Benedikt Oehmen
speaker
156 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Benedikt Oehmen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It was really a magical time like we couldn't believe we got so lucky to be working at the single best company in gaming and having this for a job making money with it and basically having this second family away from home. We all felt like we found a second family in Blizzard because everybody was excited and passionate about the same things.
And we spent time together during work and then we played together after work and we saw each other on the weekends for drinks and parties and other things. So it was really our entire world together. where the people at Blizzard had the jobs that we were there for doing. And that changed somewhat over the years as Blizzard emerged with Activision, which was a big publisher in the gaming industry.
And the priorities for Blizzard, to our eyes, started to shift. going from how can we make this the best most engaging experience for our players to how can we make more money with this and how can we make this graph go up more quickly and money is after a couple of years everything that we heard in discussions which
was a strong departure from the original values that brought me to blizzard making the most epic experiences with gamers for gamers then it came in 2018 so a long way so i started in 2005 so 2018 was then 13 years in There was an announcement saying, hey, we need to save money globally and in our office here in Versailles specifically, we need to reduce our overall amount of people by 30%.
And that was a shock to us because many of us, we started with Blizzard as our first company. And as I said, it really felt like a family. And all of a sudden we were to say goodbye to a third of that family. And we didn't know if we were impacted ourselves. So a lot of different and difficult emotions came up for everybody. We felt shocked. Oh, how can that be?
Like we've been doing so well and I thought we are still doing well. And yeah, it was a really hard time for everybody involved and people had many different reactions because in France, after the announcement, it took about a year. before that reduction actually took place.
So there was a phase for about half a year, three quarters of a year, where people could volunteer to leave so that the 30% would be filled up with volunteers as much as possible.
and during that time frame it was getting increasingly difficult because few people a couple of people said there's too much pressure i i don't want to deal with this anymore i just want to get out and they left ahead of time i for myself decided i wanted to stay around to help my team through this process
And it turned out my team was completely gone at the end of the process because they reduced the entire community team to one person instead of around 10. which was, of course, a big change. For me, I took it as an opportunity to say, okay, good, this part of my career is done. Let's transition to somewhere else in the company.
And I went from a publishing to a production environment and localization, so the translation of our games, and started there as a manager, helping the team over there, the German and Italian team in particular,
to transition through what we were going through because now they also lost about half to a third of their co-workers and now they needed to do more with less resources so there was a lot of change management to be done somewhere where I thought great I can make a positive difference here for the people to actually remove roadblocks make their lives easier so they can get
the stuff that do best, they can get that done with as little interruption as possible. And that actually worked quite well. But then in 2020, the second shoe dropped and they announced, hey, we are going to close the Versailles office completely. It was super tough and everybody that remained in the hopes of being able to keep on with Blizzard, then those hopes shattered.
Now everybody was faced with, okay, what am I going to do now? And in that environment, I sat down with my team and said, okay, it is what it is. We all have to go through these five stages of grief again that we just passed through the year before with many of our friends leaving. but we'll come out of it on the other side.
And once you're in a good space to think about it, I want to have a discussion with each and every one of you, what you want to do moving forward after Blizzard and what we can do right now to get you started on that journey towards a prosperous future where you feel fulfilled and happy and have a good job even after Blizzard. And that, in a nutshell, were my 17 years at Blizzard.
Yeah, so that was definitely towards the end of my time at Blizzard when I was exploring more and more coaching techniques and more and more workshops with my team to really empower them to take charge of their own destiny and do so with hopefully a more positive outlook on their own abilities and their own future. it really starting to make a difference for them, but also for me.
In that moment, I realized, wow, like coaching, I really resonate with that. Not telling people what to do, but listening to them where they are right now, where they want or need to be in the future. And then together, explore that possibility space of what they can start doing right now with a long term view, but very small and iterative steps right now to get to where they need to be.
And that's when I discovered for me and said, hey, after the time at Blizzard, I'll have some time and I have some resources. I'll get certified in coaching. I want to know more about that and I want to be able to do it professionally. And during the following year, I did then exactly that. And that's what convinced me doing that course with other coaches.
Wow, yes, this is really what I want to do moving forward because I'm not bound to a corporate overlord who tells me what to do and where my priorities are. And all my efforts basically go towards making rich people even richer, right?
In a sense, and now I have the freedom to work with people that share the same values, that are geeks like me, which to me just means they embrace what they love without reservation and they're not afraid of showing it. So people who do that, they don't need to be gamers, they don't need to be nerds or anything, but they're just unapologetically passionate about what they're doing.
And those are the people I love working with because that is my background and that's the life that I lived at Blizzard and I will forever be thankful for having had that time and the opportunities that Blizzard afforded me to grow into that person that I am today who is...
Showing 61–80 of 156 · page 4 of 8
← Previous
Next →