SDGC Live 1/28/21 - Activision Blizzard Says No To Diversity

This week we focus on Activision Blizzard's disastrous response to a call for increased diversity among those being interviewed for new jobs at the company. The AFL-CIO, America's largest group of unions, asked Activision Blizzard to commit to interviewing at least one diverse (as in, not a straight cis white male) candidate for every job they post. As a note, that says commit to interview, not commit to hire. Activision Blizzard responded that this was basically a waste of their valuable time. Electronic Arts was actually asked the same thing by the AFL-CIO, and at least gave a "we'll look into it" non answer. While normally that would be a pretty unsatisfying response, Activision Blizzard still rose to the challenge of saying something worse.

Of course, it isn't a chill show if we don't gush a little about what we've been playing. We also talk about Microsoft raising the price of Xbox Live, only to walk it back mere hours later. At least free-to-play games like Fortnite are now actually free-to-play without an Xbox Live subscription now! Finally, we each take some time to recount our personal histories with online multiplayer games. It doesn't take long for us to drop the "online" part of that prompt.