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Activision Blizzard pushes out dozens of employees over workplace misconduct
- kyrra 5y agoMirror: https://archive.fo/Umn02 https://archive.fo/Umn02
- icu 5y agoUntil Bobby goes it's all corporate bs. The fish rots at the head.
- usbqk 5y ago
- Aeolun 5y agoPunishment for allowing that shit to happen in the first place, and for not doing anything about it until forced to? Either way, it’s hardly a punishment. He’ll undoubtedly get a nice golden parachute.
- usbqk 5y ago
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoThe recently completed summary also says Activision had collected about 700 reports of employee concern over misconduct and other issues—in some cases separate reports about the same incidents—since July, when a California state agency filed a lawsuit against the company over harassment claims. The Nov. 16 article, citing interviews and internal documents, also detailed misconduct allegations against Mr. Kotick, including when an assistant complained in 2006 that he had threatened in a voice mail to have her killed There are other examples of the culture in the article. I simply don't see how the CEO didn't know this was in the culture, especially considering the allegations against him. It isn't like this is the first time we - non blizzard employees - are hearing about the culture there, either. How, exactly, is expecting him to be held responsible vindictive?
- listenallyall 5y ago
- malka 5y agoHe is also not supposed to leave death threats in voicemail.
- Aeolun 5y agoKind of, but I’m not inclined to hold something that happened 16 years ago against him today. That’s longer than my entire career.
- eproxus 5y agoHe’s not. He’s responsible for making sure it doesn’t happen. Create processes and hire people to run them.
- me_me_me 5y agoApart from his public disgraceful behaviour (who know how bad he is in private), how come majority of other companies avoid this shit happening inside them?
- JaimeThompson 5y agoHe gets paid millions per quarter to deal with issues like this and to stop them from happening which he is not doing. If he wasn't an executive he would have been fired a long time ago.
- gameswithgo 5y agoone of the champions of their games for speaking out for the plight of hong kong for one
- lithos 5y agoVery publicly his flight attendant, then fired her, and then left death threats on her phone’s voicemail. Yeah he’s comfortable enough with blizzard culture to willingly make recordings.
- bilekas 5y agoDidn't he also write a letter on behalf of the HR/People manager around the sexual misconduct claims and then put her name on it ? It may have been Helaine Klasky - I'll find the article.
- SSLy 5y agoNo, it was Townsend's, the one cited in OP too https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qvl4xd/bobby_kotick_actually_wrote_fran_townsends/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/qvl4xd/bobby_kotick_ac... She later left / was made to left the company
- bilekas 5y agoThats the one ! Thanks for clearing up !
- Terretta 5y ago> The fish rots at the head. This isn’t a fish. And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first).
- bigbillheck 5y ago> This isn’t a fish Are you familiar with the concept of 'metaphor'?
- thebean11 5y agoThey are saying it's not an apt metaphor
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoTrue, yet irrelevant to the discussion, which is I think the part people object to.
- webmaven 5y ago> > The fish rots at the head. > This isn’t a fish. > And as a kid living on the water, saw plenty of dead fish — usually the head is the last identifiable part to go (middle goes first). The metaphor isn't about "rotting away", it is about "rotting and stinking". The head definitely goes first. Many languages have this phrase as "the fish stinks from the head".
- true_religion 5y agoThere is a difference between dead fish you find by the waterside, and dead fish in your kitchen. All fish rot from the soft organs first, and muscles and skin last. In the kitchen, you’ve already removed all the fish guts so the fist thing to rot is the eyes and tongue in the head. So… er… you are both right?
- mysterydip 5y agoAnd the CEO remains the CEO.
- smoldesu 5y agoI'm baffled at how little shareholders have held Kotick's feet to the fire (and how little he's responded). I guess everyone who cared about company politics sold out when the accusations started flying...
- aphistic 5y agoHe's close friends with many on the board, so they back him at every turn. The shareholders can't do anything when the board doesn't care what they have to say.
- frostwarrior 5y agoAt some point they should want their money back
- smoldesu 5y agoWell yeah, but I really expected more out of them. They basically wrote a letter saying "please resign", Bob said "no", and then they said "oh okay, we have no further questions or statements at this time". Again, it reads to me like the majority of people are covering it up for financial/social benefit, or just completely disinterested in resolving their issues.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y agoIf we ignore that Kotick probably has build himself a very comfortable nest there and is probably surrounded by supporters I believe that even if they wanted him gone there is probably a calculation lying around in the offices of a number of people that compares Koticks exit package vs. the immediate expected losses from the current damage to the brand (which probably ignores longtime effects, or expects things to just blow over).
