The infamous Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick finally left on December 29, and within 24 hours of his departure, multiple Activision Blizzard current and former employees spoke out on social ** to once again denounce the bad leader.
Christina Pollock, a former Demonware Call of Duty programmer, said that the classic FPS game was made worse by Kotick's interference.
In my first month in office, there was news that he threatened to kill an employee," Christina added. "In the plenary that followed, no one wanted to speak first. The end result I hope is that Kotick is fired in front of everyone in the company, and we need to stand up to people like that. ”
Kotick, who has been with Activision Blizzard for 32 years, sent a voicemail in 2006 threatening to kill his assistant. In a 2021 interview with Wall Street**, a spokesperson for Kotick said Kotick was deeply sorry for the matter, but employees were not convinced.
Andy Belford, Activision Blizzard's current community development manager, said that Kotick refused to take a stand on Twitter regarding the resolution of employee issues, and mentioned the issue of Overwatch 2. Before Overwatch 2 was officially released on Steam, the team had a hunch that it might be surrounded by bad reviews, so they asked for more resources to improve it. But all of these requests were "categorically rejected" by the management led by Kotick, and the game was eventually released on Steam without any support from the community team.
This is just one example of Kotick's extreme culture: [everything] flows downstream, often falling on the individuals with the lowest wages and the most jobs. Management is only busy making decisions that make no sense and are always wobbly. Andy wrote.
With Kotick's exit, employees hope that under Microsoft's leadership, the company will enter a new, positive era where time will tell.