THE workers Of Blizzard Entertainment they defined themselves offended, angry and demoralized from the words of the president of the company, Mike Ybarra, during a Q&A session organized to comment on an employee satisfaction survey. Evidently what has been said has also satisfied very few people, so much so that many have taken to talking about it freely on Twitter, openly challenging some positions.
The questions answered by Ybarra had already been reviewed and selected by management. There has been talk of employee appraisal, reduced profit sharing, with workers receiving only 58% of promised bonuses, despite the company’s strong track record, with Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo franchises generating $100 million of net profits in the last quarter, and the obligation to return to the office three days a week, after two years of working from home due to the pandemic.
Speaking of the bonus cut, Ybarra said workers who believe executives make more money are believing a myth. The 58% cut will apply to executives as well as employees. Of course, it must be said that the bonus for managers is usually much higher than that of employees, so the linear cut will be felt more from the base than from the top of the pyramid, due to the very elementary principle that if you cut 1 in half, you get 0.5 , while if you cut 100 in half, you still get 50. Less abstractly, a tester in the Santa Monica area (not Sony’s development studio, mind you), is paid between $14 and $26 an hour, while the salary of a manager can exceed $270,000 annually.
Speaking of the forced return to the office, it must be said that other subsidiaries of activision they have already applied it. For example King. Having said that, it is still a further increase in costs for workers, which added to the cut in bonuses is starting to have a significant impact on their finances. The situation is particularly problematic for those who have been hired to work remotely during the pandemic and who, therefore, do not necessarily live in the area where the company is based. According to some industry experts, it is a way to disguise hundreds of layoffs, because many will simply not be able to accept the new conditions.
Ybarra has made it clear that anyone who does not agree with the company can leave. Then he also issued a not too veiled threat to the QA and Customer Service sectors, stating that some roles are no longer open-ended. It should be noted that these are the sectors treated worst in terms of wages and considered the most expendable by many companies. They are also the ones who are trying to unionize more strongly.
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