Blizzard developers who attended a recent virtual town hall meeting are outraged following comments made by Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, whose defense of controversial and unpopular policies like stack ranking and a return to office mandate has reportedly dealt a serious blow to morale at the studio.
As reported by Game Developer, a recent company-wide Q&A session where Ybarra answered pre-selected questions left employees reeling. Ybarra reportedly downplayed the news that employees would only be receiving 58% of their usual profit-sharing bonus, despite the last quarter being a record-setting one for Blizzard that saw the company's "highest quarterly net bookings to date," according to Activision Blizzard's fourth quarter earnings report. Ybarra reportedly suggested executives were not making substantially more than rank-and-file employees, a statement that did not go over well.
When asked how company leadership planned to retain talent once employees are forced to return to the office for at least three days of the week starting in July, Ybarra reportedly didn't have any such plan. Instead, he simply said that at the end of the day, people need to do what makes them happy, and if the company's goals and an employee's personal goals don't align, that employee needs to "do what will make [them] happy." Many employees saw his statement as encouraging people unhappy with Blizzard's return to office mandate to simply quit the company.
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