“In a statement, Blizzard Entertainment said Blizzard North co-founders Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer and David Brevik, along with a fourth employee, Bill Roper, ‘resigned from the company to pursue other opportunities.'” – Yahoo News (dead link), 2003

When the creators of Diablo left Blizzard in 2003, it was reported on that it was due to a dispute with Vivendi. At least, that’s what I can surmise because there’s no direct citation of that on Wikipedia, and whatever actual reporting was done on it seems to be lost to the internet void. Why do we love the brands, why do we prostrate ourselves for them? The people responsible for what everyone is nostalgic for haven’t worked there in almost a full two decades.

We love them because the corporate propaganda, likely both inside and out, tells us that they are the sole places responsible for the crafting of imagination, or some horse shit that always gets used in the hiring materials. The myth persists that people can only help make things when they’re steered by the benevolent hand of the free market. Pay attention anytime a hit happens: it’s usually because someone signs a blank check and lets people who know what they’re doing do it. Of course, if we actually looked at our corporate overlords as what they should be (blank check dispensers) there’s no reason Bobby Kotick would be in the fucking news all the time, or exist.

That stinking sack of pondscum, legally titled Bobby Kotick (who seems to have been making everything in videogames worse since I was a child) took another gigantic bonus for himself. A bonus that comes on the heels of “restructuring” which always means people are losing jobs while someone else rakes the dough in off the top. That former sentence is kind of a self evident link: you can click it, or you can take my word for it because it feels right and we all agree people getting fired during a pandemic is a sure as shit sign things are awful.

While people are getting let go the hiring materials stay the same. Blizzard is the place you go to ‘entertain the universe’. Diablo’s getting a remaster while the people responsible for putting it on the map have no ownership or say in how it’ll be changed to match nostalgia. That’s the business, baby. Why not come join our team?

Looking at Blizzard now, all of the original staff have left, or been folded into mobile games and esports marketing strategies departments. Former members of the studio decry the operation as being a husk of its former self: a catalogue of brands being managed by investors and hedge funds with a powerful need to keep the talent door revolving. Those staff that left, who did they get replaced by? If a company is the sum of its parts – what about when all of those parts are just people hungry for work that own too many Heroes of the Storm funkopops?

Less than two days after the story about Kotick’s new year bonus, even more layoffs are coming. The same language as before: restructuring, new market changes, reaction to positive growth. It often seems like the invisible hand always has someone else’s money behind it, especially when it shuffles people out the door.

When I started looking into older news articles for this story, there was a weird trend. It looked like there’s never been a time that Blizzard hasn’t actively been shuttering staff, especially after some kind of huge income return on a massive project.
They started in 2017/2018 after a huge swell in production returns. in 2016, big company do what big company always does and pushed the responsibility for a failed product off entirely on the staff. This is, despite the fact, that Blizzard Entertainment Incorporated(T) is where you go to entertain the universe, as long as the people paying and deciding entirely what you work on don’t fuck something up.

There might be still a nugget of truth that they laid off huge parts of San Francisco offices around 2012/2013. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope the people who got “restructured” there got paid for uplifting their entire lives. Sometimes those opportunities come – but in each one of these cases the reporting tows the line of pure press release. The evil arbiter of Games Writing As Selling Products come home to roost. The most a passionate writer can say about massive corporate firing? It Happened.

In many of these articles you’ll see only the occasional mark of reporting. We reached out for comment but it was not returned. Employees who were legally obligated to not tell us this told us this, but presented without a single side eye glance as if that shouldn’t be the most normal fucking thing in the world. Oh – here’s another time a massive amount of staff were laid off in 2008.

Who’s making the games now? I know someone gets up infront of a live studio audience at The Game Awards or Blizzard Convention every year to sweatily talk about Overwatch 2 with their hands in their pockets. I know it’s not the director of Star Craft II and much of the staff underneath him. Games aren’t being made with the help of Diablo II director Josh Mosqueira, again attributed to “creative differences” without a single second take or harsher question.

What’s known is that same old precedent fact: someone’s making a shitload of money at the cost of all of the people underneath them. Will anything change by being this angry all the fucking time? No – but maybe we’ll all be a little angry next time a flowery retrospective for one of these companies gets put up on Polygon and nobody talks about all of the people that aren’t there, and not just the Directors and Producers either.