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Was Blizzard’s real name decision nothing more than a PR stunt?

Was Blizzard’s real name decision nothing more than a PR stunt?

The following is an opinion piece from guest blogger Phil “rootwyrm” Jaenke:

Everyone has been up in arms about Blizzard’s RealID stunt. For those of you who weren’t following, Blizzard came up with a strategy to reduce trolling and flaming in the forums—all of your forum postings would now use your RealID information (your real legal name along with your “main character” and server). They announced it publicly to much noise from customers who were understandably livid. This got customers talking angrily, but talking nonetheless. These customers posted blogs, which got linked, relinked, and relinked again, which drove more hits to Blizzard and World of Warcraft to see what the fuss was about.

I really feel like I’m the only one who realized that while the furor was genuine and legitimate—exposure of transgendered individuals, exposure of people to harassment in real life, a complete reversal of Blizzard’s stated “publish personal information and get a lifetime ban” policy—there was really no point to the reactions.

I am not a lawyer. But I don’t need to be a lawyer to tell you that this really was most likely a pure PR stunt. Legal never would have allowed this. Why? Because of any number of reasons; invasion of privacy, exposure of private information, unauthorized disclosure of personal information for starters. But much more importantly, Blizzard-Activision would have gotten sued. There’s some obvious laws it falls under, but they knew full well that if they did it, they would be in a great deal of legal hot water in nothing flat.

The Legal Problems

That 13 years old bit is the most important, and the big blockade that prevents Blizzard from ever doing this. You see, just like everyone else, Blizzard is subject to a law called COPPA. They would have to obtain new, specifically verifiable parental consent—just having Mom or Dad’s Visa number probably isn’t enough here. Then, and only then, after obtaining verifiable parental consent could they publish their real name—and Blizzard has absolutely no idea how many, which, or if players are underage. They presume the use of a credit card as verifiable proof that the user is over 18—which is not at all true of credit cards. I had my first Visa at the age of 15, in my own name. You can order a credit card in a child’s name, typically at no fee, from most issuers. If Blizzard had published even a single name of someone under 13 years old, they would have opened themselves to dozens or hundreds of lawsuits from parents, as well as investigations by the FTC.

It requires a new agreement between the player and the provider, a specific contract. In most states, a minor is defined as someone under the age of 18, and minors cannot enter into certain types of agreements. It is highly unlikely that it would be legal for a minor to enter into an agreement that requires the publication of their real name on a forum as a requirement for being allowed to play a game. This would open Blizzard up to another flurry of lawsuits from angry parents who are now getting harassing calls and death threats mailed to their house because little Jimmy ninja-ed some loot and everyone at school knows now.

No matter how Blizzard did it, they knew full well they would be sued. They would be sued in the most expensive manner possible, by thousands of people. Whether or not these suits would have any merit, any factual basis, or any chance of winning just doesn’t matter. They still would have to respond to every suit individually, make motions to consolidate as class actions, then fight for dismissals. If you’ve ever been sued, or your employer has ever been sued, you know that it’s expensive. It doesn’t matter if you can win—it’s still expensive. John Doe can sue you for $20,000,000 because he stubbed his toe on the sidewalk out front, and even though it’s completely absurd and he has no hope of prevailing, it will still cost you several thousand dollars to get it dismissed.

How many of you think Blizzard-Activision is stupid enough to invite lawsuits that would cost them millions of dollars to defend even if they knew they could win them? Exactly. They are not idiots.  Jerks, narcissists, greedy? Possibly. But definitely not idiots.

So what is this?

Simply put, World of Warcraft and Starcraft II have not been garnering much press lately—especially not World of Warcraft, which is why it was announced there. It certainly drew eyeballs and minds right to World of Warcraft. Starcraft II will get its press come release—World of Warcraft needed more press, so they generated it. Think about it—when was the last time you non-players heard about World of Warcraft from someone other than a player? Probably not at all in the past 12 months or so—especially if you don’t play yourself. Show of hands, how many people here know about Cataclysm and when it’s coming out? Exactly.

