Committee, led by Dawn Ostroff and Reveta Bowers.

On November 23, 2021, the California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, Delaware, and Nevada state treasurers contacted ABK's board of directors to discuss its response to the challenges and investment risk exposures.

On December 10, 2021, male employees were accused of stealing breast milk from refrigerators and there wasn't enough room for nursing mothers to breastfeed.

On December 14, 2021, a judge said she would not allow the DFEH to intervene in Activision's $18 million settlement with the EEOC. However, the DFEH could submit a request for settlement to the EEOC with a "friend of the court" filing. On January 11th, 2022, DFEH appealed the court's ruling.

On January 11, 2022, LEGO delayed their upcoming Overwatch 2 Titan set (76980), as the company re-evaluated their relationship with Blizzard.

On January 21, 2022, five weeks after Activision fired 12 of the studio's QA testers, Raven Software's QA team formed the Game Workers Alliance union.

On March 4, 2022, the parents of an Activision Blizzard employee filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Activision, alleging that sexual harassment drove their daughter to take her own life while on a company trip. On May 6, the parents asked the court to dismiss their lawsuit against Activision Blizzard.

On April 26, 2022, the New York City Employees' Retirement System also sued Activision, claiming that Kotick was "unfit to negotiate a sale of the company" to Microsoft, and made the deal in part to "escape liability" for his role in enabling workplace misconduct and abuse. Days later, reports emerged that Activision Blizzard had threatened some of its employees for considering a lawsuit against the company.

In May 2022, Activision Blizzard called for the court to dismiss the DFEH lawsuit, claiming that the lawsuit unfairly damaged the company's reputation.

On June 16, 2022, the Activision board stated there was no evidence that senior executives ignored the harassment claims.

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