2033 is a year filled with difficulties, especially for the gaming industry when the wave of layoffs shows no signs of slowing down. Last week, 1,900 employees at multiple studios Microsoft also fell into unemployment, including Activision Blizzard was just acquired by the technology giant last October. Although losing their job is something no one wants, an employee at Blizzard promptly activated the game code World of Warcraft free for 10 years before leaving.
On January 25, when the layoff information was announced, Adam Holisky, then holding the position of product manager at Blizzard, vaguely realized that he was one of those 1,900 unfortunate employees. . Remembering that a series of free World of Warcraft codes given to employees had not yet been used, he immediately logged into Keyring and activated them all. Sharing on Twitter X, Adam Holisky said he will not have to pay to play World of Warcraft until October 14, 2033.
Keyring is known as Blizzard’s internal system where employees can use any game code they get “by any method.” Holisky explained that he had accumulated these codes during his five years at Blizzard and that using them now made perfect sense: “Playing games for free is an employee benefit. I have never used the codes I have been given over the years, so this is not a trick or unethical thing.”
After that, other employees also seemed to try to activate the free code before being fired, but the number of people was so large that the Keyring system was disabled.
Given that Holisky last signed up for World of Warcraft on January 14, 2024, he’s got about 117 months of free gameplay. Calculated based on US market prices, this former employee will save about $1,754 over 10 years if paid monthly and $1,520 if paid annually. Even though it’s not a large amount of money, it’s still a small bit of comfort in the difficult context of being fired so suddenly.
