Bobby Kotick left Activision and the “horror” stories immediately surfaced

After a turbulent 2023, Microsoft was finally able to get the green light from regulatory authorities and completed the acquisition a few months ago. Activision Blizzard. The company also announced that, throughout the year, Activision's longtime president, Mr. Bobby Kotick.

This is how it happened. Kotick served as CEO of Activision Blizzard until December 29 to assist in the process of integrating the company into the Microsoft Gaming division. Upon hearing the news of his departure, some “horror” stories from former employees immediately emerged.

The most prominent example of this is the story of Bobby Kotick threatening to kill an Activision employee. The publication in question is as follows:

I've been working on COD for two years as a programmer at Demonware

Bobby's decisions made our games worse

In my first month, he came out threatening to kill one of my employees. And in all the hands that followed, no one wanted to speak first. Therefore, I demanded his dismissal in front of everyone https://t.co/yhlM5xqPPg

– Christina Grim Reaper (@chhopsky) December 29, 2023

At the same time, community manager Andy Belford broke his silence to reveal the extent to which Kotic's decisions affected the Overwatch 2 team. The developers were aware of the issues in the Steam version and have been calling for more resources for several months, stressing that otherwise the bombing review will follow certainly. In the end, Activision denied everything and the developers' worst-case scenario actually came true.

The publication in question is as follows:

The community team is moderated (not a community function in Blizz), though I refuse to expose my team members to this level of toxic content/posts. When asked who made the decision to release the game on Steam without any additional help: Bobby

-Andy Belford (he/him) 💙 (andybelford) December 29, 2023

For the record, Bobby Kotick was the second-highest paid CEO in gaming, earning more than $154 million in 2020. It is worth noting that the end of his tenure at the company was marred Incidents of abuse This was revealed, for which Activision was eventually paid $50 million in damages.