Blizzard in Blackpool - Free clothes or uniforms?

dulpit

Hey, so I work in Blackpool retail park, and I notice a rake of the Blizzard staff wearing all sorts of Blizzard gear (everyone is wearing hoodies/t-shirts with Overwatch on them now).

Just wondering - is this a uniform people have to wear? Or do people just wear them because it's free clothes?

razorblunt

Casual dress code so I'd imagine it might just be a case of wearing the free gear as their uniform ... if you get me.

gimmick

Blizzard staff are very easy to notice even if they are not wearing their t shirts etc.

Sephiroth_dude

Do they develop games in the Cork Office?

nerwen

There's a fair amount of free t-shirts and whatnot but also discounted clothes from places like Jinx. Most everyone are gamers though so while there's no dress code most tend to own a fair amount of gaming related clothes/bags and so on.

All the game development is done in the US.

gimmick wrote: »

Blizzard staff are very easy to notice even if they are not wearing their t shirts etc.

Betcha you couldn't tell the Apple/Amazon/Blizzard crowds apart if they weren't wearing them. It's just people.

Oafley Jones

gimmick wrote: »

Blizzard staff are very easy to notice even if they are not wearing their t shirts etc.

I'm guessing there isn't a gym facility there. Three got in the lift with me yesterday at Blackpool carpark. They were like the Southpark gamer brought to life. It was bit odd. I say this as someone who could do with running a few laps myself.

Sonics2k

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Do they develop games in the Cork Office?

Nope, they do the Customer Service stuff there.

Worked there myself a few years back and still have friends working there. I'm pretty sure there is a gym now which a fair amount of the staff use, but a lot of the longer term staff have been there for years, working 11-12 hour shifts and living a "gamer" lifestyle so to speak and many of them have piled on weight since starting there.

Lyaiera

I knew a lot of gamers when I was in uni. A huge amount of them went to Blizzard. The amount of swag they get is unreal. I know of people who have been there over a decade. They say they enjoy their work. I believe them. I also know people who aren't gamers, they might play the odd game like a lot of people but they wouldn't identify with the "gamer" persona. They hated working at Blizzard. A professional environment, sure, well run, to a degree, but they really played on the idea that the people who worked for them were the kind of people who would work all day on customer support for WoW, then go home and play more WoW.

I know a huge amount of people in the games industry, actually developing the games, designers, writers, developers, artists, a few team leaders, and one or two game leads. I've had regular conversations with people who have been the lead designer of some really big games. Apart from one person I used to talk to, who owns a huge gaming company, and is a name any PC gamer would recognise who was an abusive asshole, who abused his employees (and has been sued for such.) Every games industry person I know is a professional, with at least 10 years of real experience, and they think the game industry is absolutely broken, and there's big campaigns from veterans to change it.

The problem is you have all these guys with huge experience, after starting with the industry when they were 22. They sacrificed a huge amount to get where they are, but the sacrifice never lets up. They're no in their thirties, forties, or fifties, and I know one or two in their sixties. They have families, kids, one person has grandkids, and they want a personal life. But their employers sometimes want them working for 18 hour days, for three months at the time, with maybe a half day on a sunday. Most of their friends in the industry have either gone to banking, insurance, or the stock market, the work is just as appealing to a programmer, a lot of challenge, and intelligence needed, but they work nine-to-five for far better money.

Kids play games, grow up thinking they want to work in games, then will do anything to work for the industry. And then they get abused because of that. There's a few companies who know this is blatantly wrong, and most of the games industries problems come from plain bad management, and unreasonable expectations. I know quite a few guys who have turned down extremely well playing jobs, because they asked what the culture was like at the company. They ones who stayed in games have gone to teams where when five pm comes, they switch off their computer and go home. And these companies are making games just as good, that re just as successful, as the places with massive crunch. They're just smarted about what they do.