It wasn’t the 30,000+ angry comments that drove Blizzard to change their mind on RealID; applying RealID to the forums was never real, and never would have been implemented. I very highly doubt they even seriously considered implementing it. Blizzard does not respond to customer threats or anger; they just ignore it completely. Starcraft II’s pricing model and “purchasable user maps” received an exceptionally negative response at Blizzcon and in the press, but they’ve stuck to it. BNet 2.0 has received an exceptionally negative response; Blizzard hasn’t changed it one bit. They get hundreds of thousands of complaints about changes to classes in World of Warcraft every time they make them, and they ignore nearly every single one. They have a very solid track record on this; when it comes to player complaints, the response is “go away. We’ll just sign up more.” But they were standing up for PRINCIPLES!

Their stated claims were that they hoped it would reduce the flames, trolling and hostility in the forums. Everybody should know by now that these statements are plainly absurd. Where real names are revealed, it does nothing to reduce the hostility or vitriol, and never has. If a sore subject is a sore subject, it will remain so under any circumstances. Again, Blizzard is not stupid. They already know all this. They also knew that doing so would open up green posters and the most vocal community members, pro and con, to real life harassment, death threats, and yes, likely violence in some cases. Would it be the norm? Absolutely not. But it only takes one incident to create a PR disaster of unmanageable proportions.

The one overriding principle at Blizzard-Activision, while they may or may not make great games depending who you ask, is profit. Just like every other for-profit company. The goal is the bottom line, nothing more, nothing less. If they can have fun doing it, if they can make great games, so much the better! But at the end of the day, they aren’t about to do anything that would imperil the bottom line—especially not something that would imperil the bottom line that greatly. How many companies do you know—still in business—that have basically walked up to their customers, slapped them and said “we dare you to sue us”? Nobody is going to actually invite lawsuits down on their head.

Where’s Blizzard-Activision’s real benefit from it? They get sued repeatedly, but what’s their financial gain? They would still have to employ the same number of people to monitor and moderate forums. They would still have to employ the same number of GMs and support staff. The staff already has your real name available from subscriber records. There was no clear or real financial benefit in doing something like this—unless you wanted to generate a great deal of noise for very little money.

So it’s a scam and a huge PR blunder?

Yes and no. Yes, it was probably a total scam. They convinced millions of players that personal information would be handed out to anyone and everyone with an Internet connection. And it was a huge PR win for Blizzard-Activision. Why? Because they convinced somewhere well north of a million people that they actually listened to the player complaints, which made Blizzard-Activision look good to all those players.

So now they have a huge subscriber base that’s suddenly happy with them and thinks they’re great. They have the people who don’t play World of Warcraft suddenly talking about it again. And their actual cost to achieve this? Two forum posts by a full-time employee who would have been writing forum posts anyways. Did they lose some subscriptions? Probably no more than they do to regular subscriber churn, and most of those will probably come back now. Did they make a lot of people angry? Yes, but with one post, they converted the vast majority of them to happy customers who are now talking about World of Warcraft and Blizzard-Activision positively. The folks who continue to complain, are the folks who always complain.

At the end of the day, we probably never will know the exact truth. In fact, it’s not even “probably”—for it to work, we can’t know the truth. But after careful analysis, I’m left wondering which PR or marketing pro cooked this scheme up. Because they pulled it off flawlessly; they even had me convinced for a time. Bravo.

Comments

  1. Dave Very nice piece.
  2. Gate28
    Gate28 Blizzard doesn't exist anymore. It's just Activision now, sometimes taking the guise of a friendly clown everyone likes to make the bad things they do look better.
  3. Sledgehammer70
    Sledgehammer70 The Real ID was an opt in program. You have to say yes & sign-up under the forums to actually have your name displayed. The big thing that is crazy is that Blizzard like Facebook allows you to see friends of friends which already has lead me to deny access to my where abouts while gaming.
  4. Cliff_Forster
    Cliff_Forster As someone that is totally non biased on the subject (I know, hard to believe)... But I just don't give a darn about WOW, never played it, likely never will...

    I think its just one of those times where someone at corporate shows up and says, hey, I have this big idea, and it will help this dept, it will improve workflow, so on so forth, but, we are not sure how our customers are going to feel about it.

