After the boss threw up, a woman from Disney should now make WoW developer Blizzard better

Studio Blizzard (WoW, Overwatch, Diablo 3) has major problems after a sexism scandal in the summer of 2021. With Jen Oneal, they had actually found a new boss who stood for equality. But she gave up after only a few months in the job. Oneal got less money than her co-boss. Now Blizzard presents Jessica Martinez, the next hope as the new number two.

Who has been Blizzard’s boss so far?

• For years, Blizzard was run by Mike Morhaime (54), a likeable, soft-spoken man who spread a family atmosphere and was popular with fans and employees. He came from the time when Blizzard was independent. Morhaime co-founded the studio in 1991 in Irvine, California
• In 2018, J. Allen Brack, a veteran WoW man, took over. He once stood out when he said people didn’t want WoW Classic at all, they just believed it, but it wasn’t like that. After the sexism scandal in the summer of 2021, Brack had to go. He was seen as an “old guard” who once laughed at BlizzCon when a woman complained that the women in WoW looked like they came out of an underwear catalog.
• Activision installed a dual leadership at Blizzard in August 2021 with Mike Ybara and Jennifer “Jen” Oneal. But after only a few months, Oneal threw down. Since then, the former head of technology Ybara has been managing Blizzard alone within the larger group “Activision Blizzard”, which could soon belong to Microsoft.

The boss left because she didn’t trust the company to take equality seriously

Why did Oneal resign so early? Oneal officially quit in November 2021 because she wanted to fight for the good stuff elsewhere.

In fact, she apparently resigned because she was paid less than her co-chairman Ybara. Supposedly he had a higher salary than her because of his old job and Blizzard didn’t want to match her salary – only when it was too late did they give in.

Oneal apparently found that Blizzard was not taking the “renewal” as seriously as publicly proclaimed and resigned.

This is the new one now: Blizzard has now presented Jessica Martinez as “First Vice President” and “Head of Culture”. She is, so to speak, “number 2” at Blizzard behind Ybara, who was quietly promoted to “President” in February 2022. Before that, he was just “Leader,” whatever that means (via activisionblizzard).

Martinez is said to work on Blizzard’s “culture,” taking care of talent development and nurturing. This probably also corresponds to an agreement that Blizzard made with an equality committee (via mmorpg.com).

Martinez comes from 14 years at Disney, where she worked as a human resources director and strategic advisor. Blizzard points out that she has also rendered outstanding service to culture at Disney.

In addition to Martinez, Activision Blizzard hired Kirsten Hines as its new diversity, equality and inclusion officer in April.

The controversial head of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, had emphasized when introducing Heines that they wanted to become the “most inclusive company in the gaming industry”.

We have already dealt extensively with Blizzard’s “women’s problem” on MeinMMO:

Employee says: Blizzard had 3 powerful women in 2020, all gone in 2021