- 5y ago
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoQuestion, when these people find a new job will the person hiring them know?
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agowhy would they know
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoIf they call Blizzard checking references, does Blizzard say “we fired them for sexual harassment.”
- Overtonwindow 5y agoBlizzard won't say that, too much liability.
- ALittleLight 5y agoWhat does it mean that there is too much liability? What liability do you have for saying true things? "That person was fired because an investigation conducted by our company suggested they participated in sexual harassment."
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agowhy say anything when you can just say nothing. they don't care about it that much as long as the offender is gone now
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoBecause no corporate investigation has to meet the same standard as a court of law. You can fire someone if you think they did something wrong. But when you make statements, it's possible the employee will claim it is libel and you will suddenly need to prove their misconduct at a higher standard in a court of law. IANAL, but basically it's not worth it. The company already has what they want: Not working with that employee. Anything past that is unnecessary risk.
- cletus 5y agoHow many managers and executives were fired? My fear is that individual perpetrators have been fired but not the leaders who buried complaints or their own inaction dissuaded victims from complaining. A fish rots from the head.
- MBCook 5y agoHow many of these people WERE managers or executives? I bet not enough.
- eru 5y agoHow many would be enough?
- google234123 5y agoDidn't many of these bad event happen a while ago? I would guess that many of them have moved up the chain. So a majority maybe?
- icu 5y agoAll of the direct and indirect perpetrators. Sexual misconduct is devastating for the victims. Covering it up is part of the problem.
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- throwaway47292 5y ago> A fish rots from the head. Are you sure about that? Doesn't it rot from the guts outwards?
- simonh 5y agoIt's a widely used proverb with versions of it found all over Europe and Asia, alluding to the idea that organisations fail due to bad leadership. One early version I've found is "a fish rots from the head, not the tail", which avoids the issue you raised, so it's likely it has become abbreviated over time as it became more widely known.
- framecowbird 5y agoHow did it get this bad?
- dehrmann 5y agoLots of people want to work in the video game industry, so they'll put up with low pay, long hours, and apparently sexual harassment for a really long time.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoExcept there’s an overlap in low level perf tuning in AAA game engines and improving cloud workloads. These folks could easily get a job at FAANG
- da39a3ee 5y agoBoth your sentences are true. So, what do we conclude from them though? It doesn’t change the core fact that the cost of skilled labor is lower for games companies than it is for FAANG, right?
- speedgoose 5y agoWorking a at FAANG is not as attractive to most when you don’t know about the issues in the video games industry. There is a reason why FAANG companies pay well and video games companies don’t have to. I met zero people who told me they dreamed about working in a FAANG since childhood.
- krasin 5y ago>I met zero people who told me they dreamed about working in a FAANG since childhood. Hi, nice to meet you: I dreamed about working in Microsoft since I was 12. Ended up in a different FAANG, but anyway.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fareesh 5y agoI really wouldn't boycott anything over workplace culture. If their product is good I will buy it. In the case of Blizzard their products haven't been good for a long time. I'm ok with supporting a company that's evil. I am consuming petroleum, plastic, the news media, etc. all the time. Anyone who suggests otherwise comes across as somewhat delusional and a little self obsessed to me. Blizzard would be the least of my sins.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThere are both good and bad people at Blizzard. Like each of us, they are complex and complicated and nuanced. No one and no thing is pure evil or pure good.
- seventhtiger 5y agoReminds me of when gamers voted EA as the worst company of the year.
- johnhenry 5y agoWe can improve ourselves one step at a time.
- WaxProlix 5y agoThis is a pragmatic approach in some regards, but misses nuance. I can't really live my life as a part of society without some of these 'sins', and I don't think my opting in or out of plastic consumption on a choice-by-choice basis will move any needles. My choices will not effect the behaviors of these corps. But I can live without buying the next loot box, and I can still be a productive member of society without the new Call of Duty game. And forgoing those might move a needle, as sales are a closely tracked metric, and being one of a few million is a much larger impact than being one of many billions.
- pm90 5y ago> But I can live without buying the next loot box, and I can still be a productive member of society without the new Call of Duty game. You could live on slurried nutrient paste instead of regular food. Yet we choose to pursue good food because it gives us happiness and satisfaction. To a lot of gamers, video games offer happiness and fulfillment. What Blizzard folks did was terrible, and I reduced willingly spending on them. But when they released Diablo 2 remastered, I bought it immediately and relived my childhood experience. I don’t regret it.
