Activision Blizzard Employees' Response to Bobby Kotick's Statement

[Stan 5,240]

About the Lawsuit

Last week, The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard over "frat boy" culture. The lawsuit was filed after a two-year investigation by the state agency, according to Bloomberg.

Since then, Blizzard President J. Allen Brack sent an internal email to Blizzard employees. The former CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Mike Morhaime later also came forward with his own statement.

More than 1,000 current and former Blizzard employees signed an open letter, condemning the company's responses, and sent it to multiple publications.

The World of Warcraft team released a statement yesterday and promised to remove references that are not appropriate to be removed from the game soon.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick also issued a statement, where he called the company's initial responses to the lawsuit and employee concerns "tone-deaf." You can read the full statement here.

Activision Blizzard employees have now responded to Bobby Kotick's statement via IGN and are organizing a walkout protest today.

Here is their response:

Activision Blizzard Employees' Response to Bobby Kotick's Statement

On the evening before our employee walkout, Activision Blizzard leadership released a statement apologizing for their harmful responses to last week's DFEH lawsuit. While we are pleased to see that our collective voices -- including an open letter with thousands of signatures from current employees -- have convinced leadership to change the tone of their communications, this response fails to address critical elements at the heart of employee concerns. Activision Blizzard's response did not address the following: - The end of forced arbitration for all employees. - Worker participation in oversight of hiring and promotion policies. - The need for greater pay transparency and to ensure equality. - Employee selection of a third party to audit HR and other company processes. Today's walkout will demonstrate that this is not a one-time event that our leaders can ignore. We will not return to silence; we will not be placated by the same processes that led us to this point. This is the beginning of an enduring movement in favor of better labor conditions for all employees, especially women, in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups. We expect a prompt response and a commitment to action from leadership on the points enumerated above and look forward to maintaining a constructive dialogue on how to build a better Activision Blizzard for all employees. Today, we stand up for a chance. Tomorrow and beyond, we will be the change.

Source: IGN, Reddit

[Elendiil 2]

I truly hope the folks who were impacted by this disgusting behaviour are able to get not only compensation for what they have endured, but that this company makes some serious changes to how it operates. 

No one deserves to be treated this way, and the fact that a management person's suite had a nickname of "The Cosby Suite" should have been a huge alarm bell to execs. 

[Dejo93 1,023]

Remember kids, if "woke" companies or video game journalists call you problematic or toxic, they're always projecting. They knew and did nothing. Why didn't people like Schreier, who had insiders in Blizzard as he said, write about this earlier? Of course he knew. Not to mention Metzen's retarded statement where he said that "men need to be better". Go choke on a bag of *filtered*. Don't project your behaviour on us. You allowed this to happen, not me. Same as the diversity officers who enticed the women to join your company and straight into the arms of predators

 

And they have the nerve to give us lectures about "toxic male gamers"

[Nym85 72]

9 minutes ago, Dejo93 said:

Remember kids, if "woke" companies or video game journalists call you problematic or toxic, they're always projecting. They knew and did nothing. Why didn't people like Schreier, who had insiders in Blizzard as he said, write about this earlier? Of course he knew. Not to mention Metzen's retarded statement where he said that "men need to be better". Go choke on a bag of dicks. Don't project your behaviour on us. You allowed this to happen, not me. Same as the diversity officers who enticed the women to join your company and straight into the arms of predators

 

And they have the nerve to give us lectures about "toxic male gamers"

Or you know, both can be true. There can both be toxic male gamers and companies whose attempts at social justice are largely performative with either some people who actually care pushing for it and the company thinking it can get good publicity out of it, and/or being a decent way to obfuscate a problematic situation in house.

[Nayrusa 50]

1 hour ago, Dejo93 said:

Remember kids, if "woke" companies or video game journalists call you problematic or toxic, they're always projecting. They knew and did nothing. Why didn't people like Schreier, who had insiders in Blizzard as he said, write about this earlier? Of course he knew. Not to mention Metzen's retarded statement where he said that "men need to be better". Go choke on a bag of dicks. Don't project your behaviour on us. You allowed this to happen, not me. Same as the diversity officers who enticed the women to join your company and straight into the arms of predators

 

And they have the nerve to give us lectures about "toxic male gamers"

you are really that naiv?
ofc we are all the problem all of us because this is not an blizzard exclusive issue its an issue of society the *filtered* that happened and happens at blizzard happens all over the world every day

even in our daily live women are harassed because they wanna look good and some retarded freaks see that as an invitation for being a total piece of sh't

as long we as a society are not changing and stop looking the other way and finally standing up against this kinda behaivor we're not better then those responcible at blizzard because same as them we look the other way like we dont care

i mean what do you think will happen?

those responcible get fired and then they disappear?
they hiring at the next company and doin there the same *filtered* they did at blizzard
and even if they didn't get a job in that industrie they move on to another job and then they harass there women or they do it in other places

open your eyes

fgs

[Brightamethyst 104]

2 hours ago, Stan said:

Activision Blizzard's response did not address the following:

Of course it didn't. No way is Blizzard going to talk about those things while there's an ongoing lawsuit. It would be weirder if the statement HAD addressed those issues.