Schreier: Kotick will depart after 33 years, employees are "very excited."
CEO Bobby Kotick will leave Activision Blizzard on January 1, 2024 | Schreier: Kotick will depart after 33 years, employees are "very excited."::Schreier: Kotick will depart after 33 years, employees are "very excited."
That's not the problem. The problem is him not doing anything about all the toxic culture and sexual assault in his company, causing the best employees to leave.
They trick people into buying in. The majority of people buyi g these games are extremely susceptible to the tactics they use to get you to buy their games and when you buy thwm they have more tricks to keep you locked in. The people falling for it arent idiots. They just fall for this stuff a bit easier. Or they havent been shown how it works so they dont know what to look out for.
Things like fomo and gambling mechanics as well as clever pricing tricks are just aome examples. Tbere are conferences and lectures held by industry people for lther industry people where that talk about consumers like they are cattle or other livestock and how we can be manipulated if certain tactics are followed. Games are more like "storefronts" to them. In fact thats literally how the fortnite developers referto fortnite, a storefront. With a game attached.
So, no, bobby didnt force anyone to buy his games, he didnt point a gun at anyones head (well actually we dont know that and i think there was a rumour aomewhere of something like this, couls be wrong tho) but he did remove all choice and boil everything down to a basic game with an inflated shop which fans of activision and later blizzard games fell for, for far too long. CoD was one of the most popular games in the world and fans of the game took some time to realise that the same game was being re released with a new skin for years.
Bobby took away that choice by not releasing other games, he just preyed on the susceptable and knew exactly what he was doing.
So please dont pretend that, for all those people, simply not buying the games or in game purchases was "simple" for the majority of people and that in a round about way, people weren't forced into buying into it. It just shows a lack of understanding and research into the subject.
He might earn himself and the stockholders a lot of money.. But in my eyes he's a great example of why I don't like capitalism, but that is another discussion tho!
ATVI's stock performance only looks impressive if you don't compare it to anything. Here's a graph comparing ATVI to ONEQ, which is an ETF that tracks the NASDAQ composite index. If anything, ATVI has been slightly underperforming the market average for most of Kotick's tenure as CEO.
To see what "outperforming the market" looks like, compare ATVI to NVDA. NVDA's stock has increased 16,000% in the 15 years that Kotick has been CEO of ATVI.
From a purely financial perspective, Kotick was middling at best. He deserves no plaudits. There were plenty of other NASDAQ companies that outperformed the market during the time he was CEO of ActiBlizz, including other video game companies.
Most consumers just don’t care or don’t know at all who Bobby Kotick is. Call of Duty is so popular, but the people that follow the market or the game industry well enough to know the people behind games aren’t that many.
I hear his actual testicles (testicle?) look like they have eyeballs as well. There were a lot of similar accounts from the women he abused who used terms like "genital deformity" and "botched surgeries" when recounting the sex he forced upon them.
I am so glad he is gone. I stopped playing any blizzaed games partially because of this shmuck... and partially because the games became trash. Here's hoping things will turn around now that he is gone.
Yeah, i'm sure microsoft won't do anything to increase monetization on their 69 billion dollar purchase. The objective is to make blizzard's games better by minimizing highly profitable systems like microtransactions, battle passes, DLC season passes, xp boosters, in game real money stores.
They wouldn't be buying these properties to try and milk as much profit as possible at all. No sir.
Hey, this is the last hope I have. There's not a lot of it, but there is a tiny chance that maybe maybe maybe things will get better. Very likely not, but, you know, one could hope.
I paid full price for both Factorio and Skyrim because they are full games that I get to own. No micro transactions, and modding is almost encouraged through Steam. I will never buy another microtransaction game. I will never buy another "subscription based" platform like Xbox. I'm so fucking over not owning the thing I bought
Now when I think about it, the chronologically last Blizzard games I've enjoyed were WarCraft III TFT and old WoW on pirate servers. (My favorite is Tides of Darkness, obviously)
So - I don't know in which direction would things be turning around, what is there left even since those times?
They drag the corpses of their games along for money real good. Sometimes I think about the amount of people still paying a wow subscription and just sigh.
This is standard. You always get rid of the upper management. You give them a lot of money and a round of applause and then you put your own people in. Everyone at the top will be Microsoft.
We don't know that yet. I dislike Kotick as well, but doubtful that much changes from the monetization standpoint of the company.
From a purely morale standpoint, it's mostly a W. But it's not like Kotick isn't getting his golden parachute and wiping his tears away with $100 bills.
Microsoft must have a policy of no stealing breast milk, poor guy lost his job to that (fr tho, he will get a really nice bonus and will never 'pay' for the terrible work environment he created)
Sounds good but that is the job of the development lead, the CEO is there to make sure the money keeps flowing. These things cost money and with the removal of skins less profit.
So what would your strategies be to bring more money on the table for Activision blizzard?
It's "a massive change for the video game industry," Schreier writes, which seems almost restrained, given Kotick's longevity and recent history.
Kotick, who has led Activision for more than 30 years and orchestrated its merger with Blizzard, had considered stepping down in late 2021.
Activision was also sued by its shareholders and pressured by state treasurers over its secrecy and responses regarding the California lawsuit.
In early 2022, Microsoft announced its intent to buy Activision, and the timing, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, was not a coincidence.
Kotick told VentureBeat after the Microsoft announcement that he didn't believe the harassment and mismanagement accusations hurt the company's stock.
He cited delays in shipping Overwatch and Diablo titles, along with Call of Duty's sales performance.
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What are people's predictions on what will happen to ABK after he leaves? Personally, I've never played COD and the last Blizzard game I played was Diablo 2, so I don't know what they've been doing.