Mike Ybarra, the boss of Blizzardwrote a letter to gamers to explain what the first steps the company will take to try regain their trust. Various topics are touched on in the text, including legal problems due to internal conduct by the staff in recent years.
“Our priority, now and in the future, is the work we are doing to rebuild your trust in Blizzard“reads the message, which then goes on to explain what has been done so far to improve the culture of the company and communication with the community. According to Ybarra, the first change concerns the evaluation, including economic, of executives and managers, which will be based on ability to create a working environment “safe, inclusive and creative.“
Additionally, Blizzard is hiring internal resource support staff to help monitor and enhance this culture, because all too often these tasks have been assigned to people who already had their jobs to do. For this reason, the positions of “culture leader”, organizational head of human resources and DE&I (diversity, equity and inclusion) have been opened, which will have dedicated teams.
The same philosophy has been applied to internal investigations, whose team has been tripled, and to feedback from development teams, which now have a program aimed at evaluating executives.
“These initiatives are just the beginning of the work Blizzard is doing,” concluded Ybarra, who promised more news for the next few weeks.
Will the company be able to recover? Difficult to say, but it should be emphasized that Microsoft, with the acquisition, may have expressly requested that the Activision Blizzard studios work actively and decisively to clean up the image, after the very serious facts that have emerged in recent months and years, the underestimation of which is largely attributed to CEO Bobby Kotick and his closest associates.
After all, one of the strengths of the recent management of Xbox is the excellent relationship built with the gamer community.
