The highly controversial CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, has finally stepped down a couple of days before 2023 ended. After his retirement, current and ex-employees have spoken about Kotick's detestable actions while working for the company.
Games Made Worse
Christina Pollock was one of the first people to speak out about Kotick's misconduct. Pollock was a former programmer at Demonware who worked on the previous Call of Duty games.
She said that in the first month, Kotick threatened his assistant that he would have her killed. Although the controversial CEO said in an interview in 2021 that he regretted ever issuing the threat, none of the employees who had worked for him bought that.
Pollock went on to say that ever since the issue was made public, most of the developers at Demonware were afraid to say anything, especially if it is something that goes against what Kotick wants.
Because of her seniority, however, the protections afforded to her allowed Pollock to call for Kotick's firing in front of everyone. Pollock also said that everyone should be on board with the notion to revolt against people like Bobby Kotick; people who will say or do despicable things at a whim.
Andy Belford, the current Community Development Manager for Overwatch 2, said that Kotick refused to provide additional help to the community team when the game launched on Steam in August of last year.
Belford continued that the brunt of the work often fell to the lowest-paid employees. "Management was too busy reacting to wildly vacillating direction and decisions that made zero sense," he added.
The disgruntled community manager also said that the executive leadership did not care about player/worker experience. All that mattered to them was the quarterly earnings call and the company's bottom line.
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Set on the Prize
It is understandable that a CEO will make decisions for the betterment of the company. However, Kotick only set his eyes on how to increase profits even if this comes at the expense of employee welfare.
The gaming community took to Reddit to voice their opinions about Kotick's retirement. Redditor TheFirebyrd said that despite the controversial CEO's actions, Kotick still left the company with a golden parachute and millions of dollars to boot.
Another person has a more negative take. Even though Kotick is no longer working for Activision Blizzard, the Redditor expressed that anyone who says the company is going to make great games again is delusional.
Redditor Swimming-Elk6740 opined that the company is still in shambles, especially after being acquired by Activision in 2008. Kotick is merely just one of the people responsible for Blizzard's collapse.
While Kotick is indeed partly to be blamed for Activision Blizzard's recent woes, Redditor Kozuten said that the developers need to be accountable for the quality of games as well. "Truth is the devs working on Blizzard games are bad, the state of modern Blizzard games got nothing to do with Bobby [except] probably Warcraft 3 Reforged," they added.
Now that Bobby Kotick is out of Activision Blizzard, what do you think will happen to the company in the near future? Let us know in the comments!
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