Activision Blizzard faces repercussions from employees and players angry over the response to the lawsuit

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Anger is growing among employees and customers of video game maker Activision Blizzard, with both groups calling on company officials to reform the work culture that allegedly drove a woman to suicide, according to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed last week by California regulators.

More than 2,000 current and former employees, according to the latest tally, signed an open letter to the company’s leadership earlier this week condemning the game maker for its “distasteful and humiliating” response to a lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The DFEH lawsuit accuses Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard of wage discrimination and allowing persistent sexual harassment complaints to go unresolved. In the letter, the employees petitioned for “immediate corrections… from the highest level in our organization.”

Activision Blizzard said last week that the lawsuit’s allegations are inaccurate, adding that “the picture DFEH paints is not where Blizzard operates today.”

Employees said they were pleading to disagree, adding that company leaders did not take the DFEH sexual harassment allegations seriously. The Orange County Register reported that employees also plan to strike on Wednesday in protest of the company’s response.

“To put it clearly and unequivocally, our value as employees is not accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership,” the employees said in the petition.

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick sent a letter to employees Tuesday to respond to some of the concerns they raised, writing that the company’s initial response to the situation was “tone deaf.”

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“It is essential that we acknowledge all viewpoints and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way,” Kotick wrote. “I’m sorry we didn’t offer the right sympathy and understanding.”

Video game manufacturer Activision Blizzard h… 03:44 “let them down”

Activision Blizzard is best known for creating Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft. The company started as two separate entities – Activision and Blizzard – but joined forces during the 2008 merger with now-defunct Vivendi Games, Blizzard’s former parent company.

Mike Morhaime, the original Blizzard co-founder who is no longer with the company, tweeted last week that he had read the lawsuit documents in California and said, “To the women of Blizzard who have experienced any of these things, I’m so sorry I failed you.”

“The fact that so many women have been abused and not received support means that we have let them down,” Morhaime wrote on Twitter.

The lawsuit, filed last Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, follows a two-year DFEH investigation into Activision Blizzard’s workplace culture that found evidence of sexual harassment of female employees including harassment and unwanted advances, as well as pay inequality for women in the whole world. The company, government officials said last week. State officials also accused senior Activision Blizzard executives, all of whom are white, of allowing male employees to routinely torture female co-workers.

The lawsuit states that “in the office, women are subjected to cubic crawls where male employees drink copious amounts of alcohol while they ‘crawl’ their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”

Sit-in in World of Warcraft

Blizzard chief J. Allen Brack sent an email last week to employees stating that “the behavior detailed in the allegations is totally unacceptable,” calling them “deeply concerning.”

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– Fence Macabre Caravan (@fencemacabre) July 22, 2021

An unknown number of World of Warcraft players organized an in-game sit-in to protest what they described as the “unethical treatment of Activision Blizzard employees”. The players called for “lasting changes” at the company and said they “stand with victims and survivors of Blizzard’s racism and abuse”.

Meanwhile, development of the game has virtually been halted, as chief system designer Jeff Hamilton, who recently tweeted, said, “I can tell you that almost no work has been done on World of Warcraft at the moment while this obscenity is going on. It’s no use — no neither the players nor the developers nor the contributors.”

Activision Blizzard shares fell more than 7.5% Tuesday after news of the employee’s petition.

employee death

The lawsuit alleges that an employee committed suicide during a company trip due to a sexual relationship she was having with her male supervisor. The suit alleges that the deceased woman had been experiencing ongoing sexual harassment at work prior to her death, including an incident at a holiday party where male co-workers walked around a nude photograph of the female employee.

Activision Blizzard has about 9,500 employees worldwide, 20% of whom are women, according to court documents. The lawsuit alleges that despite complaints of harassment by female employees to the company’s human resources department, officials took no meaningful action to improve conditions.

The staff said in their petition that this must change.

“We invite the executive leadership team to work with us on new and meaningful efforts that ensure employees – as well as our community – a safe place to speak and advance,” they said.

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