No, I actually agree. Overwatch IS one of the most diverse rosters of any video game ever crafted, and they do deserve credit and affirmation for it. They also asked for feedback and the lack of playable black women in the game has been a point of contention for a very long time. We all knew a black female lead was…

Overwatch came out in 2016. Can you believe it’s already been over three years? And in that time, we’ve gotten 31(!) playable heroes. But no female black leads. And if their development timetable is on point, Overwatch 2 may not hit until 2021, so at least a five year wait since launch. In between that time we got…

That’s actually incorrect, as Blizzard directly responded to complaints about a lack of playable black women in the game at the start of the year and the devs requested more feedback, critique, and constructive criticism while promising that they were committed to listening to the community. That is because the devs…

Just to be a bit pedantic, robots don’t have ethnicity. And even using your examples, “Zenyatta” isn’t Tibetan by concept - his name is derivative of Japanese terms and is more representative of Japanese Chan Buddhism. And while I can’t speak for all minorities, I’ve never look at any four-legged mech and went…

She was designed at one point to be a black man, yes. I don’t believe she was ever concepted as a black woman, though the point was her ethnicity was at one point in flux. She could very well have worked as a black woman.

No, this is like celebrating Marvel for taking 19 movies to have a black lead and 21 movies to star a female heroine. Yes, I’m glad they did it. No, that doesn’t mean they should have dragged their feet as long as they did, and it doesn’t retroactively make it better either (if anything, their respective successes…

Skin color is hardly a reason to scrap a character whose flashiest and most eye-catching part of their creation is the clothing they wear. By that metric, any pale-skinned characters were be “too similar”.

She actually had a legit concept art that portrayed her as a black woman that they didn’t go with. 

Nothing wrong with a cool black soldier lady in the sequel. I just question why they had to wait or, as the author of this article even states, focus on a bunch of other characters that are already over-represented in games. Someone mentioned Ashe below and she was even planned to be black at one point:

As a storyteller, to say that you’ve “had” to save your black woman for a story is a bit weird, because you’re the writers, and you write the story, and there is nothing you have or don’t have to do. You could have altered the story (most of the story isn’t even in the game proper). You could have changed the…

That still doesn’t explain the two casters whose crime was just to have him on. The casters for the American team didn’t get banned, I noticed... And it’s also telling that they got banned AFTER they had already publicly withdrawn from competition in protest. 

Here’s the thing... This is ALSO Blizzard.

Because I don’t live in the area, so I instead spread awareness online, wrote my congressman and senators (who have also taken an interest in this affair with bi-partisan support), donated to the “Free Hong Kong” campaigns (including those free T-shirts they’re handing out at the con right now), working on creating…

One can use products made from a terrible country that oppresses its citizens and still call out the flaws in the system. The two are not mutually exclusive. 

They still banned two casters and then went on to ban 3 more players for supporting Hong Kong democracy.

As someone who lived to see the massacres at Tiananmen Square where the Chinese government slaughtered thousands of citizens advocating for democracy and freedom...

Of course, which is why this apology is nothing.

They’ve had nearly a MONTH to fix things. This incident didn’t JUST happen.

We’ve given them a MONTH. They haven’t fixed anything. They’ve had plenty of time.

“We’re sorry you were offended.”