More evidence has surfaced that confirms that Blizzard Entertaintment is quite possibly one of the worst video game studios in history. VFX artist Chris Sayers recently revealed how he was mistreated by Blizzard Entertainment during his 13-month stint with the beleaguered studio.
What is interesting is that being gay, and having a PRIDE flag emoji and pronouns in his bio was not enough to save him. White gay males are one rung above white straight males in the victimhood totem pole and are no longer immune to layoffs. Gays are now just as expendable as straights in the DEI racket.
What follows is a verbatim transcript from his X profile. To his credit, he’s still on X unlike the cowards who left X because Elon Musk took over and wisely decided that it’s important that free speech be an integral component of the digital town square.
Warning: for some reason, he didn’t capitalize his sentences which makes his revelations hard to decipher:
so, enough time has passed now for me to talk about why i decided to leave Blizzard. a mixed year with great teammates, but a management that mistreated, lied to me, gaslit me, gave me a fake promotion, and HR that refused to help.
buckle up friendos. 💪
i wanna start by saying that all of the people I got to work with on Team 4 (Overwatch 2) were incredible. they were warm, welcoming, fun, friendly and just so goddamn talented. there were so many great people on my team championing for me and i am so grateful for their support
unfortunately however, i spent most of a year stressed out of my mind, working 4 peoples jobs at once, and having management make promises they had no intention of fulfilling and i ultimately felt like i had no choice but to leave for my own mental health.
in July of 2023, i was invited to a meeting by Art Leadership and production, to let me know they were interested in promoting me to Lead VFX Artist of the cosmetics team. (skins, emotes, POTGs, etc.), i had only been there 6 months and I told them basically “if youre sure?? lol”
but before accepting i was adamant, that we were all on the same page about the full role, what it meant, what i would be doing, and also, what the “promotion” would come with. (pay increase, title change) and confirmed all of those details before going further
these conversations included other Lead VFX, Art Directors, Associate Art Directors, Production Directions and also HR. and as we were *all* happy, i started the job effective immediately, with the details to come at the end of the week, in writing.
the new role was:
– all of my existing responsibilities and workload as a senior
– becoming a line manager of 3 people immediately
– managing our entire outsourced vfx pipeline in china
– plus additional Lead things (planning, much more meetings lol)
friday of that week comes, nothing, but, the Production Dir does announce my promotion to Lead to the whole team on the thursday! its official! its happening! the whole team knows! i even tweet about it, because im so excited. we’re all gucci!
on my first week as lead. my new manager, tells me that we are going to have to fire one of my new reports cus he wont RTO
me: “he is waiting for a medical accommodation because he is a carer for his parents”
them: “yeah [laughing] we’re not gonna do that for a junior”
another lead on the team offers to deliver the news for me, because it is my first week as lead. and the person we are supposed to fire is one of my closest friends on the team. he is given until the end of the month to either relocate, or leave. we’re all distraught.
im now doing my senior role, my lead role and now all the work that this great vfx artist was doing. they then refuse to hire an intern, another one of my reports, who is incredibly talented and we all love. so i add all the work they were going to do, to my plate.
a month goes by, and i have now sent an email or slack message, every other day to find out what is happening with the pay increase and title change.
im told i have to wait until August, because thats when all the promotions happen but “dont worry. its all happening”
i then discover that as I am earning less than 50% of every other Lead VFX Artist at blizzard, so much so, that as a Lead, my salary is lower than every person I am managing. i send more emails. im told its cus im in the UK, and my salary is based on market value, not my value.
i ask HR if they think that it is ethically okay to pay me less than 50% of every person for doing the same job?
they tell me “why would we pay you more than we have to? that doesnt make any business sense”
i realise i am talking to a person who doesnt give a shit about people
another month passes and i get to august and turns out, “no no, its actually september now” for some reason. but “dont worry, its coming. its definitely a promotion, and theres definitely a pay increase.”
i continue to be overworked, and exhausted, but hopeful. (fool)
another few weeks pass, and its getting to 3 months being a lead. so i send an email out to everyone, directors, VPs, HR, leads, you name it, telling them that if there is no written information by Sep 1st, i will stop doing the role immediately.
