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.”
Time to polish up my resume.
Fuck yeah, brother! I’m excited to apply for the new Activision Blizzard, too! What a time to be alive! <3
Damn I already got competition?
Add some kielbasa
So many CEOs stepping down now
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 expect some changes to integrate better with gamepass, but overall if monetisation is the problem, MS won’t fix anything.
Microsoft-Activision-Blizzard to design pachinko machines and mobile games, exclusively.
Konami docet
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
I hate to break it to you but you don’t really “own” the games on steam either. You have a license agreement with valve which they can revoke at any time, and you lose access to the games you paid for.
I mean, if it’s playable offline there isn’t much they can do about it, right?
Yeah but most people don’t have their library installed at all times. I don’t have the space for that.
I have them all downloaded. 25 years of old hard drives and nerdy piracy have me well stocked for the apocalypse
What the big developers see when they read this is that you’re a low-value customer and marketing to you will be less profitable than milking 14yo kids who use their birthday money to buy fortune gift cards.
Most underaged individuals are being taken advantage of and the government does jack shit. Gambling is banned but this you never gain money at least in gambling you have a chance to gain which makes all of this so much worse.
Yes, and if you teach this to your friends and children, the big companies will eventually adapt to what the market is offering vs trying to dictate the market
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?
He looks like Bilbo Baggins in the scene where he’s overcome with desire for the ring and tries to take it from Frodo.
He looks like the the love child of Bilbo Baggins and Elon Musk.
Awesome. Also ewwwww.
And yet I would still rather hang out with fiend bilbo
HRAAAAGH!
Is there a scarybilbo lemmy sub yet?
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)
We’ve replaced Kotick with Microsoft lol
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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.
And there was much rejoicing
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The original article contains 376 words, the summary contains 128 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
employees are “very excited.”
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Vote me as a CEO I will
- bring back original maps from several CoD titles, make more, compact 3-4 row maps.
- remove skins from the game and replace buyable weapon skins with unlocks
- create 4-5 paid dlc with good content.
- revert matchmaking to OLD days…. No SBBM
- Actually invest in an working Anti-Cheat
- Reduce the amount of „Celebrities“ in-Game and Trailer
- continuing zombie lore
- console crossplay no pc
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?
the shareholders will identify a suitable replacement my dudes, no need to cheer up over this
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.
Hope he burn in hell. He’s the best example of how not to run a company. It’s insane that he’s not been let go for years now.
That entirely depends on your expectations of a company CEO
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ATVI/activision-blizzard/stock-price-history
I can’t think of a company that wouldn’t hire someone with this kind of stock performance over 30 years.
The issue is really that consumers just keep spending money on things that they hate.
If they didnt do that, Bobby would have been gone a long long time ago
I think you’re right. I’m pointing moee to his leadership and how he has allowed sexism and other bad behavior to go on without any consequences. He even told an assistant that he would have her killed… https://www.pcgamer.com/more-shocking-activision-blizzard-revelations-bobby-kotick-once-told-an-assistant-he-was-going-to-have-her-killed/
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!
He’s obviously a terrible human being, I think you have to be to be a wildly successful CEO.
But those are the people who are best at running companies. I wouldn’t be good at it, because I’m not a piece of shit
That’s what sucks about capitalism. We’re allowing thhattype of trash to run it.
Wow I’m very anti capitalist today!
The thing that sucks even more about it is no one even has to ‘allow’ that type of trash to run it, it’s just what tends to happen if the profit motive is the main driver of people’s behavior.
History isn’t over. We humans can do better.
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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.
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.
Or to see some video game company stocks that have outperformed the market, compare ATVI to TTWO (Take Two) or CCOEY (Capcom).
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.
When is ONEQ a baseline to track against? Compare it to S&P500 and ATVI looks ahead.
Take two is three times smaller via market cap and Capcom is 8 times smaller, just saying looking at stock price alone doesn’t tell the full picture.
Activision has also done multiple stock splits over the last 30 years.
Stock price charts account for all splits/reverse splits, so it wouldn’t be a factor when comparing price over time.
I agree with the first point though. Even just performing slightly below the market with such a massive company would make Kotick very desireable as a new CEO, unfortunately. Maybe some corps would not be fine with his reputation, but I doubt he will struggle to find a position in a new board room.
The stock price itself does account for it in the charts, but it doesn’t speak to the market cap aspect.
The charts are in percent, not dollars. It doesn’t matter that Capcom is 8 times smaller if investing $1 in it still yields a higher return on investment.
Also, Take Two may be smaller, but… Grand Theft Auto.
Not true, because of stock splits
Also all I’m looking at is market cap, it doesn’t matter what games you like from them lol
I tried to get my parents to buy NVDA during its IPO.
good boss lol
Blizzard will stay the rotten corpse of something great it is right now
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.
Such a punchable face. Damn
