Well, realistically, ‘Every voice matters’ is a pretty absurd notion because it’s impossible. Do misogynist voices matter? What about racist voices? Nazi voices? And that’s just the edge case voices. It’s easily possible to have rational, logical, voices split several ways on a subject that can only have one solution. And those discarded, dismissed, voices, did they matter? Obviously, not much, if at all.
I’m not bent out of shape by what blizzard did though I wish their response had been different. There’s a lot more important issues to me than blizzard’s ham-fisted attempts to keep political statements out of their esports.
I don’t think that’s what he said. He was making a case that the ‘every voice matters’ slogan makes no sense, which is true.
This is why Blizzard should have supported (or at the very least refused to punish) any voice in their competition that argues for the existence of human rights. Meanwhile, any voice that says people should be subjugated to the will of a repressive dictatorship do not matter and should be shunned in all public discourse.
It’s a shame that this is a matter of controversy in an e-sport competition. The ideal is to have politics 100% removed from the proceedings because it is assumed that everyone involved likes human freedom and doesn’t want to subjugate and oppress large groups of people. Yet here we are.
I said nothing about democracies or controversies, I just said that the notion of the Blizzard principle is impossible and gave some edge cases to demonstrate why. I think as soon as you weaken the statement to something like ‘Most voices matter’, you clearly start seeing its absurdity. Technically, i’m agreeing with you, so you can just jump down off your soap box.
You’re amusing. I suppose next you’ll tell me what I’m really talking about. Go ahead, you’re so very clearly intent on being outraged, don’t let me stop you.
You seem to be a lot more excitable about this than I am. Look at your statements compared to mine.
Also, it’s idiotic to think let alone say that if you make a statement to include all voices you must clarify that you don’t intend to lend credence to ideas of genocide, mass rape and murder, Nazis solutions or any host of monstrosities deemed so by history. It’s implied and does not need clarification.
The specific example used (Nazis) is goofy, but I think the point is that “every voice matters” is an empty promise. More biznizz marketing BS than a practical core value for a company. I think anyone that’s every worked in a customer-facing position knows that some people are straight up nuts and their voice is worth utter garbage.
Are there any actual figures on subs that have cancelled due to this? I know a lot of people are talking about it, but I’m interested to see how this actually affects their bottom line. Further, will people go back?
No figures that I know of, and I highly doubt Blizzard will release them. Have to wait for quarterly earnings to see how their bottom line has been affected in the short run, though damage to their brand will be harder to gauge.
In my case I am done with them permanently, with the caveat that businesses, like any organization, are a composite of their members, and if new corporate leadership appeared and totally repudiated their stance I’d consider it.
I took them a week to address the problem in a totally pathetic way. It seems highly unlikely they would admit they have mass canceling of accounts even IF it is happening.
and if it was happening… I know a number of my friends who still HAD active WoW subscriptions; their voice of cancelling won’t show up until January 2020, the next time their account is up for auto-renewal.
I would expect a number of people will slowly bleed out over time, and that it will only be internal reports that will show the date in which the cancellation was initiated. (and thus, they can internally attribute it to potentially the PR clusterf)
As a caveat, I ask because yesterday an old buddy reached out to me asking if I wanted to sub to WoW Classic with him. I asked him has he been under a rock, and told him of the news. After listening he just shook his head and then asked again if I wanted to join up with him. Grrr.
That makes me think this will blow over and they won’t really take a huge hit. Let’s hope it does at least sting a little.
We’d only find out about this during Activision’s next quarterly financial announcement. And even then, they don’t release sub numbers anymore, only information about “engagement.” However, if the cancellations are material to their financials, they may have to address them in some way.
Timing-wise, they did their 2nd quarter results on August 8th, so third quarter will be around the same time in November. That’ll be following Blizzcon and all the major announcements they’ll likely have, including Diablo 4. And remember that Blizzard ran a promotion for Diablo 3 when it was announced that gave the game free to WoW players who pre-paid for a year of WoW. A similar promotion would probably wipe out any negatives from this drama in an hour or so.
EDIT: though the timing on that would fall into their 4th quarter, I guess.
I don’t think they are going to take a huge hit. Were I looking at metrics in Blizzard this is what I’d look at:
Number of cancellations the week of the incident
What is our normal cancellation for this period, x weeks after a major patch?
What is the average play time of those accounts over the last 6 months?
Did these people pay for a lot of services (transfers, wow tokens for gold, etc.?)
How many of those accounts came back after Blizzcon?
How many restoration requests did we get from deleted accounts?
The reason I don’t think they will take a big hit is it is something you had to pay a little attention to find out about. You had to go to the forums, fan sites, etc., and decide this is the final straw for you and Blizzard.
Given that the most vocal tend to be the a minority, and we have no proof they actually cancelled accounts, I expect it to be blip in their financials.
