The plaintiff, who goes by “Jane Doe,” filed the lawsuit against the company as well as former Activision Blizzard employee Miguel Vega. In the suit, the anonymous plaintiff claimed that “Activision Blizzard is a massive video game company with a massive sexual harassment problem.”
Doe also accused the game developer of sexual battery, gender discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and an inability to prevent harassment in the workplace.
The lawsuit shed light on the root cause of the issue, going back years to when the plaintiff first met Vega online. According to her, they both started a short virtual friendship where she sent some “compromising pictures” to him, which she regrets now.
Doe further revealed that Vega helped her secure a full-time job at Activation Blizzard years after the incident and was her manager at the company. The plaintiff alleged that while working under him, Vega constantly threatened to release the photos she sent him years back to the public.
Besides that, Doe claimed that the Activision Blizzard manager sexually harassed her, groped her, and tried to kiss her on several occasions. She added that he insulted her during her time with the company and promised that “one day you’ll give in.”
After receiving constant harassment and blackmail threats, Doe reportedly took the cast to the higher-ups, and Vega was released from his position with Activision Blizzard a month later. Doe’s reason for the lawsuit is apparently because the game developer did not take immediate and corrective action for the situation.
Due to Activision-Blizzard’s failure to act quickly, she claimed that the company was ratifying the former manager’s behavior towards her during his time with them. The lawsuit alleged that Vega “never missed an opportunity to make her feel small.”
As a result, the lawsuit is seeking punitive damages, compensation, as well as the ousting of the Chief Executive Officer of Activision-Blizzard, Bobby Kotick. The CEO was previously accused of allegedly failing to report sexual harassment claims that were reported to him or that he knew about during his time with the game developer.
Shortly after news of the Doe lawsuit circulated, Activision Blizzard put out a statement concerning the situation where they revealed that they took every complaint by an employee seriously and had immediately launched an investigation after Doe filed the complaint.
“We take all employee concerns seriously,” the game developer wrote.
“When the plaintiff reported her concerns, we immediately opened an investigation, and Mr. Vega was terminated within 10 days. We have no tolerance for this kind of misconduct.”
Aside from the Jane Doe lawsuit, Activision Blizzard is currently dealing with a similar case by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in California, now known as California’s Civil Rights Division.
The lawsuit was filed in July and alleged that the company had traces of a “frat boy culture.” It also claimed that there were several cases of discrimination against female employees. The company, however, strongly denied all allegations the DFEH lawsuit put forward.
When the lawsuit was filed, Activision Blizzard attempted to have it dismissed. However, the presiding judge ruled against it and allowed the case to proceed. The DFEH lawsuit will officially begin trial in 2023.
The game developer had a similar lawsuit previously filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was eventually settled out of court for $18 million.
The numerous lawsuits come at a time when the organization is trying to close a deal with Microsoft. The former president of Activision Blizzard, J. Allen Brack, and Claire Hart, the Chief Legal Officer, notably left the Overwatch 2 game developer last year after a wave of litigation.
]]>The season’s tentative schedule will be revealed soon, according to reports. The first major will take place concurrently from December 15 to December 18.
“I have obtained leaked internal documents that appear to reveal the full CDL 2023 season schedule.” An esports reporter, Jacob Hale, tweeted.
Below is a list of the alleged schedule for Call of Duty League:
Major 1 Pro-Am: December 15-18, 2022
Major 2: February 2-5, 2023
Major 3: March 9-12, 2023
Major 4: April 20-23, 2023
Major 5: May 25-28, 2023
CDL Champs: June 15-18, 2023
Ever since they introduced the Call of Duty League in the year 2020, Activision has been busy working to improve the schedule and overall structure.
The global health crisis caused the Home Series format to be scrapped in 2020, but in 2021 and 2022, they began to use online qualifier matches as a stepping stone toward the Majors, which were team-hosted LAN events for every franchise.
Players and fans together have repeatedly offered methodologies to enhance the schedule, along with an early commencement date, tournaments for Challengers competitors to face off against the pros, and several other ideas.
At least according to the records that were leaked, the concerns of fans seem to have been heard.
The full calendar that was found in the leak reveals that there are several bye weeks in between the main events, which take place approximately once every month. According to sources, the season will reach its climax with the CDL Championship Weekend, which will take place from June 15 to 18.
This is going to put the CDL on a very different schedule than it has had in the past, which saw the league beginning in January or February and continuing until August. This timetable is going to be very different. The couple of months that pass between the introduction of a completely new game and the beginning of a CDL season is the rumoured model that would help relieve that concern in a significant way.
According to the report, the CDL as a whole will be in charge of hosting the 1st Major as well as the Championship Weekend. Individual CDL organizations will be responsible for organizing the 2nd through 5th Majors.
