Pride month has begun and Blizzard has put out a small collection of new merch to go alongside it.
Over the past few years, you may have seen Blizzard employees in similar employee apparel, followed by comments about how members of the community would love to know where they got the shirt. Well, now that's actually a reality thanks to LGBT folks at Blizzard, who created the original designs, pushing to get them made public.
Here are the shirts, clicking on the image will take you to the Blizzard Gear Store where they can be purchased. Also see below for a thread from Twitter from Valentine, a UI Senior Software Engineer on the World of Warcraft team, who talks about the shirts more.
Quote From Valentine Seeing people criticizing Blizzard for rainbow capitalism, and I can understand that reflex. I’m here to set the record queer on this. I’m a queer, trans person who works at Blizzard. These shirts were a labor of love by LGBT people at this company.
They were designed and created by LGBT people here for Pride, and a lot of us wanted them to be made publicly available. After a lot of hard work by some awesome people at this company, we made it happen.
For me, these shirts and the pins we did for the Trevor Project charity fundraiser are meaningful, because Blizzard is interwoven with a bunch of amazing LGBT+ people who have poured ourselves into creating our games.
Video game spaces have long felt inaccessible to me growing up. The stories that have been told and the social spaces were not representative or always welcoming to people like me. I’ve spent the last 3.5 years at Blizzard along with my colleagues, trying to change that.
Blizzard, and the entire industry have a long way to go, but we are working on it every day. And visible representation is a big part of that. I’m really proud of the people who made these shirts happen, and I’m so glad to live in a world where our fans wanted them.
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Comments
Funny how I already own a similar shirt (white instead of black). Bought it off aliexpress like 4 years ago. Blizz be behind the times yo 😜
As an initiative from LGBT+ employees, I think it is good that they managed to get this published. As a product of a company the size of Blizzard, it feels a bit underwhelming though. I'd rather see something showcasing their LGBT+ characters like Tracer or Varden.
But what is the point of it?? Giving Bli$$ard more $$??
Yeah, so what. Looks neat but that is about it. Call me a cynic but that is just another money grab / woke PR stunt from Blizzard. I could respect it if they would for example donate a small percentage of the proceeds to further an actual queer cause, for example a charity that supports gays in less friendly environments like certain countries where they are harrassed or even killed. I would seriously consider buying it in this case. So it's just another cheap business move to generate revenue and or publicity.
P.S. I am not doubting the sincerity of Blizzard employees like Valentine, I just think it is lame from Blizzard and a missed opportunity.
And where will all that gay money go? Somewhere useful? Nope, it will go right into Bobby Kotik's asshole.
If that is the case and you are a guy. It is gay so it is for the cause.
No hate from me - I can believe the statement, actually. The 'labor of love' they speak about is likely dealing with merchandising, branding, distribution, etc. It's just very odd that the proceeds aren't going anywhere useful.
Also, couldn't the design have been, y'know, more of a design? They just took the logo and Bomb Pop'd it.
I don't buy it at all. Nothing's more transparent than "Oh shit, they're onto us. Quick, send out the resident token to give us some street cred."
Like, they talk about how these "amazing" shirts were designed by LGBT people in the company...and yet the best these people could come up with to celebrate something they're supposedly proud of is "let'S take this stock PNG we have and color it rainbow".
This isn't design. This is literally a matter of minutes to come up with, execute and finalize. This wouldn't even be a problem if it was a novelty gimmick for a charity where the actual proceeds matter more than the product itself, but this is legitimate merch they are trying to sell for profit.
The only way this could have been lazier is if they jsut took the regular Blizzard logo and added "I'm gay" in comic sans below.
Wouldve been lazier, but it’d be kind of funny so it might’ve been better overall
I was gonna say this, I'd be really tempted to buy that!
Considering that riot got a bit of backlash for giving away all that stuff for free, you have to wonder how people are going to react to this.
Let me get this straight, I don't hate LGBTQ community, but this time, I really must say no. It made Blizzard logo looks bad.
If they wanna show their support, make something else with rainbow.
I think it looks super cool actually
Ah yes, ye olde "we support you by letting you give us money for rainbow colored reprints of stuff we already had? Don't believe us? Here's a representative of [insert demographic here] to let you know that this is all genuine and not just an easy moneygrab."
I don't see any charity or other pro-bono stuff going on, so it is literally just "we painted the Blizzard logo rainbow, give us money"
Maybe you're right. Because it seems they don't sell any new games in the previous years, and only taking profit from old games.
I mean...of course I'M right. This is not an original design and the idea that this was made "with love and effort" is laughable at best. They literally couldn't even be bothered to come up with something generic like Lich King waving a rainbow flag.
It's literally just taking the Blizzard logo, then using the bucket tool to color each letter with a different color of the rainbow and then adding another one because they didn't even think about the fact that the rainbow only has 7 colors.
It's the absolute bottom of the barrel gay capitalism. No sincerity, no statement made, literally just "maybe there are enough gullible gay people that cover the costs of this low-effort merch shitpost".
If this doesn't get some massive backlash just for the sheer laziness then the LGBT community at large has lost their right to ever complain about being instrumentalized by corporate capitalism.
It's an artistic interpretation of ultraviolet ;)
There definitely are