Blizzard co-founder and longtime boss Mike Morhaime took to Twitter just after midnight Friday to comment on the widespread allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the game company he led for so long. “To the Blizzard women who experienced any of these things, I am extremely sorry that I failed you,” he wrote. “I hear you, I believe you, and I am so sorry to have let you down.”
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Morhaime helped found the World of Warcraft and Diablo developer right out of college in 1991. Since then, it’s gone on to become one of the most prominent studios in the world, producing hits in every genre like StarCraft, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. For much of that history, Morhaime was its leader, and his departure in 2018 to go on and form the new game company called Dreamhaven was widely regarded as a major blow to Blizzard’s longstanding legacy.
But according to a complaint filed in California court earlier this week by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing following a two-year investigation, a “frat boy” workplace culture was rife at the company during Morhaime’s time as CEO there.
Here is Morhaime’s statement in full:
Since news of the allegations broke on July 21, former Blizzard developers have been speaking out on social media about the harassment and abuse they experienced or witnessed. Current developers have been distancing themselves from the company’s public and internal statements and calling on it to make changes.
Activision Blizzard’s response so far has been to challenge the accuracy of the accusations by implying that they only reflect things from the past. “The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past,” a spokesperson for the company told Kotaku. “The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today.”
Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Blizzard president J. Allen Brack sent an email to staff earlier this week calling the allegations “extremely troubling.” In this message, he failed to mention that he was personally named in the suit as someone who failed to stop another developer from serially sexually harassing female coworkers. That developer, Alex Afrasiabi, contributed to World of Warcraft as recently as 2020, and many NPCs and items in the game still reference him. A video recording of both Brack and Afrasiabi making sexist and condescending remarks about a female fan’s question at a 2010 BlizzCon panel has also been making the rounds online, following a seemingly industry-wide reevaluation of Blizzard’s history.
Call of Duty maker Activision acquired Blizzard in 2008, and following the merger formed a new parent company called Activision Blizzard. While both subsidiaries have largely functioned separately, Activision’s role in Blizzard’s day-to-day business reportedly grew following Morhaime’s departure in 2018.
Last year, Blizzard released a remaster of WarCraft 3 called WarCraft 3: Reforged that was so unpopular the company almost immediately started offering refunds for it. According to a recentreport by Bloomberg, increased financial pressure from Activision is partly responsible for recent uncharacteristic flops like this. Some of the new changes have reportedly included meetings suddenly being attended by finance people who wouldn’t normally been there prior to the company’s cultural shift. Several longtime Blizzard developers, including former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, have begun exiting the company in recent years.
