Blizzard Developer Quits in Protest For Being Asked to Downgrade Staff Reviews!

Putting all the stuff regarding Microsoft’s (now very shaky) proposed takeover of Activision/Blizzard to one side, for Blizzard specifically it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the last couple of years have been pretty rough. And not just in terms of gaming titles, but also their public relations. – You may, for example, recall all the allegations back in 2020 regarding hugely inappropriate behaviour from many senior staff figures at the company.

In this regard though, it seems that staff problems are back but in a somewhat different situation. – Following a report via PCGamesN, Brian Birmingham, a senior member of Blizzard’s development team, has resigned from his role at the company citing allegations that he was effectively being forced to, without warrant, downgrade staff employee performance review scores simply to meet redundancy-style quotas.

Major Blizzard Dev Quits In Protest!

According to the allegations, senior management figures at Blizzard were apparently dissatisfied that, as part of his employee review report, Brian Birmingham didn’t cite at least 5% of his staff performance levels as, effectively, being ‘below expectations’.

Now, you might be wondering why this is important. Well, according to Mr Birmingham that 5% category was created simply for a financial means of basically estimating who should receive a bonus and how much they would be entitled to. So, in a nutshell, it would appear that Mr Birmingham didn’t believe as many as 5% of his employees were performing ‘below satisfactory’, and because of this, management actively encouraged him to rethink this position to ensure that the quota was met.

So yeah, in order to meet financial targets and budgets, it would appear that Blizzard was willing to cut the bonus of staff members who may have fully deserved it. And possibly worse, both asked and encouraged senior members of the development to pick people for this unhappy fate!

Overall then, it’s certainly a solid move of support from Brian Birmingham who hopefully won’t find himself out of employment for too long. You have to admit though, this is (yet another) scumbag move from Blizzard!

What do you think though? – Let us know in the comments!