Blizzard boss wants to win back the lost trust of the fans

Mike Ybarra, the head of Blizzard, has done a lot so that fans of the game company can trust them again – at least he hopes so.

Being a Blizzard fan hasn’t been easy in recent years. Not only have all of the major games from the once-popular developer drastically dropped, but many scandals surrounding the company – from sexism to abuse and death threats – make it hard to get excited about upcoming games.

It is also clear to current Blizzard boss Mike Ybarra that the confidence of almost all players has been shaken. In a blog post, he now explained that they want to regain trust – and revealed what steps are being taken to do so.

Who is Mike Ybarra? Mike Ybarra is the current CEO of Blizzard. For a short time he ran the company together with Jennifer Oneal, but she left the co-management after only a few months, so that Ybarra now holds this position alone. He is quite popular with the players, which is also due to the fact that he streams regularly, keeps in touch with the community and plays World of Warcraft at a fairly high level.

What did he say? Im Article on the official Blizzard site Ybarra points out that the past year has been pretty tough – and Corona was just one of the reasons why, alluding to all the incidents and findings surrounding Blizzard and the great abuse scandal.

The main goal is to rebuild trust in Blizzard, both in terms of fans and employees.

The efforts that are being pursued or are already being implemented are:

• The management team wants to be measured directly against the improvement in corporate culture. Pay and success is tied directly to success in creating a safe, inclusive and creative workplace.
• More full-time positions will be created to improve corporate culture. Typically, these are often roles filled by people who already have full-time jobs. That should be different now and the new leaders should include:
  • A “culture leader” who aims to preserve the best of today and strive for the necessary improvements.
  • New organizational leadership in HR to enable teams to create a safe, positive workplace for all.
  • A “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Leader” who is solely responsible for advancing these areas at multiple levels.
• The size of the Compliance and Investigation team, which investigates violations and allegations, has been tripled and clear guidelines for accountability and unacceptable behavior have been developed that apply to all employees, including bosses.
• Internally, representation data was shared with employees and clear goals were set to improve these values.
• There is now an ‘Upward Feedback Scheme’ so employees can rate their managers and this is used as a means of assessing the quality and effectiveness of managers.

These are just a few of the changes and more are sure to follow in the coming months.

At the end, Ybarra also revealed that there will be new content and information about games soon – we discussed what that could be in this article.