Mired for three years in internal problems, Blizzard must now face the breach of its contract with NetEase, resulting in the unavailability of its games on the huge Chinese market.
Definitely, Blizzard seems totally alien to good news. The American studio is once again in the spotlight after breaking its contract with Chinese distributor NetEase, resulting in the withdrawal of most of its titles from the land of the rising sun. Concretely, within a few days, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch and almost all of the studio’s products will therefore be withdrawn from Chinese sales and gaming platforms. This rupture of a fourteen-year-old and undoubtedly extremely lucrative partnership was due to differences on the financial and intellectual property levels. NetEase claims for its part that Blizzard would not have respected its part of the contract before trying unsuccessfully to conclude an agreement with other Chinese publishers. Blizzard has not revealed the reasons for this separation.
A complicated situation for the American studio, which is therefore deprived of the world’s largest video game market, estimated again this year at 36.7 billion euros. For the players, it is also a huge thunderbolt, since certain licenses such as Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Overwatch had become firmly established in Chinese culture, at times creating extremely prolific eSport scenes. and competitive. Blizzard has announced to players that they can save their progress indefinitely while the company finds a new partner for the distribution of its games in the land of the rising sun.
This fiasco comes in the same week of the departure of one of its most venerable technical engineers, Brian Birmingham, having once again revealed toxic managerial practices marring the corporate culture of the video game giant. The engineer, in office for more than seventeen years and well known for his work on titles extremely appreciated by the public, left the company at the beginning of the week after a disagreement with his hierarchy on the system of Stack Ranking set up within the working groups. This system aims to evaluate employees and determine their suitability for promotion, the value of their bonuses, and their risk of dismissal, and was implemented in the studio despite the protests of the majority of its employees by directives of ‘ABK (Activision Blizzard King), Blizzard’s parent company. Birmingham would have been forced to give negative ratings to at least 5% of its employees, a practice it did not want to condone in the words of Bloomberg. Birmingham has since explained the situation itself on Twitter. A case that once again testifies to a hostile corporate culture, and which adds to the cases of generalized harassment for which Blizzard is sued for a little less than a year.