    So, what do you do, you flip the switch and see if they throw a big enough fit, and if they do, you just say, hey customers, we value and love you so much we realize the error in our ways and that this was fundamentally a bad idea. We just thought the pros for us outweighed the cons for you, but obviously not the case, carry on like we were never here.... As long as the customer still gets what they want, its not like a bad idea ever killed anybody. I really don't think its going to mar Blizzard's PR to a point where WOW addicts are going to stop playing their favorite title.

    I really think its as simple as that. We have situations like that where I work sometimes. We have a set of customers and authorized representatives, and sometimes you decide you really need to change something in your business practice thats going to upset the apple cart a bit in their eyes. Do you ask permission or prior input? Not if you actually want to pull it off. You just say, hey, we are doing this, or, you go one step further and actually do it, then see what the reaction is. In some cases we get what we want, streamline a process internally while doing it, in other cases the customers freak out and we say, sorry, we love you guys, we really do, so here is what were gonna do...

    I think its as simple as that.
  5. primesuspect
    primesuspect I don't think a company with the single largest grossing game of all time, and the requisite shareholders that go along with that, can just have something as simple as "flip a switch and see how they react". In fact, I believe there may be legal repercussions about doing that very thing.

    They can't flip switches without changing their subscriber agreements, etc.

    And this isn't just about WoW - this is about Battle.net and everything that's going to be on it (Starcraft II, Diablo III, etc.)

    You're painting a picture of "Silly WoW addicts and their silly games" but it's much more complicated than that.
  6. Cliff_Forster
    Cliff_Forster Now, now Prime, I never called anyone silly. Quite contrary, I'm just saying because I have nothing vested in the game, I have an outsiders view of the situation. That does not make my view any more or less valid, it just means I'm not biased for a change.

    As I understand it, Blizzard has been generally considered a class act amongst developers. WOW is arguably the most successful gaming product ever. I'm not defending them, I'm not even saying that what they were thinking about doing was technically legal, but from their viewpoint, you could see the potential benefits for them, and in some ways the community. From a consumer standpoint, I can understand why I might not want it. I can see both sides here.

    I'm just saying from a business stand point how you solve problems and innovate when you know there is going to be opposition, especially from your customers. Sometimes you push, and you get pushed back. They withdrew the lousy idea, case closed for now.

    Perhaps in the future they will change the subscriber agreements as you suggested, and people will have a choice as to if they do or do not want to continue to support that product, but for now, Blizzard had an idea, they knew it was not going to be popular with some of their customers, they pushed, measured the outrage, decided the outrage was not worth the benefits that the change might yield (or potential legal battles), they say hey customers, we love you, sorry about that, forget we mentioned it.

    You know me, I'm as anti corporate / pro consumer as anyone that posts here. In this case I'm pretty sure Blizzard's loyal fans are going to forgive them for this since they set it right so quickly.
  7. Koreish
    Koreish
    Gate28 wrote:
    Blizzard doesn't exist anymore. It's just Activision now, sometimes taking the guise of a friendly clown everyone likes to make the bad things they do look better.

    QFT
  8. CyrixInstead
    CyrixInstead It was an expensive PR stunt for the Blizzard employee who used their RealID and had people track down where he lived!

    ~Cyrix
  9. Tim
    Tim Over a yer ago, I was banned off the WoW forums for some quite mild comments about the Blizzcon ticket buying process. They have not reinstated me.

    But I'll show them. When Starcraft 2 comes out next week, I'll make a whole new Battle.net account and be able to post again! HA-hahahahahahaaaaaaaa! :)

    They won't keep ME away! And I may make a seperate accout for Cataclysm!
  10. Sirisaacnuton Funny enough, I was in the camp of not having even thought about WoW in a good while, except during the Mr. T commercials. I had no idea Catalyst was on the horizon.

    Now suddenly, after seeing a link to the controversy on Penny Arcade, I've found myself reading up on the upcoming changes and new content and trying to fight the itch to fire up the account again.

    So if it was just a great big "Hey! I'm still here! Don't forget about me!" ploy, it was certainly effective at getting their name back out there, if nothing else, and I'm sure I'm not the only one it worked on.

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