What constitutes a "significant number" of customers to your mind? Losing 5% of WoW customers in very mature recurring revenue business would be huge hit, and not something they can easily make up. Its not like kids today are beating down the doors to play a game that launched the year Ronald Reagan died.
Even customers without a heart will be upset when content deadlines slip because of labor turmoil caused by this mismanagement.
And, of course, people who are upset about this who do like Blizzard games or work for Blizzard don't want Blizzard to be killed off. They want things to change. And it is not like 'frat boy culture" or incompetent management benefits shareholders. So perhaps that change could come.
This may put some hurt on Blizzard, but all of the popular opinion/employee action has been ‘localized’ to Blizzard, not the company as a whole. It would be a hit for WoW to lose some percentage of players, but Blizzard on accounts for 24% of the companies income [1]. If the PR squad can keep it contained with Blizzard, then Activision and King can just go on making money. Maybe the company as a whole let’s Blizzard take the fall and slowly tries to re-establish the brand.
TL;DR — I don’t think this will have any major impacts to anyone in the long-term, but I can remain hopeful that at least some changes at Blizzard will benefit their employees.
Even customers without a heart will be upset when content deadlines slip because of labor turmoil caused by this mismanagement.
And, of course, people who are upset about this who do like Blizzard games or work for Blizzard don't want Blizzard to be killed off. They want things to change. And it is not like 'frat boy culture" or incompetent management benefits shareholders. So perhaps that change could come.