Blizzard was a game developer that was so popular that they used to have their own annual ComicCon style convention where fans from all over the world would come to meet the developers of their favorite games and learn what new stuff was coming. Then, an unhappy faction who didn’t like the “frat house” atmosphere made a bunch of largely false allegations at the height of #MeToo. Lawyers were brought in to investigate, and they found email chains discussing the “Cosby Suite,” which was the hospitality suite at the convention hotel that Blizzard developers named for its carpets that looked like a Bill Cosby sweater. These emails were from years before Cosby’s sexual assault conviction, but they were considered damning at the time and it was insinuated in the media that the men on the email chain were committing rape in the “Cosby Suite,” entirely because of the name. Everyone on the email chain — men who had worked at Blizzard for decades and built the Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft franchises — were fired in disgrace over this. Alex Afrasiabi had his name stripped out of World of Warcraft. An Overwatch character named after veteran Blizzard developer Jesse McCree was renamed in the game. These guys did absolutely nothing wrong except joke with their friends in emails they never expected to be exposed as part of a witch hunt. In the wake of the mass firings of veterans game designers, the entire culture of Blizzard changed as an institution, and the games changed too — for the worse. “World of Warcraft” became a cozy fantasy coffee shop game. “Overwatch” became a gay pride game. Nobody would go to a convention these days to celebrate these games or the people who now work on them. The false sexual assault allegations were a pretense for a crowd of disgruntled nonbinary weirdos to seize the greatest game studio in the United States, but without the people they purged and replaced, they could not uphold Blizzard’s once legendary standard of quality and the studio collapsed into irrelevance. When you see gamers celebrating mass layoffs at game studios, it is because things like this happened across the gaming industry. The hobby was conquered and transformed by people who believed gaming needed to change. But they changed it into something nobody wants to pay for, and now they’re all losing their jobs.