Bobby Kotick is no longer the CEO of Activision Blizzard, departing the company with millions of dollars in platinum parachutes after the Microsoft acquisition. And now, both current and former Activision Blizzard employees feel more comfortable sharing stories about Kotick, and none of them are positive.
Easily the funniest one is a tale about Kotick attending a meeting where he wanted to test out some sort of industrial-sized donut making machine they didn’t even know how to get the building to power. A less funny one is about Kotick allegedly threatening to have an employee killed. But others are more focused on specific game situations, like what happened with Overwatch 2’s Steam launch.
Former Blizzard employee Andy Belford took to Twitter to share a now widely-circulated story about how Kotick directly ignored pleas from teams about what they knew was going to happen with Overwatch 2’s Steam launch. Namely that it would be review bombed to hell because of how OW2 was being viewed by players at the time, and there would need to be some sort of plan to manage and react to that. Here’s Belford:
“Moderation of Steam was put on the community team (not a function of community at Blizz), despite my refusal to want to expose members of my team to that level of toxic content/posts. When asked whose decision it was to launch on Steam with no additional help: Bobby.”
Belford concludes that “player/worker experience meant nothing to Csuite and exec leadership. It was all about that quarter’s earnings call.”
And you can see the results of what happened in that specific situation. Overwatch 2 is the second worst-reviewed Steam game of all time, with just 15% of its 230,215 votes being positive, an expected reaction to the “update” to the game which many believed to be little more than a glorified patch to make it free-to-play. While Overwatch has survived, it clearly was damaging to both the game and the team working on it, and according to those who were there, that was due to Kotick.
While perhaps not universally true, there seems to be a collective breath of relief from workers now that they’re moving under Microsoft, which is not perfect, certainly, but there’s no Kotick-like figure looming over everything at the top, where instead that’s the jovial Phil Spencer. However, many of the old Activision Blizzard guard do remain, part of that “Csuite,” so we’ll see how that might play out. But Kotick? Current and former employees are unified in saying he will not be missed.
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