Bobby Kotick told us who he was years ago. He told us exactly who he was when he 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:oversaw t🐼he layoffs🌄 of 800 members of staff. He did so again when there were no consequences for his subsidiaries implementing force🌼d, unpaid overtime. And he does so eve𒆙ry year, when he takes a bonus of , while his employees are said to skip meals to pay rent.
For years, we’ve known that Kotick is a compulsive capitalist (and ) who is not interested in using his vast amount of power to make the gaming industry a better place. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:He did nothing to stop crunch, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:pay disparity, and as we know now, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:sexist abuse in the workplace. Hell, he even dabbled in it himself, sending a death thr🍰e✤at to a female member of staff, and saying he would “destroy” a flight attendant.
The fact that Kotick is still here is a stain on the i🌠ndustry. Kicking him out now is the very least Activision Blizzard could do, but the fact that it’s taken this long for his peers to condemn him shows how uninterested companies are in changing.
Even knowing how awful t🔴he industry is, Kotick’s conduct makes for some difficult reading. But it isn’t surprising - anyone who can fire hundreds of employees during a year of record-breaking profits, and then pocket a multimillion bonus obviously isn’t going to be too concerned with their wellbeing. As a compulsive capitalist, his behaviour indicates he is only motivated by revenue, which leaves no room to treat your employees like human beings.
You can’t be a compulsive capitalist and care about your staff’s wellbein𝄹g. Because when you catch wind about a sexual abuse allegation facing one of your executives, the smart thing to do, financially, is to back your guy - and intimidate the victim♏ into silence.
But before any of that happened, the mass layoffs should have been enough for the industry to turn its back on Kotick and Activision Blizzard. That - as🍷 well as - is a pretty big indicator that he was capable of some nasty stuff🥂. Yet the industry would never do that, because that hits a little too close to home.
EA laid off a quarter of its Australian studio’s staff in 2019. The late Telltale crunched its🔜 employees relentlessly and sacked the lot of them without severance pay. Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Ubisoft, Epic, NetherRealm, BioWare, Riot, Gearbox… let me know if I missed any. It seems like every company has faced accusations of workplace abuse now.
It takes threatening to kill a woman to turn heads in this indus🔜try because everything else has been done before.
Kotick needs to go, because he needed to go years ago. There’s no “better late than never” when every day left in power is another day of𓆏 poverty wages, layoffs, and abusers bein💫g protected.
It’s also givin🌸g him more money - which could🐠 go towards increasing the wages of abused staff - to donate to the likes of Republicans Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Chris Christie. Keeping him in place doesn’t just make it much more difficult for Activision Blizzard to change, it gives him more money to fight LGBTQ+ rights, free healthcare, and access to safe abortions.
Kotick is antithetical to any promises of Activision Blizzard “doing better”, and he has been for a long time. While he remains in place, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:union-busting firms are being hired, Bush and Trump administration staffers are 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:helping to run the company, and employees are receiving emails gaslighting them about the alleged abuse. Oh, and Kotick used a female employee's email address to send out that last one, just to dodge accountability even more than he already does.
If there is any good to come from this, let it be a lesson. Compulsive capitalists cannot be trusted to root out abuse in the gaming industry. In fact, it prospers underꦇ their leadership. It goes against their philosophy, and if you’re paying the slightest bit of attent🌊ion, it’s remarkably obvious that they don’t care.
Bobby Kotick needs to go, and this entire, abhorrent industr✨𒐪y needs to stop acting like its hands are clean.