What is the last thing you should do before getting fired? Exactly. Quickly grab all bonuses – like this Blizzard employee did.
Recently, there were some unpleasant reports from Blizzard. Not only were numerous employees laid off, but the former president Mike Ybarra also stepped down.
For many employees, this meant hours of chaos. But as it slowly became clear who had to go, some took advantage of the situation – including one employee who quickly snagged a 10-year subscription for WoW.
Which Blizzard employee are we talking about? We are talking about Adam Holisky. He worked at Blizzard in recent years as the “Core Technology Product Lead” and was also affected by the layoffs, as he revealed on X (formerly Twitter).
What did Holisky do? As he himself revealed, after the layoffs were announced, he quickly redeemed a lot of codes for World of Warcraft. He added almost 10 years of free playtime to his account and documented it with screenshots. These clearly show that he will not have to pay a cent for the WoW subscription until October 14, 2033 – apart from the costs for new expansions, should he want to play them.
In converted terms, the codes represented a value of around €1,250.
However, Holisky quickly clarifies in a second tweet that this was not a “reprehensible” or “amoral” thing. The codes are simply part of the bonuses that employees receive – he just hadn’t redeemed them until now.
To ensure that the codes wouldn’t become invalid soon, he redeemed them quickly.
What the community says: In the gaming subreddit, this little story is being discussed enthusiastically. Therefore, they believe that Holisky won’t enjoy his redeemed keys for long. User Einkarf95 writes about this:
That’s funny because there is a system that detects who is on a “Friends & Family” plan for over 10 years or longer. I had a family member who worked at Blizzard and gifted me a 30-year membership. Shortly after he stopped working at Blizzard, I received an automated email that my 30-year membership would be ending next month (and the 30 years weren’t up yet).
Another comment, from Logridos, points out that this hasn’t been common practice for a long time:
As a recently laid-off employee: The 25-year employee codes were all deactivated about a year ago. They don’t exist anymore.
However, since Holisky reported that he redeemed a lot of individual codes, he might be lucky and get to play WoW for free for the next 10 years.
But that is probably only a very weak consolation for losing his job.
