As far as pay that’s most definitely true. Even though I don’t know what it was like after the Activision acquisition, a company I also worked at. I can tell you that the culture you describe came from Activision because there were about 70 employees when I joined the Diablo 2 expansion team at blizzard in 2000 and I felt we were cared about. Freebies, 10th anniversary party in Vegas where we could take 3 friends and some moved up to different places in the company. Blizzards much bigger now so I don’t know about how the merger affected the culture or if it turned toxic. I wouldn't call layoffs as an indicator of that because that's very common in QA.