The debut of Trendy Warfare 2 is scheduled for October 28. This will allow players and teams to have well over a month of practice time before the first main event of the season begins in December, while also making the most of the excitement surrounding the launch window for the brand new title.
Although reports have confirmed this schedule, it is important to keep in mind that the dates as well as the calendar itself are susceptible to change.
The Call of Duty League stated: “We have been working closely with our teams to finalize the 2023 season schedule, exploring several draft options these last few months. A full season reveal is planned for this fall with more information on dates and locations for each event.”
]]>Akshon Media had previously been the highlight creators for Blizzard’s Overwatch League. The three-year partnership deal signed in 2020 saw the media company produce trailers videos and behind the scene coverages. The expansion of the partnership was mandated owing to the success of the previous engagement shared by both parties.
The new deal will see the media company increase its scope of work with the esports organization. Part of the new partnership includes the production of post-game match highlights and visual content of the Overwatch League for broadcast. The deal also includes coverage of the Call of Duty League, making it the first time Akshon Media will dabble into video content creation for CoD League.
Chief Executive Officer of Akshon Media, Roger Chan spoke on the partnership. He stated that the company was contracted for these global franchises for its amazing ability to produce content that speaks to the global esports community. He shared his excitement about the expansion of the partnership with Activision Blizzard and commended his team for the great act of storytelling.
“These production contracts for the global franchises were awarded to Akshon Media for our uncanny ability to create content that truly resonates with the global esports fans,” Chan said. “Akshon’s hand-picked team understands the storytelling needed to enhance the overall fan experience and we’re thrilled to continue our relationship with Activision Blizzard.”
Created in 2016, the Canadian media company has built a reputation for producing high-quality videos with compelling storytelling at its core. The brand has created multiple digital videos for a range of brands in different industries.
In its arsenal is a wide knowledge of digital marketing and the presence of a strong network of content producers. Akshon Media has operational offices on two continents, with two offices in North America (Los Angeles and Vancouver) and one in Asia (Seoul).
Amongst its clientele within the esports scene includes Overwatch teams like New York Excelsior, T1, Toronto Defiant, NYXL (formerly known as Andbox), and the Gaming Stadium.
The CoD League has secured some partnerships in the first half of the year, like a collaboration with the esports operations company, Esports Engine. The organization has recorded a partnership with the trading platform Aim Lab, with global trading card company Upper Deck releasing a line of cards for the 2022 CoD League.
The Overwatch League has also recorded some notable partnerships in the past years with top brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota, YouTube, Twitter, and Intel to mention a few. Although Activision Blizzard suffered a setback with harassment and discrimination allegations against female employees. This development saw Coca-Cola and State Farm reevaluate its involvement with the Overwatch League.
]]>Activision revealed that the Call of Duty: Warzone Invitational will make its way to Australia and New Zealand for the first time. The tournament is scheduled to hold on July 2nd, a day after the official release of the series.
“Australian and New Zealand Call of Duty fans, mark your calendars and get ready for an epic event,” the press release read. “The Terminal List – Warzone Rebirth Island Tournament, takes place on Saturday 2 July and will see Activision Publishing and Prime Video Australia & New Zealand partner for the first time to celebrate the launch of new series, The Terminal List starring Chris Pratt.”
The event is expected to feature top Call of Duty gamers from Australia and New Zealand that make up the 10 participating teams. While the teams will be announced at a later date in June, the Warzone event will feature commentators and guests from the ANZ region.
The event will be broadcasted via the official Call of Duty Twitch channel and will be produced by You Know Media. The tournament will be hosted in the new gaming house of one of the oldest and most successful esports franchises in Australia, the Chiefs Esports Club. Information as it pertains to time schedule, teams and their captains, and possible giveaways for viewers will be announced at a closer date to the event proper.
The tournament has a prize pool of $20,000 AUD and in-game rewards for Amazon Prime Video subscribers. Only ANZ subscribers who watch the tournament via the live Twitch stream will be eligible for the rewards.
Activision has earlier this year announced the return of the Call of Duty Mobile World Championship. The tournament is scheduled to be concluded by December 2022, with the largest prize pool in the history of the game. The participating teams will compete for a part of the $1.7 million prize pool.
The expansion of the title as one of the biggest esports titles continues. With a range of influencer tournaments having to use the Call of Duty Warzone title in recent times. An example of such influencer tournaments includes the Fnatic’s Moonryde Invitational. The invitational was, however, named after its Streamer Dario ‘Moonryde’ Ferracci. With a prize pool of ￡30,000, the tournament featured 35 teams which consisted of top steamers.
Amazon, on the other hand, has since 2016 been active within the esports and gaming scene. The company started out as Twitch Prime before it rebranded its gaming division to Prime Gaming.
