Loud complaints are piling up at Activision Blizzard. More and more World of Warcraft developers are getting loud and demanding changes – because employees are running away.
In the last few days, the positive mood around World of Warcraft has taken a big hit again. This is not due to the content in the game, but to all the “trappings” that are currently taking place at Blizzard. The developers are venting their displeasure more and more on Twitter – because beloved colleagues are leaving the company. And the culprit is apparently a rule change that hardly anyone understands.
What has been changed? A few weeks ago, Activision Blizzard decided that the “home office” rule would be suspended again in the future. Anyone who was previously able to work permanently from home now has to drive to the nearest office at least 2 days a week and work from there.
The problem with this is that during the corona pandemic, many employees were hired who worked completely from home and also assumed that this would continue later. They often live far from the nearest Activision Blizzard office or cannot afford to move to the rather expensive Irvine.
What happened now? After yesterday one of the World of Warcraft game producers was critical, Allison Steele, who works as a game designer for WoW, is now following suit. She wrote on Twitter:
The forced “return to the office” has already cost us some fantastic people and will cost us more in the coming months.
It’s a terrible, short-sighted, and self-defeating rule that only weakens our ability to make the kind of games we want to make and our players deserve.
And just to be absolutely clear, I just want to make great games. This is my dream. I love WoW. I’ve been playing since vanilla and have been working on it for two years since patch 9.1.5.
Everything Adam said? The. Exactly that.
Why is that strange? Largely home office based, World of Warcraft Dragonflight is considered by many to be one of the best expansions of all time. That Activision now insists that all employees have to spend 2 days out of 5 in the office seems strange. After all, the corona pandemic has shown that working from home can be just as efficient as working in the office – Dragonflight is a good example of this.
It seems like a new wave of criticism is slowly but surely breaking through – and again it’s coming from the developers, who have to watch more and more colleagues say goodbye.
The long-term effects for World of Warcraft are not yet foreseeable.