I must say: I’m not surprised to hear that Blizzard is ripping off its employees. They’ve been ripping off their customers for a very long time.

Bloomberg:

Employees at Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard Inc., began circulating a spreadsheet on Friday to anonymously share salaries and recent pay increases, the latest example of rising tension in the video game industry over wage disparities and executive compensation.

Blizzard, based in Irvine, California, makes popular games including Diablo and World of Warcraft. In 2019, after an internal survey revealed that more than half of Blizzard workers were unhappy with their compensation, the company told staff it would perform a study to ensure fair pay, according to people familiar with the situation. Blizzard implemented the results of that study last month, which led to an outcry on the company’s internal Slack messaging boards.

One employee then created a spreadsheet and encouraged staff to share their compensation information. The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study.

“Our goal has always been to ensure we compensate our employees fairly and competitively,” Activision Blizzard spokeswoman Jessica Taylor said. “We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees.”

This year, Blizzard top performers received a salary increase that was 20% more than in prior years, and more people got promotions, Taylor added. “Our overall salary investment is consistent with prior years,” she also said.

Wage disparity has become a hot-button issue in the $150 billion video game industry as calls for unionization grow. A pro-labor group recently slammed Activision Blizzard for the pay of Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick. His 2019 compensation was worth $40 million at the end of that year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and the package has grown since then as the company’s stock has soared. Last year, the company also paid $15 million in stock awards and sign-on bonus to incoming Chief Financial Officer Dennis Durkin. In the anonymous spreadsheet, one employee listed the CEO’s annual salary, bonus and stock award.

This is not some communist thing, in my view. I am certain that these employees are being abused, because I have personally been abused by Blizzard.

For whatever reason, large Western video game companies have all become criminal rackets.

Blizzard specifically has pretty much completely given up on trying. I was personally very excited for the release of a new version of Warcraft III, entitled Warcraft III: Reforged, which was announced in 2018, to be released in 2019. They kept pushing the release date back, eventually saying they would release it on the last day of 2019. That got pushed back to January 2020, when they finally released it.

When it was finally released, it was one of the biggest disasters in the history of video games. In fact, it was almost unbelievable. Not only did the game contain zero of the promised features that people were excited about, it was so buggy as to be unplayable. They also made the classic version of the game unplayable by forcing people who owned the old version to upgrade their client (for no clear reason).

After blaming the players for the game’s failure, they then did the classic video game scammer move of refusing to issue refunds.

Six months later, I still check up on the game, because I would still pay $30 for my classic childhood favorite if it had the features I want (primarily, I want a ladder system with good matchmaking), but these features have still not been implemented.

It would have been very easy for Blizzard to simply make a good game, but they instead decided to do a cash grab against their own customer base. Just so, it is always better to pay your employees a fair wage. You’re not going to be able to effectively rip them off. If they do not feel they’re being paid fairly, they will not ever give 100% on the job, so you just end up losing money in the long run.

This mindset of “just get the money, screw the customers, screw the employees, screw everyone but the investors” has overtaken every company, from 2K, to EA, to Ubisoft, to anything at all owned by Microsoft. It’s a real mess. Other than Rockstar, it’s difficult to name a large Western game company that cares about its customers at all.

Fortunately, smaller companies are moving in and creating some good games, giving the people what they want. But this is basically the end of big games. I don’t think Cyberpunk is going to live up to the hype, but even if it does, it will be the last such game. I don’t think Grand Theft Auto 6 can be made due to the politics of the current year.

This would be a great time for the Chinese to come in. Tencent is the biggest game company in the world, technically, though no one in any Western country can name a game they’ve made. They could be making our games for us. They don’t have politics, and they’re not stupid – they understand MONEY.

But why would China make games for Westerners, after having had TikTok stolen from them? What is to keep the US government from just stealing their games, too?

Nothing, apparently.

So they probably shouldn’t waste their time.

I reported on the Warcraft III: Reforged situation earlier this week when a member of the team that created the horrible, broken redux of the classic game gave a statement on it. The statement accused users of being at fault for not liking the game.

At that time, they were still holding out strong against giving refunds to players unsatisfied with the broken disaster of a game. However, after many users threatened Blizzard with criminal complaints, they have finally decided to start giving refunds.

They have a page up with a streamlined process, and people are claiming that it works and simply gives you an instant refund.

