Blizzard found that one of the world's top Widowmaker players was finding it hard to get a match; people were misusing this feature to steer clear of people who were too close to the skill ceiling.
The first half of the sentence is a fact, the second half is an assumption predicated upon that fact. It's the same assumption Blizzard made, but the truth is that if you're being matched with that guy you're probably being matched with Seagull and Moonmoon and many others.
What's sad and hilarious is that it was never considered that the guy was being avoided not because of his skill, but because chooses to apply it with the game's sniper character. Everything about Overwatch is based around medium-range combat, with a few characters giving you bonuses if you can bridge that gap and get in close. Widowmaker is the only character that is effective at very long range, and her existence means the game's maps can't have large unobstructed areas or else she'll become too powerful taking everyone out at a distance from which can't be countered.
Widowmaker can't be anything better than a periodical semi-serious novelty pick or she turns certain players into demigods, with lifetime Counter-Strike players probably having the biggest edge over the crowd migrating from TF2, Battlefield, Quake Live, etc.
Never bought this game because the developer never was clean about their business relationship with OSC, and shut down threads on their forum about the issue.
Contrast that with the (admittedly not very good) Ender's Game movie, where the staff actually responded, clarified that OSC wasn't invested in the success or failure of the film, and asked people to remember that there were other people involved in the production who didn't agree with him either.
Around me, the local industry is servicing tourists. When a new hotel comes online for those tourists, they hire more people than they need. Within a couple months, there's layoffs. I see games the same way. Hire people when you're putting a large project together, then shrink when you're done. I don't expect anybody expected EA to keep Bioware Austin at the staffing levels it was at when developing SWTOR.
People generally want companies to treat their employees well, it's why those anonymous letters about EA a decade ago got so much support. But the fact is that nobody is buying a game because of 80% of the people reflected in the credits. While I don't want a QA tester's family life ruined, at the same time I'm also not gravitating to certain games over others because a well-known QA tester is on that project the same way that I would with Will Wright or John Carmack or whatever. Production people just aren't as valuable in the industry as design people, for whatever reason. This is also how I feel about the argument the voice actors are making, they do fill an important role but their demands but their desire to be paid relative to the stature and success of the game suggests that voice acting is what gives stature and draws people to a game. While people don't like bad acting, I don't think Metal Gear was successful because of a "Kiefer Bump" either.
I think the way the industry really hurts people is just in being so spread out. Tech companies are generally based around northern California. Media conglomerates are typically in the northeast. Gaming companies are spread out from Seattle to Maryland to the center of Texas. While it would be nice to see one enclave of companies, I doubt that will happen. Part of it actually is because there's been so many mergers and acquisitions over the years, and the buyers keep their studios where they are so as to not force a relocation onto anyone. But as a result, the industry at large is as spread out as ever and losing a job usually means having to move anyway.
I do wish they had circumvented such direct visual parallels with 20th century fascists with Empire 2.0. A lot of people straight-up acknowledge that they prefer the Empire over the Rebels. A lot of people assumed most Stormtroopers aren't die-hard evil but just regular people (sometimes foolish ones) doing their job. The Imperial aesthetics with it's spartan cleanroom hallways are supposed to be cold and intimidating, but to a lot of people they look like the clean, minimalist world of tomorrow that the public was sold in the age of the space race and Walt Disney; before the rugged, grimy look of the Rebels ships and eventually the downright oppressive world of Blade Runner became the sexy vision of sci-fi. This weird cultural shift is part of what made Star Wars seem so daring in the 70s, and was photocopied poorly in years to come.
Star Wars is one of the few brands where people identify themselves as hero or villain with equal glee, and part of that is because the public was able to sort of understand that the Empire, outside of it's totally fictional atrocities, was very cool. By drawing parallels to real-world authoritarian evils, you've created something much closer to Zeon in the Mobile Suit Gundam universe: something that represents an ugly set of ideals, attracting people who like those ideas and severely inhibiting the acceptance of people who don't.
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