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]:
- About stores keeping gaming inventory: “I think that if you look at how much volatility there is in the economy and, dependent upon your view about macroeconomic picture and I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”
- He cited Activision’s employee incentive program as one that “really rewards profit and nothing else.”
- [From GameSpot directly:] The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn, adding, "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression." (Yes, millennials, that recession.)
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 to the company in the eyes of players.
Esports players (self included) have a slew of complaints about how the conglomerate ruined the scene. Blizzard cracked down on permitted third-party activities and tournaments for Starcraft 2 and Overwatch, which effectively killed the former’s scene and did so to the latter before it could create a solid foundation. The very concept of the Overwatch League was immediately recognized as an unsustainable cash grab from the start by industry veterans, and now it’s being disbanded. Not to mention, Major League Gaming is effectively dead. Not technically, but it’s a shell of its old self. In case you were wondering where that went.
There’s the merger, the mandatory return to office, and ActiBlizz employees’ attempts to unionize, too. Yes, these are mentioned together—some argue that the former two are, in part, attempts to break up unionization attempts, as Microsoft seems to be a master of such and especially as one QA subsidiary finalized its union vote last year. ActiBlizz has done its damndest already, and “ABK Cares,” which represents many of the organizing employees, is keeping track. Returning to office, meanwhile, forces many workers fighting for optimal conditions to make a career-shifting decision, diluting organization efforts.
In 2021, there was the hire of Frances Townsend, who said at the time in an Activision press release to have known Kotick for over a decade and joined ActiBlizz as the executive vice president of corporate affairs until late 2022. Her resume includes being in US national offices for counter-terrorism between 2003-2008, including a 2004-2008 tenure as chair of the Homeland Security Council. As the executive sponsor of ABK Employee Women's Network, she seemed to immediately decry the 2021 lawsuits only for Kotick himself to have allegedly written the email. Very normal.
These are all high-level issues for Blizzard, though—just things that would probably need to fall under a CEO’s watch. Or directly did, in some cases. Within the context of his business alone, staff testify on social media, now that he’s gone, that he was a rotten person.
And that’s before we get into him showing up late accused minor sexual trafficker Jeffery Epstein’s “black book” of contacts, published online with redactions by a reporter from the former Gawker publication, with the “activision.com” email just peeking out from the redaction.
Again, Kotick makes it out of the company with one last $15 million payment. Do you remember the devastating 2019 layoffs, where about 800 ActiBlizz employees were let go despite the company making revenue they bragged about? If you assume an ActiBlizz employee earns $125k per year, $15 million would have saved 120 of those employees for a year.
It’s not a shocker that Activision doesn’t really publish anything that challenges the status quo anymore. Instead, Activision defined the industry’s status quo during Kotick’s tenure like a bomb defines a city: causing damage from the mind down to the physical, dodging accountability, and with a really bad and weird obsession with military might. And these damages, too, will be felt for many years.
Executives like Kotick and his ilk are both the symptom and the problem—they’re the face of the tumultuous gaming industry, from which developers bail into other adjacent industries due to overwork, frat culture, and a myriad of flavors of discrimination. And I don’t expect ActiBlizz to change that dramatically, immediately, with his departure. I think few feel that way. Nor will the industry change; Riot Games kept in tow an executive named in its own major lawsuitsuntil he was allowed to peacefully step down.
But few will ever have the sort of rampantly unkind, and even comically evil mentality that Kotick brought to the position. If they do somehow, I won’t be surprised. After all, it’s the state of the industry that Kotick forged.