It has over time partnered with top esports and game publishers Riot Games and Respawn Entertainment. With the latest partnership of its Prime Video arm with Activision, the brand adds Activision to its rich list of partners within the esports scene.
]]>Ever since Blizzard relaunched WoW Classic servers at the end of August 2019, the prominent gaming company saw immense growth in revenue and won back some of the support they lost within the gaming community during the Blitzchung controversy last October.
Since August, Blizzard have remained mostly hands-off when it came to WoW Classic as a potential esports title. While many see it as a very unbalanced game that is unsuited to competitive play, there are plenty of gamers who view the situation differently.
In a bid to show WoW Classic can work as an esports game, prominent WoW streamer and content creator Tips Out organised the Classic Dueler’s League (CDL), which was succeeded by the Twitch Rivals-hosted WoW Classic battleground tournament. The latter featured a plethora of Twitch streamers and iconic figures from the WoW Classic community competing for a US $10,000 prize pool.
The success of the inaugural season of CDL ushered Tips Out to run a second season in May this year. The league further expanded with a European CDL tournament, which is set to enter the group stage on Sunday, June 14, leading to the CDL European Championship starting on Thursday, June 18.
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The immense success of community-hosted WoW events grabbed the attention of Activision Blizzard, who decided to show their support for the Classic WoW community by creating the first-ever fully sanctioned WoW Classic player-versus-player tournament – the WoW Classic Summer Bowl.
The Summer Bowl will use WoW Classic’s recently implemented War Game feature, which allows individual players to group up and compete against other groups of players who accept their invite. The tournament will see two groups of 10 players battle in the Capture the Flag game mode on the iconic Warsong Gulch (WSG) battleground.
The tournament will be split into two stages for each region: qualifiers and finals. The qualifiers are open sign-ups, while the finals will feature only the top six teams from each of Europe and North America. The format and other details about the tournament have yet to be revealed and may depend on the number of entries.
The only requirements the teams need to meet before they can apply for the Summer Bowl is to have 10 players, all of whom have level 60 characters. There are no gear requirements, although we are likely to see most players fully decked out with the highest tier of equipment, as well as Grand Marshals and High Warlords with their Rank 14 gear – the highest level of PvP equipment and weapons available in the game.
]]>The announcement, which surfaced this Wednesday, cited the safety of employees, fans, players and partners as paramount. The schedule changes come in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
“After careful review and working in close collaboration with our teams, we are cancelling all Overwatch League events for Match and April,” read the announcement.
“Concurrently, we are working hand-in-hand with our teams to see that all matches are played when it’s safe and logistically feasible, staying as close to our originally planned schedule as possible.
“We are considering the various options available to esports in this effort, so that all teams – including those previously impacted by the schedule changes in China – can get back to doing what they do best.”
Although the events are officially cancelled, Pete Vlastelica, CEO of Activision Blizzard Esports and OWL Commissioner, explained that cancellation relates to events only and that matches scheduled to be played in March and April will still go ahead. It is not yet known where and when those fixtures will be played, with more details to be released in the coming days.
“To be clear, we WILL be playing matches in March and April,” said Mr Vlastelica.
“We cancelled the events, not the matches (though we will have to move a few things around in the schedule to make this work).”
The cancelled events include home series that were slated to be played in London, Paris, San Francisco and Washington. Earlier in the 2020 OWL season, Activision Blizzard postponed all events in China and South Korea.
Some reports suggest the company is working on adjusting the Call of Duty League schedule ahead of Dallas Empire’s home series, scheduled to begin at the end of this month at Toyota Music Factory in Irving, Texas.
Shortly after Activision Blizzard’s announcement, reports surfaced that claimed the Electronic Sports League was cancelling the ESL One Los Angeles Dota2 Major. However, it was later confirmed that the third Major tournament of Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) season will instead be postponed to a later date.
As the reason behind that decision, ESL cited the COVID-19 outbreak and ongoing travel restrictions that prevented a handful of teams from entering the United States with their full rosters, including Virtus.pro, Aster and Adroit.
“In light of recent travel restrictions and the evolving COVID-19 situation, ESL is postponing the ESL One Los Angeles 2020 Dota 2 Major,” read the ESL’s announcement.
“We are working closely with Valve to determine a new time and location for the Major.”
The ESL Pro League Season 11 CS:GO tournament also implemented some changes to its schedule this week when organisers unveiled the whole tournament will be played online, while the final event has been moved from Denver to a studio location.
FLASHPOINT organisers opted for a similar approach, with the entirety of the event to held in a studio setting in Los Angeles instead of the initial plan of hosting the finals in Stockholm, Sweden.
]]>Despite the ongoing controversy surrounding Blizzard’s decision to suspend Hearthstone player Ng Wai “Blitzchung” Chung over his well-documented political stance, business is flourishing for one of the world’s biggest video game companies.
