In case you didn’t know, Activision’s head cheese Bobby Kotick stepped down from his role in the company this past December 29 as part of the Microsoft acquisition. Finally, with no retribution, some developers who worked on Activision’s biggest games (like Call of Duty) have begun speaking out.
Over on Twitter, Christine Pollock, who worked on the Call of Duty franchise, shared a story on how not only Bobby Kotick’s decisions made their games worse, but the exec event threatened to have an employee killed.
i worked on COD for two years as a programmer at demonware
bobby's decisions made our games worse
in my first month it came out he threatened to have an employee killed. in the all-hands that followed, no-one wanted to speak first. so i demanded his firing in front of everyone https://t.co/yhlM5xqPPg
— christina 死神 (@chhopsky) December 29, 2023
We’ve compiled the Twitter chain into text below for an easier read:
i get that i am very loud and very annoying and that with my seniority and ease of other opportunities, that affords me certain protections and safety to do such things
but you all need to get on board this train. we all need to revolt against people like this, every time
if i’d been fired i had several other companies hovering in the wings, but that is why it is on senior staff to dig their heels in
juniors will not feel safe doing that until their leaders do it first
we may not have unions but we do have power if we work together
ask the loud annoying question in the all hands
make it short, direct, to the point, and leave no room for waffling in response. make it sharp, direct, and do it with clarity and without anger so they can’t attack your delivery
they won’t answer, but everyone will see it
write down what you said. keep notes in case HR pings you. record yourself saying it in the meeting if you can so that you have evidence of exactly what happened, because pissweak executives will take their exposed failure personally
demonware protected me, but other places wont
early in my career, an engineering manager doing things like this caused discussions that lead to him and his entire team quitting on the same day, and going to a new company
they all got offered $30-50k more to stay and they all said no
soli-fucking-darity 💪💪💪
muting this now due to notification volume
stand up for your fellow workers x
Pollock isn’t the only one speaking out, as Community Manager Andy Belford has also spoken out about Kotick decision regarding Overwatch 2 that didn’t exactly line up for the betterment of the studio.
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
— Andy Belford (he/him) 💙 (@andybelford) December 29, 2023
Breaking my silence to share a fun fact: when we planned OW2’s steam launch, my team warned (months in advance) that we’re going to be review bombed. We begged for more information, more details, and more resources to help us with the anticipated influx, all flatly denied.
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
This is only one example of the culture Kotick bred at AB: shit flowed downstream, usually landing on the lowest paid and most overworked individuals. Management was too busy reacting to wildly vacillating direction and decisions that made zero sense.
At the end of everything, player experience/worker meant nothing to CSuite and exec leadership. It was all about that quarters earnings call
Chances are, these won’t be the last horror stories we’ll hear about Bobby Kotick, and hearing what’s out there now isn’t really all that surprising, no?
Source: Andy Belford (Twitter), Christine Pollock (Twitter); Thanks, Eurogamer, PCGamesN!
More MP1st Reading:
Those meek people could’ve spoken out in situ when things were going all kinds of sideways, but no, too afraid to confront the facts as they played out.
They end up being a post mortem rather than a symptom that could’ve been addressed before the plague of Bobby’s profiteering variously ruined AAA gaming for everybody.
Maybe resolve to be more courageous in the face of such deplorable leadership, everybody else who witnessed the read out on this sad spectacle. It’s not just you who’d benefit from calling it out.
Easy to criticize people when it’s not your job or livelihood on the line.
GIven the post, responding like that probably *is* their job.
Kotick is rich and his ego/image is his #1 priority. He’s got a PR firm on retainer.
It is actually pretty easy to criticize people who sit by and watch their fellow employees get harassed, and do nothing about it for months, even years. Where do you draw the line between self-interest and basic empathy for your coworkers experiencing intense abuse in a terrible work environment?
You’re actively defending a company that hasn’t even properly addressed what people in its top ranks were doing to other employees for years, a company that just recently celebrated the return Chris Metzen, who claims he “didn’t know” what Alex Afrasiabi (whom he looked up to) was doing. That he honestly had no idea what was going on around him.
That’s BS, you know it, I know it, anyone who actually pays any attention to crap like this knows it.
Wow. Just. Wow.
Another person who understands everything, but gets nothing.
I’m not exactly buying this nonsense that one man is directly, much less solely, responsible for a continuous downward trajectory in the quality of games out of a company consisting of thousands of developers, hundreds of middle managers, and tens of game directors.
Bobby didn’t come down from Mount Doom, lightning crashing around him, and demand that Diablo 3 include some of the most vile monetization of in-game rng-generated items in any Blizzard game up to that point, nor was he directly responsible for the frankly abysmal quality of Diablo 4’s endgame. He didn’t force Bungie’s upper management to commit to a development plan that it frankly was totally incapable of living up to in regards to Destiny 1 and 2. He didn’t make Alex Afrasiabi come up with the Cube Crawl, the Cosby Suite, he did not make Afrasiabi or the rest of the serial harrassers do what they did while people just stood by and watched and did nothing about it for months and years, nor did Kotick actively cause the writing in WoW to collapse in quality, nor did he cause the quality of the CoD campaigns to go down. And he certainly wasn’t alone in his GAAS push for the company; those things basically print money, the entire board of directors were equally complicit, and the shareholders certainly did little to “correct” that trajectory because why would ANYONE stop the money printing machine from printing money?
Much like how some communities on the internet like to wrongfully attribute any amount of success in game development to a single, occasionally properly PR-coached face from any given company (looking at how gamers elevate Hideo Kojima, Phil Spencer, Hideaki Kamiya, and so on while totally ignoring the contribution of hundreds of people doing the hard work under them), they also have an equally ridiculous obsession with lapping up any narrative about how ONE GUY is responsible for EVERYTHING they don’t like. It’s stupid.
The fact that the story here is “BOBBY KOTICK ACTIVELY MADE OUR GAMES WORSE” while not a single developer who has come forward thus far has actually presented real evidence of how he specifically acted to make their games objectively worse just feels like an extension of the ongoing PR that has been getting pumped out of ABK to try and restore the company’s image after it came out that the allegedly progressive nature of the Blizzard side of the company was and likely always will be just a front. They will never be able to truly wash the stink of Afrasiabi and ALL of his enablers from that company until they actually properly clean house, and we have already seen them fail on that front. And with that failure also comes the failure to address serious internal deficiencies being suffered at the game developer level, at the game director level. And I have serious doubts that Microsoft will actually fix these issues, because they spent 70 billion on a company that, despite all its faults on a human level, still makes an absurd amount of money. They want what ABK is and has been for the past 15 years, and to suggest otherwise is dumb.
Can’t wait for Activision Blizzard to crash and burn under Microsoft.
These traitors deserve nothing more
Shut up you absolute melt.
Cry harder xbot