Mike Ybarra speaks to gamers and reflects on recent events at Blizzard

By werdt07/04/2022591 Views

I'm honored to be a part of Blizzard Entertainment, the rich history, the amazing talent, the best gaming communities, and of course, the awesome games we're so lucky to create. I've been leading Blizzard for a few months now, and in addition to this week's exciting news, I want to share some initial thoughts as we strive to put our teams and players at the forefront of everything we do.

2021 has been difficult for all of us. As individuals, we care about treating everyone around us with respect and dignity. As professionals, we care deeply about our creations and want to work in the most supportive and safe environment possible.

Our first priority - now and in the future - is the work we do to rebuild your trust in Blizzard.

Seeing Blizzard work as creatively and diligently as we have through this difficult time (in addition to the current pandemic) has been inspiring. Navigating through these challenges, evolving our development processes, introspecting, and seeing how we can improve our culture shows incredible strength and commitment to everyone, our work, and the gaming communities.

Mike Ybarra s'adresse aux joueurs et revient sur les récents événements ayant eu lieu chez Blizzard

I was also encouraged to read forums, social media posts, and emails from people inside and outside of Blizzard, standing up for what is right and giving us your advice. I want you all to know that we are listening, and we are committed to change. As a first step in improving communication with the community, I want to highlight some of the initial actions we are taking to improve our culture:

We are committed to setting up these teams as a priority.

We tripled the size of our compliance and investigation teams and defined clear accountability for unacceptable behavior. This applies to all Blizzard employees, including leadership and management.

We have shared representation data internally with our teams and have targets for improving these rates.

We have implemented a feedback program so that employees have confidence in management evaluation, and we will use this to measure the quality and effectiveness of our managers.

These actions are just the beginning of the work ahead of us for Blizzard. I am motivated and enthusiastic to work directly to build the best environment for our teams, and enable them to bring their vision to life.

We also know that we need to deliver content to our players on a more consistent basis and innovate both within and beyond our existing games. We have some exciting things to announce, and I'll talk more about them next week.

I want to thank our amazing communities and teams for your devotion and guidance, which will always be our northern star.

Towards an incredible year 2022 and beyond.

Mike 'Qwik' Ybarra