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Bobby Kotick Escapes With A Golden Parachute | Opinion
01.01.2024 - 21:41 / mmorpg.com / Bobby Kotick
Bobby Kotick’s last day at renowned gaming megacorporation Activision Blizzard was Friday, December 29th, 2023. He leaves with a $15 million… departure salary? In casual terms, it’s a “golden parachute.” He’s 60 years old. He’ll be fine.
Anyway.
Gaming culture was never perfect, but when there’s personal incentive, no matter how mundane or temporal, people in power historically enable bad things to be worse. In fact, he’s proud of sanitizing the companies he’s looked over (and the industry he arose from), with these 2009 quotes from an industry conference [via GameSpot ]:
Someone in the comments will be sure that these were meant to be jokes—but jokes come from somewhere in the mix of reality, right?
Alright, to his slight credit, the guy was a hell of a businessman in the 1990s and early 2000s. The man essentially climbed his way up through the gaming and technology industries through merger after merger, concept after concept, until he bought 25% of Blizzard and made its products some of the most successful in history. But that’s extremely foreboding of everything else to come.
Around the time of the ActiBlizz merger, Kotick had his first major sexual harassment case when his management company fired a flight attendant who complained about sexual harassment by a company-hired pilot. In the end, allegedly ignored advice from his lawyer to settle for $200,000, who later sued Kotick himself; the situation eventually cost the then-renowned businessman $1.4 million.
ActiBlizz, meanwhile, grew to enable what California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing called “akin to working in a frat house” in 2021’s massive lawsuit, so major that State. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal alleged he personally was aware of incidents, spanning from harassment to rape, and the overall toxic culture, which put him in regulatory hot water. Only this month, the company settled to distribute by paying $54 million, $46 million of which will go to current and former employees and contractors affected by incidents. So maybe it’s not actually good business practice to enable this.
And the gamers found frustration as a result of the Activision philosophy, too. Call of Duty’s most recent single-player campaign was so short that a complaint was made on stage at The Game Awards, and the main complaint wasn’t that it was wrong , but that that speech took time away from devs (though CoD devs were upset ). The CoD franchise in general went from being playable war movies, highlighting the complexity of the American military, to being accused of misleading American propaganda (which is saying a lot for a war game). Beloved projects like Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone started to feel like useless pet projects
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The decisions made by outgoing Activision CEO Bobby Kotick actively made Call of Duty games worse. That's according to Christina Pollock a programmer who previously worked on the series. Pollock, along with many other former colleagues, made their feelings regarding the controversial exec known on social media once it was confirmed he had definitely left the building.
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03.01.2024 / 10:01
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Bobby Kotick was a controversial figure during his long tenure as the CEO of Activision Blizzard, and controversy, it seems, is continuing to follow him in the aftermath of his recent departure. More specifically, developers who formerly worked at Activision Blizzard studios have been speaking out on Kotick’s leadership adversely impacted the games they worked on.
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02.01.2024 / 09:19
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31.12.2023 / 17:59
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30.12.2023 / 15:15
Workers Share Bobby Kotick Horror Stories After He Finally Leaves Activision Blizzard
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