Things are not good at Blizzard. World of Warcraft is Blizzard’s cash cow, so this is big news. The game requires gamers to pay a monthly subscription in order to keep playing it, and with in-game purchases for mounts, pets, and cosmetics, it is a huge money maker for the company. And now it looks like development on the game has stopped.
This is due to the ongoing lawsuit that the state of California has filed against Activision Blizzard, Blizzard’s parent company, over workplace harassment. The company was accused of having a “frat boy workplace culture”. As you might imagine, morale at the company is at an all-time low, which has prompted developers to stop working on the game.
This comes according to World of Warcraft senior system designer Jeff Hamilton who posted on Twitter, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have all the answers. I can tell you, almost no work is being done on World of Warcraft right now while this obscenity plays out. And that benefits nobody – not the players, not the developers, not the shareholders.”
Obviously Blizzard isn’t abandoning the game yet and we doubt that they will, at least not for a long time. But things are not good at the moment. There have also been reports that players in World of Warcraft have staged a sit-in protest in-game following the allegation leveled at Activision Blizzard. We will have to see where this all goes.
Source Ubergizmo