SUDDENLY, people have something to say!
this entire time, HR have not responded once and they finally reply inviting me for a quick call. it is in this call that HR ask me “what promotion? i have no idea what you are talking about?”
at this point i raised a formal complaint.
i had months of messages, emails that i sent to HR to explain what i was talking about and they finally reply with
“you seem to be confused” … “there is no promotion” … “leadership is a lateral move” … “its just a change of responsibilities” … “there is no pay increase”
i was livid, naturally, and asked what any normal fucking rational human would “why would *anybody* want that promotion then?” which obviously they then did the old “i can see you’re frustrated, i can see how you misinterpreted this”.
the investigation from the formal complaint comes back after a few weeks and after some careful deliberation, decides that HR did nothing wrong, and followed all processes correctly. SO, i hand in my resignation about an hour later. but it doesnt end there!!!
because no!!!
HR then told me!!! that because of my role as a Lead!!! i had gained inexplicable knowledge that would put me at a business risk to work anywhere else!!! so they are activating a Non-Compete Clause that restricts me from working ANYWHERE AT ALL for 3 MONTHS!!!!😍😍
and, you may be rightfully thinking “oh, so this is a *paid* 3 months, right? you cant stop someone from working at ALL for 3 months without paying the-…” INCORRECT that is exactly what they did, and unfortunately, completely legal, because get fucked, i guess???
i said I cant survive for 3 months without pay, I have a mortgage and they looked me in the eye and said:
“well, you probably shouldn’t have signed the contract then 🙂”
within a few minutes i was locked out of slack/email, and that was the end of my time at Blizzard. 🎉🎉🎉
if anyone has continued so far, thank you for listening 💚💚💚💚
idk what the point of this is, but, i needed to get it off my chest. blizzard had every opportunity to do the right thing, and they continually failed at that.
Congratulations if you made it to the bitter end!
PRO TIP: If you want to be taken seriously in life, learn proper punctuation.
Conclusion
I wish he would have named the people that screwed him. From reading comments to this X thread, other former Blizzard employees were being gaslighted as well.
If anyone has any doubts about how truly despicable Activision-Blizzard is, hopefully, they have been quickly dispelled by this new evidence. It is abundantly clear that all of the moral posturing and virtue signaling that Blizzard has engaged in over the years was a cynical smokescreen to hide their nefarious deeds and disgraceful business practices. They used alphabet people like pawns.
To add insult to injury, for years Blizzard has relentlessly promoted how great working for Blizzard is to attract recruits with their obnoxious #blizzlife hashtag. (The official BlizzLife X feed looks like a series of hostage videos with fake smiles). Never mind the fact that Blizz pays less than average industry wages and moronic bimbos like Arin Goldsmith makes working for Blizzard seem like a fairy tale.
In corporate America, middle management routinely jerks employees around by making verbal promises of promotions with pay increases. This kind of behavior by publicly traded companies makes capitalism look bad. The sad truth is that most investors have no clue about what makes a good video game; all they want is risk-averse fast profits.
I’m very torn about how I feel about this person’s predicament. Part of me feels bad for anyone who is treated so poorly like this. But on the other hand, he may have got exactly what he deserved. He chose to work for a soulless evil woke company that’s been screwing workers and players over for decades. Even as far back as 2004, Blizzard was so callous that Mark Kern remarked that they laid off many people after World of Warcraft was released. All of this happened under the leadership of Mike Morhaime and the rest of the executive team.
There’s a good chance that Chris Sayers was hired because he is gay and as a result took a job from a straight male but thanks to the mass adoption of DEI and ESG, we’ll never really know.
One interesting revelation came up in his thread and is that he was tasked with supervising VFX artists from China. Activision-Blizzard has been outsourcing much of its art overseas from countries like China, Russia, and India for years. They do this because it’s dirt cheap labor and they don’t have to pay benefits. Most gamers are not even aware of this.
For years, I have been shouting from the rooftops that the current agenda-driven AAA video game industry needs to be broken into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind. The mounting evidence that most video games are made in virtual sweatshops by eager-to-please young developers who put in long hours for little pay only confirms this. Most video games today are terrible anyway.
While I’m sympathetic to workers, unionization is not the answer. Unions while having good intentions promote incompetent people and eventually become corrupt and overrun by wokesters. The union movement is one of the best examples of O’Sullivan’s Law in action.
I still believe the indie game movement is the only real future for video games. I have every confidence that the AI revolution will empower many creatives to take the plunge and create, produce, and sell their games free from the demands of shareholders and cultural Marxist commissars.
The truth is that most video game developers are slaves to other people’s dreams. They are replaceable cogs in a big machine that chews them up and spits them out. The sooner the AAA video game industry dies, the better.
–Wolfshead
