Blizzard Entertainment has unveiled its 2025 Pride Collection, once again partnering with GLAAD—an activist nonprofit with a clear ideological mission. The company insists this initiative is about “inclusion,” but the truth is harder to ignore: Blizzard is not making space for everyone. It’s picking a side.
The Illusion of Inclusion
Video games should be a refuge from politics and culture war narratives—a realm where players of all backgrounds, beliefs, and identities can come together. That requires ideological neutrality. Instead, Blizzard has embraced a form of corporate activism that favors one worldview while alienating millions who don’t share it.
GLAAD is not a benign partner. It’s a powerful NGO that pressures media companies to conform to its agenda, often using “inclusivity” as a Trojan horse for ideological conformity. By elevating GLAAD, Blizzard isn’t making its games more welcoming—it’s sending a clear signal: some beliefs are more welcome than others.
The Award Loop: GLAAD and Blizzard’s Conflict of Interest
What’s worse, this partnership isn’t happening in a vacuum. GLAAD has previously nominated World of Warcraft for media awards—essentially rewarding Blizzard for shoehorning activist content into its games. This cozy relationship raises serious questions about motive and integrity. When the same activist group that doles out awards also shapes your in-game content, it’s not inclusion—it’s quid pro quo. I’ve documented this before: Blizzard executives have openly bragged about receiving praise from GLAAD for adding LGBTQ themes into Dragonflight, as if narrative quality or player immersion no longer matter. What matters now is pleasing the gatekeepers of virtue.
Even Blizzard-aligned fan sites like Wowhead—which covered WoW’s GLAAD nomination back in 2021—routinely lock the comment sections on these announcements, clearly anticipating backlash from the actual player base. So much for inclusion and open dialogue.
- “Blizzard VP Holly Longdale Brags About GLAAD Nomination for Shoehorning LGBTQ Propaganda into World of Warcraft: Dragonflight”
- “GLAAD Is Incentivizing Video Game Studios to Create LGBTQ Propaganda”
- Wowhead: Shadowlands Nominated as Outstanding Video Game in 32nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards (Comments Locked)
Virtue Signaling at the Expense of Immersion
Blizzard’s commitment to this one-sided vision goes beyond merch. Over the past few years, the company has aggressively stripped away basic biological language from its games—removing male and female designations from character creation menus and rewriting lore to spotlight gay and trans characters for the sake of performative virtue signaling. These changes add nothing of substance to the World of Warcraft experience. Instead, they shatter immersion and reek of corporate pandering to activist communities. Players aren’t asking for this—they’re enduring it.
WoW Was Never Meant to Be a Culture War Platform
What makes this even worse is that World of Warcraft was never meant to be a social justice sandbox. It was built atop classic European fantasy tropes and heavily inspired by Tolkien—rooted in mythic archetypes, medieval aesthetics, and timeless struggles between good and evil. LGBTQ ideology was never canon. And longtime players had every right to expect that WoW would continue to honor its own internal lore and provide a consistent form of European medieval escapism.
This stands in stark contrast to Overwatch, a franchise set in a speculative modern world, where ideological experiments might at least be thematically plausible. But shoehorning modern activist causes into Azeroth doesn’t feel “inclusive.” It feels like betrayal.
The Double Standard of Symbolism
Blizzard still flies the Progress Pride flag outside its headquarters in Irvine. But imagine, just for a moment, if the company raised a Confederate flag in the name of “heritage.” The backlash would be instant and absolute—and rightly so, because symbols carry weight. They don’t just represent ideas; they declare allegiance.
For many devout Christian employees, walking past that Pride flag feels no different. It’s not a banner of welcome—it’s a signal that their faith is unwelcome, outdated, or even hateful. In trying to promote “inclusion,” Blizzard has created a new kind of exclusion.
Pride Fatigue: Blizzard Is Behind the Curve
One more thing: the cultural tide is turning. Pride Month exhibitionism is quietly dying out. In 2024 and 2025, most major tech firms and video game studios have dropped the practice of decking their logos in rainbow colors. The silence is telling. After years of performative signaling, the appetite for ideological branding is fading—and fast. But Blizzard, as always, is late to notice. While the rest of the corporate world quietly backs away from Pride virtue signaling, Blizzard doubles down, still waving a flag for a movement that has long since lost its cultural momentum.
The Way Forward: Ideological Neutrality
Blizzard once built games that united people across boundaries. Today, it aligns itself with polarizing activist groups, hoping to score virtue points while selling merch. If Blizzard truly wants to build worlds where everyone feels welcome, it should stop partnering with partisan organizations—and start treating games as neutral ground.
—Wolfshead
It shows how deeply compromised Blizzard is by now. From lowly employee to management. It also shows that they no longer set the trends, they are trailing behind.
The organization you mentioned cannot be talked about, anything written about them would need approval and moderation, so I will let it be and hopefully you can read this right away.
It is a terrible activist control organization. Mr. Alinsky would have loved it. It is about cultural influence. And you know that there are the proverbial upstreams and downstreams of culture and politics. So they rather attack culture, and unfortunately gaming is no exception. We already talked about movies and trivial literature.
Nowadays we would get Conan the Vegetarian. Likes it gluten-free and men as well. Oh my. But maybe I was wrong. He would not only be vegeratian but be vegan, of course.
“Arathi” became suddenly a race/tribe out of nowhere. And the Elves who are part of the lineage apparently were sun studio addicts.
Even Warhammer isn’t safe. Just google Solomorne Anthar in the Game Rogue Trader. For Jae Heydari, same game, it is harder to google, she loves love-making with everything. Not only humans. The true progressives in the very xenophobic world of Warhammer. The developers got away with it.
It is very hard to find anything that isn’t compromised already these days.
I cannot believe it, my carefully crafted comment above truly made it through Akismet! 😉
Praise God!