According to official reports, Activision’s third-quarter performance was in majority driven by Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 in-game revenue, which exceeded that of CoD: WWII for the same period in 2018.
Activision also enjoyed great success following the October launch of Call of Duty: Mobile title, which reached over 100 million downloads in its first month and claimed top spot on mobile app charts in over 150 countries.
Adding to that boom was the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which became the top-selling game release of the year and comfortably outsold CoD: Black Ops 4.
In total, Activision produced a segment net revenue of $209 million and gathered 36 million active monthly users.
On the Blizzard side of the business, the significant growth in revenue was in majority driven by the launch of World of Warcraft Classic in August, which “drove the biggest quarterly increase to subscription plans in franchise history” and launched Blizzard to a segment net revenue of $394 million.
While the numbers were significantly lower compared to the same quarter in 2018 when Blizzard launched the seventh expansion for their MMORPG game title Battle for Azeroth, the WoW Classic release was still an exceptional success, financial and otherwise, seeing how Blizzard successfully re-launched a 15-year-old game.
While WoW’s success took most of the spotlight, the Blizzard-run Overwatch League also produced plenty of profit.
Blizzard sold 11,000 tickets for the OWL grand finals match between San Francisco Shock and Vancouver Titans, while the average minute audience (AMA) for OWL streams increased by 18% compared to last year.
In total, Activision Blizzard’s third-quarter revenue outperformed their estimates by $180 million, and the company is expecting an even more fruitful final quarter.
The year 2020 looks every bit as promising after Blizzard revealed plans for new instalments of popular franchises such as Overwatch, Diablo, Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.
While the exact release dates are yet to be confirmed, the announcements made at BlizzCon earlier this month were received with widespread acclaim.
Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV are not yet available for purchase, but Blizzard rushed to offer World of Warcraft fans a chance to pre-order the newest expansion, Shadowlands, starting at US $39.99 for the standard version and up to $79.99 for the ‘Epic Edition’ upgrade.
]]>The decision to implement a home/away format for the inaugural CoD League season was aired back in August, and the company confirmed on Friday, October 18 that it would go ahead as planned.
Each of the 12 franchised teams will host two multi-day competitions in their respective home cities during the regular season, with one of each taking place during summer and spring splits of 2020 season.
CoD League 2020 will also host a Midseason Weekend event between the two splits, where all 12 teams will be present.
Furthermore, all host cities will be given an option to host additional events during their home series, including amateur open-bracket competitions. Those will serve as an opportunity for amateur CoD esports teams and players to show off their skills as they look to climb their way into the professional scene.
The amateur tournaments will be a part of the Call of Duty Challengers series, which serves as a recognised ‘path-to-pro’ competition.
CoD Challengers will use the same rules as the professional competition, with over US $1 million in prize money to be distributed across LAN and online events.
Activision Blizzard also unveiled they will be adding another level of competition, named Call of Duty Circuit.
A more casual competition series that aims to take recreational play to a higher level by offering fans the chance to represent the pro teams, CoD Circuit is set to launch in late 2020.
The circuit will see fans sign up as duos to compete in CoD: MW 2v2 gunfight matches, where they will duke it out for dedicated prize pools and a chance to appear at the finals on Championship Weekend in summer 2020.
The Call of Duty League is set to begin next spring, although no specific dates about the league or any other competitions have been revealed as yet.
The news comes following the successful deployment of a similar format in the Overwatch League. OWL has used a geo-located format for the past two years while transitioning to a city-based format and will join CoD in using a home-and-away fixture next year.
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Unlike OWL, however, the Call of Duty League will skip the transitioning phase and implement the new format straight away.
The home-and-away system has been planned for a while, but Activision Blizzard decided to slow down the process and wait until 2020 before rolling it out. That was to give the teams enough time to prepare their facilities and develop a loyal fanbase for their home matches.
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Call of Duty Esports Commissioner Johanna Faries said the new format will “bring more competitive events to fans in cities around the globe”.
She added: “With seven teams already signed on, we anticipate a robust slate of events held in all home markets.”
Activision Blizzard plans on having up to 12 teams on board for the next Call of Duty season.
The confirmed teams and locations are as follows: Toronto (OverActive Media), Los Angeles (Immortals Gaming Club), Minnesota (WISE Ventures, LLC), Dallas (Team EnVy), New York (Sterling VC & New York Mets), Paris (c0ntact Gaming, LLC), and Atlanta (Atlanta Esports Ventures).
Should new franchises express their desire to join the league, they would have to pay Activision a US $25 million expansion fee, which is in the same price range as an Overwatch League slot.
The home/away format, while common in traditional sports, has rarely seen the light of day in professional gaming, as major esports titles like League of Legends and CS:GO swear by region-based tournaments rather than city-based competitions.