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Activision Blizzard Clears Itself Of Any Wrongdoing
16.6.2022
Nearly year after an explosive lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing kicked off a firestorm of sexual harassment and discrimination allegations at Activision Blizzard, a Board of Directors working group investigating the company has released its findings. Led by...
What Diablo Immortal Means For The Future Of Gaming
14.6.2022
Diablo Immortal has been setting the internet alight with controversy. Every gaming website under the sun has a take about how the microtransactions ruin the gameplay and how Blizzard was ruining fans’ beloved childhood memories of Diablo. The game currently holds the lowest user score...
Diablo Immortal Slammed On Metacritic, Now Holds Lowest User Score Ever
13.6.2022
Review aggregation sites are hardly the arbiter of a game’s quality, particularly when it comes to user reviews, and particularly in the era of review-bombing. Still, some data points are unignorable: As noted by VGC, Blizzard’s recent Diablo Immortal now holds claim to the lowest user score...
Diablo IV Won’t Be Anything Like Diablo Immortal, Blizzard Promises
13.6.2022
With Diablo IV back in the news and the largely-maligned Diablo Immortal still a topic of conversation, developer Blizzard wants everyone to know that the two games are alike in name only.Read more
Diablo IV Revives The Necromancer For A 2023 Launch
12.6.2022
Diablo IV is still set for a 2023 release, Blizzard announced today. And while that 365-day launch window may not be super exciting, it was also revealed that the fan favorite Necromancer will be the game’s fifth and final playable class (at least for now). Put on your finest bone armor, folks...
Let's All Exploit The Exploitative Games
10.6.2022
There is, and should be, a huge amount of discussion and debate regarding the exploitative nature of so many practices in modern video games. From gacha and lootboxes to in-app purchases and meaningless cosmetics, right up to the recent idiocy regarding NFTs, both game players and the gaming press...
Diablo Immortal Is Far Too Good To Be Free
8.6.2022
Last week Blizzard launched Diablo Immortal, the next entry in its long-running, loot-driven action-RPG franchise. However, unlike previous games, this one is free-to-play, and was built from the ground up to be a mobile game first. While it did also come out on PC last week, the reality is this...
World Of Warcraft Streamer Allegedly Harassed Off Of Twitch By Ex-Cop
26.5.2022
A 29-year-old former airport cop, Evan Baltierra, was arrested this week and charged in federal court with allegedly harassing a World of Warcraft streamer off of Twitch. The two met in person at BlizzCon 2019, according to an accompanying affidavit, but when the streamer declined to be...
Xbox Boss Says He Will Recognize Raven Software's Union After Acquisition Closes
26.5.2022
In today’s internal all-hands meeting with Xbox Game Studios employees, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer said that he would recognize Raven Software’s union. This came after the QA testers at Raven voted to form the first labor union at a major studio.Read more
Activision Blizzard Devs Demand Breastfeeding Protections And Other Reforms
25.5.2022
10 months after a California lawsuit alleged widespread sexual harassment and discrimination at Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard, employees at the company don’t feel like it’s made the necessary changes and have created a worker committee to demand further reforms. Chief among them...
Gaming Gets Its First Union At A Major U.S. Studio
23.5.2022
Despite months of negative talking points by Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard, quality assurance staff at its Raven Software studio voted to unionize Monday, becoming the first union at a big studio in the U.S. The successful vote comes with talk of labor organizing picking up across...
New Marvel Card Game From Ex-Hearthstone Devs Plays Fast As Hell
19.5.2022
Announced today, Marvel Snap looks like a chaotic but fun digital trading card game (TCG) featuring popular Marvel heroes and villains. It’s also the next game from some of the key folks behind Blizzard’s popular digital card game Hearthstone, who left to form their own studio a few years back....
Lawsuit: Blizzard Lets Minors ‘Gamble’ On ‘Worthless’ Hearthstone Card Packs
19.5.2022
Blizzard is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit over card packs sold to minors in Hearthstone, its popular World of Warcraft-themed trading card game. A parent in Arizona claims his child purchased hundreds of dollars worth of the cards without realizing how rare it is to get good cards out...
Activision Blizzard’s Diversity Tool Has A Long, Even More Embarrassing History
17.5.2022
Activision Blizzard touted its Diversity Space Tool in a blog post on May 12, in which it claimed that both the Call of Duty: Vanguard and Overwatch 2 development teams beta tested the tool with much enthusiasm, then quickly walked this statement back on May 13 and said the tool “is not being used...
Activision Blizzard's New Diversity Game Tool Comes Across Terribly
14.5.2022
Today Activision Blizzard fulfilled its daily oopsie quota by blogging about how the publisher’s subsidiaries have apparently been using a special tool to help develop more “diverse” characters. It apparently thinks it can accomplish this without, I don’t know, actually talking to or hiring...
Overwatch 2 Beta Visuals Aren't Helping Perception That It's Barely An Update
9.5.2022
The Overwatch 2 technical beta started on April 26, and players have already started mining the build for content. One player even made a side-by-side lighting comparison video of the differences between the beta and the original game, which recently took off on Twitter. The two video captures...
Now New York City Is Suing Activision Blizzard
4.5.2022
Activision Blizzard is facing (what feels like) its 8,583,129th lawsuit, as first reported by Axios. This one’s from New York City, and alleges that longtime CEO Bobby Kotick raced to find a buyer for the mega-publisher he has been leading for 30 years to explicitly avoid consequences for turning...
Everything You Need To Know About That New Overwatch 2 Scoreboard
29.4.2022
Overwatch had a nontraditional approach to keeping score. Typically, competitive shooters like Apex Legends and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds keep a running list of kills, points, and team ranking on a shared scoreboard. Overwatch, instead, used a less specific system that awarded an individual...
Activision Shareholders Approve Xbox Deal, But Wall Street Has Doubts
28.4.2022
Shareholders at Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 publisher Activision Blizzard voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to approve a $69 billion sale to tech giant Microsoft. The deal gives golden parachutes to top execs at Activision, including embattled CEO Bobby Kotick. But despite gaming’s biggest...
Diablo Immortal Is Hitting PC Because Players Would Just Emulate It Anyway
25.4.2022
Today, Blizzard announced that Diablo Immortal will be out on June 2 for iOS, Android, and PC. The PC version was a surprise as Blizzard had previously said that this new entry in the ARPG dungeon-crawlin’ franchise was built for mobile devices from the ground up. But according to the Warcraft...