Some angry players had put up a parody of the official Reforged site at warcraft3refunded.com, which is pretty funny.

They’ve now updated the page to reflect that you can get an instant refund.

It is absolute lunacy that Blizzard not only believed that it could produce a bullshit fake game, but that they think they can just trick users and scam them out of money when people find out it’s a fake game. And they end up with their fans, who loved them, threatening them with criminal complaints.

It’s very funny how similar this is to the Fallout 76 debacle. Bethesda also refused refunds until users began threatening in mass to file criminal complaints against them. I found the situation with Fallout 76 funnier, but that might simply be because I had no interest in playing 76, and Reforged was basically the only game I was looking forward to this year (other than Cyberpunk 2077, of course).

But I think this is objectively much sadder, because Bethesda was never really a good video game company in the way Blizzard was once a good video game company. It is shocking and really just pointless for the company to devolve like this. All anyone wanted from Reforged was just a 2002 video game with new graphics and a couple of modern features. There was literally no other expectation. Not being able to deliver that after spending three years on it is just unimaginable.

And if they really couldn’t make it happen, they would have been better off just canceling the game and refunding all pre-orders and apologizing, telling fans “we’re sorry, it was just literally impossible for us to update this game for some reason.” That would have been better for the company in the long run.

Now they have escalated the war with their own customers far beyond what it was before. And people kind of already hated them, because of the weird stuff in Overwatch. And people knew that the company resented them, because of the Diablo phone game announcement.

Whereas we now have a competition between Fallout 76 and Reforged, Diablo is going to make both look like kiddie stuff, I can promise you that. They are simply going to release a much worse version of Diablo III, and then attack players for not liking it, then refuse to give refunds until they get enough threats of criminal complaints.

Why don’t they just hire passionate people and make good games? Wouldn’t that actually be easier?

It’s the same thing with Star Trek: Picard.

Why is this show such a piece of crap?

Why did they not just hire people who liked Star Trek and make a good Star Trek show?

I hate to have to say this every time, but it’s because of the Jews.

Star Trek is now being run by entitled, lazy Jews, just as Blizzard is now being run by entitled, lazy Jews.

Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, is a cartoon character Jew.

Activision took over Blizzard in 2008. And since then, everything the company has produced has been Jewish crap.

Imagine that a beloved video game from your childhood comes out and it’s a piece of crap and you say “I’ll bet the Jews did this” and you’re right.

If you sit back and look at the whole of the problem, it is truly amazing the way that these Jews have managed to invade and corrupt every single aspect of all of our lives. It is literally impossible to point to any single part of the Western world that has not been damaged by them.

People are really mad about Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Apparently, this game didn’t have any of the features that were promised before it was launched.

I was actually waiting on the game myself, and would have bought it on launch day, save for the fact that my gaming computer is currently not operational.

For those who do not know, Warcraft 3 is one of the best Real Time Strategy (RTS) games of all time, if not the single best. Because no one can make good games anymore, Blizzard-Activision decided to simply re-release this game. They announced it in 2018, and it was originally scheduled for first quarter 2019. They then pushed it back and back, until it was scheduled for December 31, 2019. They they pushed it back to the end of January.

Then it was released, and it now has the lowest ranking of any game on Metacritic.

Apparently:

• The cut scenes that were promised were not included.
• The graphics are a disaster.
• The game crashes constantly.
• Blizzard makes you sign a contract that says that any user content you create – including custom maps and levels – is owned by Blizzard.
• All online features were removed, including ladders, automated tournaments, clans and profiles.

Blizzard took a long time responding to the drama.

Then they made a forum post saying that it was the users’ fault for not experiencing the game as they wanted to.

Gotta get those “unforgettable moments,” goy.

It’s incredible that gaming companies continue to abuse people in this manner.

Apparently, none of them have figured out that if you just engage your customers and give them what they want, they will really love you and give you a lot of money.

The only company that ever figured that out was Valve, and they managed to get a virtual monopoly on the sale of games.

All they did was listen to their users and do what was requested.

Any gaming company could do that.

Just even with this apology – they very easily could have just said “we’re really sorry about this, guys – we had a time limit and a budget limit and we failed to deliver. We’re going to do our absolute best to fix this game.”

Instead, they act like there wasn’t any problem and it is just the user’s fault for not liking it.

It is just bad business.

But these gaming companies think that they’re untouchable because creating a AAA game costs so much money, no one other than asshole Jew companies can make them.