What constitutes a "significant number" of customers to your mind? Losing 5% of WoW customers in very mature recurring revenue business would be huge hit, and not something they can easily make up. Its not like kids today are beating down the doors to play a game that launched the year Ronald Reagan died.

Even customers without a heart will be upset when content deadlines slip because of labor turmoil caused by this mismanagement.

And, of course, people who are upset about this who do like Blizzard games or work for Blizzard don't want Blizzard to be killed off. They want things to change. And it is not like 'frat boy culture" or incompetent management benefits shareholders. So perhaps that change could come.

This may put some hurt on Blizzard, but all of the popular opinion/employee action has been ‘localized’ to Blizzard, not the company as a whole. It would be a hit for WoW to lose some percentage of players, but Blizzard on accounts for 24% of the companies income [1]. If the PR squad can keep it contained with Blizzard, then Activision and King can just go on making money. Maybe the company as a whole let’s Blizzard take the fall and slowly tries to re-establish the brand.

TL;DR — I don’t think this will have any major impacts to anyone in the long-term, but I can remain hopeful that at least some changes at Blizzard will benefit their employees.

1: www.investopedia.com/how-activision-blizzard-makes-money-4799286

The main thing people lost here is hope. Before they were angry with Blizzard products but hope remained that the next game, the next expansion or the next patch would fix things. But now hope is lost, the community views this event as the final confirmation that Blizzard is run by really shitty people and their releases will just continue to get worse instead of shaping up.

I don't think it's customers who need to be their main concern, but employees. I have to imagine that they are going to have to pay a pretty significant premium to recruit good people going forward.

Maybe related: See the criticism of their games in this thread. Potentially this is explained by blizzard having trouble employing people who can make them good games...

It would be unprecedented for one of the most profitable companies in the games industry to struggle to hire top talent.

The industry has always relied on a hiring pool that is willing to put up with untold amounts of bullshit for the privilege of working on games instead of CRUD apps.

I don't think this thread or any other social media is a good indicator of a company's ability to hire talent. Look at Google and Facebook. They get shit on constantly by online commentators, but they're doing pretty well and seem to have no problem hiring at market rates.

Facebook pays well above the typical market rate from what I can see, presumably as a result of that being the only way to attract the talent they want with their reputation.

Google has a great reputation as a great place to work with most people in the industry. I think that is actually responsible for a pretty decent portion of their success.

People in the game industry who are any good have the ability to work for any number of companies in the game industry, Blizzards worsening reputation is going to mean blizzard has to do more (probably pay more) than those other companies to attract them.

Anecdotal evidence: I've seen so many posts of WoW players swearing to log off for 1 day in protest of recent events. One whole day. Meanwhile posts of players cancelling their subscriptions are few and far between.

Players won’t cancel until they’ve tried and like an alternative. Final Fantasy 14 has had a massive surge of wow players so it’s not like players aren’t looking for alternatives. If they like other games I’d expect many cancellation in the coming months.

I spend more time at /r/wow than I probably should. Lots of people cancelling. Lots of people uninstalling if they've already unsubbed. Or at least claiming to. It's the internet so who knows if they're telling the truth. But there's lots of noise in that direction.

Hope the people who sometimes do population estimates in WoW will report soon. Would love to know if the actual data matches the noise.

That'll really teach Blizzard. Lower their server costs for one day. Ha!

> Blizzard is perhaps the best in the industry at this. They've done shitty things before, as documented in this article, but it hasn't really mattered. The users are hooked and business is booming.

Not as of now they are losing talents. Blizzard is notoriously in the industry for exploitively underpaying their employees.

I have a friend that previously worked in the industry fir several companies, including Blizzard and Activision proper. The stories are indiscernable. The industry itself treats enoloyees like chattle because there 10 people waiting fir the opportunity to be exploited by their favorite franchise.

> "Blizzard's reputation collapsed." The question is, did it collapse among a significant number of their actual customers, or did it mostly collapse among a vocal minority of Twitter and Reddit users?

I gave a hearty chuckle when I read that WoW players had staged and in-game protest as a result of this most recent fiasco. I can't think of a better way to signal that you have no intent take meaningful action.