For Blizzard, is growing up really about finding new ways to grow its bottom line?īlizzard has already helped shape and reshape the idea of what video games are and who plays them. But as it turns out, Diablo’s hard-core-friendly hellscape hasn’t been reformed so much as made roomier. The goal is to appeal “to as many players as we could possibly think of, because we want this game to be inclusive,” another Diablo team member said. The first Diablo sequel in 11 years is being released by a scandal-chastened company touting a PR-savvy mission to “foster joy and belonging for everyone,” as Blizzard’s president, Mike Ybarra, put it to me. Ostensibly, the industry has changed a lot since then.
I was so hooked that I eventually decided to quit the game cold turkey, fearing that my schoolwork and friendships would wither away if I didn’t.įrom the October 2021 issue: Confessions of a Sid Meier’s Civilization addict The resulting rhythm of pummeling and prospering-the game’s “core loop,” to use an industry term-was more validating than anything in my real life as a high schooler. The franchise’s creators had wanted the time “from boot-up to kill” to be less than a minute, and for combat to reward players like slot machines reward gamblers.
#Graphic river sound full#
Playing as an ax-wielding barbarian with bulging muscles, I slashed across screens full of monsters, striving to acquire power (by gaining experience points) and lucre (gold, gems, and gear dropped by vanquished foes). I visited Blizzard’s headquarters because, to tell the truth, I was once an antisocial teenage dude who spent a lot of time with Diablo II, the 2000 iteration of the franchise. Gaming’s association with antisocial, immature dudes is dying hard.
Multiplayer-chat channels remain, as ever, rife with bigotry and sneers at “newbies.” The allegations against Activision Blizzard, along with recent harassment scandals at a number of other prominent companies, suggest an intractable culture. In the mid-2010s, the “Gamergate” campaign saw hard-core players systematically harass “fake gamer girls” who dared to denounce, say, the “jiggle physics” commonly used in the animation of female characters across the medium. But the mainstreaming has triggered purist pushback, tinged with machismo and aggression. New and so-called casual users, many playing on their phone, have driven the sector’s surging growth. No longer the niche activity it was when Blizzard was founded in 1991, gaming has become a mass pastime (two-thirds of Americans participate) and a diverse one (nearly half of gamers are women). “It’s taking time for us to grow up,” Rod Fergusson, Diablo’s general manager, told me. The company has pledged to hire more women, treat employees better, and make more inclusive products-all while being vetted for a $68.7 billion acquisition bid by Microsoft, a deal that regulators are scrutinizing, wary of the market power that the resulting megacorporation could wield. According to the complaint, the company had become a “frat house” where female employees were underpaid, discriminated against, and groped “women who were not ‘huge gamers’ or ‘core gamers’ and not into the party scene were excluded and treated as outsiders.” Activision Blizzard initially described the allegations as “distorted, and in many cases false,” a response that the company’s CEO soon after called “tone deaf.” The suit is still in litigation, but a number of company leaders have departed since it was filed, including developers originally tasked with steering Diablo IV, Blizzard’s most anticipated new title in years. In 2021, allegations in a lawsuit brought by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing against the studio’s parent company, Activision Blizzard, seemed to confirm the worst stereotypes of gaming as a realm of testosterone-fueled brutality and indulgence-and not just within the universe of the games themselves. Blizzard is also a business under siege: an object lesson in how gaming’s old guard is facing new pressures. With tens of millions of monthly users of its products, the studio is one of the most important brands in gaming, an industry whose nearly $200 billion in annual revenues exceed those of the global box office and the recording industry combined.
But Blizzard Entertainment is trying to show its sociable side these days. Earlier editions are notorious for beckoning a certain kind of player-typically male-to hunker down alone in marathons of virtual hacking and slashing, immersed in a simplistic fantasy in which might makes right and women wear bikini-like armor. The kindness was appreciated if incongruous: The world of Diablo is violent and lonely, a classic example of the hard-core-gaming experience. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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