Activision-Blizzard Underpays Employees to the Point Where They Can't Afford Food

If you needed another reason to hate Activision-Blizzard – and I really assume you don’t – it was just reported by Bloomberg News that employees have just discovered that despite earning record profits, some of their co-workers are being criminally underpaid to the point where they can’t even afford to eat meals every day.

Here’s the long and the short of it: last year, Blizzard Entertainment did an internal survey after employees expressed dissatisfaction with their pay. The results of that survey came back last week and found nothing wrong. In response, one employee did their own survey – sending out a spreadsheet for employees to put their salaries into so they could compare their compensation in a much more public forum.

The results, which haven’t been made public but have been seen by Bloomberg, are striking. For one, on average Blizzard offered employees a 10 percent raise, which is significantly less than what was promised after their first internal survey. Secondly, it was revealed that while producers and engineers could earn healthy six-digit salaries, QA and customer service employees barely earned more than minimum wage – which, given that Blizzard is based in California, means they were not earning enough to live on. In fact, many allegedly needed to skip meals to make ends meet.

This, again, at a time when the company is making record profits: they just had their highest-revenue second quarter ever. So between their record earnings and overpaid CEO, there’s no reason they couldn’t pay their employees fairly… they just choose not to.

So yeah. That’s disgusting. Disgusting because of the way they treat their employees, of course, but also disgusting because in spite of how awful they’ve been recently, people continue to not care and buy their games. Which either means people aren’t willing to take a stand against such obvious crap or they don’t think it’s crap to begin with. Both are equally disturbing to think about.