- crimastergogo 5y ago
- jdlyga 5y ago
- joe-collins 5y ago> fired or pushed out more than three dozen employees and disciplined another 40 since July This is just a summary of the last half year. If you've been keeping an eye on ABK, this isn't news.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MangoCoffee 5y agoBlizzard, Ubisoft and gaming industry in general seem to be plagued with sexual harassment problem. is this the result of Silicon Valley bro culture?
- hemloc_io 5y agoI wouldn’t discount it as a possibility, but I’d assume it’s closer to Hollywood sexual assault coverups than tech stuff.
- vsef 5y agoIt is a cultural problem but the game industry is not SV based. Blizzard Activision is SoCal, Ubisoft is French (with studios in many locations). I worked at a studio owned by Activision (in SoCal) in the early 2000s and the culture was certainly toxic. I just find it funny how often commenters here assume all broism originates in SV.
- pm90 5y agoTo be fair most broism does originate in SV though doesn’t it?
- seattle_spring 5y agoWhat definition of "broism" are you using?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- birdyrooster 5y agoCrypto Broism is from SV
- pferde 5y agoI think "broism" originates from colleges, and is then carried over to businesses by new, young employees who never had the necessity to actually grow up and become decent people. Therefore it is not a geographically focused phenomenon.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SerLava 5y agoA lot of the original Blizzard people have said the company's just dead - it's Activision now. Everything and everyone that made Blizzard good has gone. And it shows - they're botching games in ways completely uncharacteristic of the old company. Not even a vague sense of culture made it through to the new company. And mark my words, this won't be the last instance of severe employee mistreatment and harassment.
- pm90 5y ago> In a letter to employees made public in October, Ms. Townsend said Activision had “exited” 20 employees and another 20 had faced disciplinary action. “We know there’s a desire to know about the outcome when misconduct is reported,” Ms. Townsend wrote. “Sometimes, there are privacy reasons we can’t share. But where we can, we will be sharing more information with you. We will also be providing you regular, aggregate data about investigative outcomes.” They fired 20 people, not the CEO, and haven’t disclosed who it what reason these people were fired for. Smells to me like major scrapegoating.
- alisonkisk 5y agoWhy would you assume scapegoating and not firing offendors who aren't "too big to fail"? Not disclosing a reason is the opposite of scapegoating. It's downplaying to avoid a fresh news cycle with lurid details.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago> They fired 20 people, not the CEO Oh no, he's trying to save face and trying to make it look like he fixed the issues - even though he was a participant and he allowed this culture to develop.
- huxflux 5y agoI might be out of the loop, but what is indicating that, this is what actually happened?
- 0xfaded 5y agoSetting culture is a large part of leadership. Most likely one of two things happened: a) the leadership was complicit in the culture, b) the leadership was too weak to prevent a toxic culture from festering. In either case, the leadership is not fit for, ahem, leadership.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoOr leadership is new, is correcting the problems, which takes time. Otherwise every time you replace leadership you must immediately replace the new leadership, since they too have not instantly fixed the culture.
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y agoThis has the feel of the CEO rounding up as many patsies as he can find to scapegoat in order to placate the investors. No doubt the culture there is rotten to the core, the rumors of the horrible work environment and harassment are widely known, however, I predict you won't see too many of the exec team having to leave. It'll be all low level expendable IC's that the CEO won't have to encounter at the country club after the sacking.
- stathibus 5y agoThe mostly empty low-effort changes they've made to their games recently in the name of inclusion also match this strategy.
- andygroundwater 5y agoThe "do just the minimum" strategy of corporate inclusion and diversity.
- meatsauce 5y ago
- tdsamardzhiev 5y agoIt's the game industry way. Diversity this, inclusiveness that, but when you want to go on holiday for Orthodox Easter instead of Catholic Easter, we have a problem. And you realize it's all pandering and saving face in front of the public.
- swalls 5y agoI saw the changes to WoW being described as reeling back from 'the line' because their company culture is so warped they have no idea where 'the line' lies anymore.
- bertil 5y agoDefinitely. For the _Wall Street Journal_ to write most of their article about how the CEO is guilty of the worst and didn’t face any consequence, because the board supported him —— and use the word “rape”, he really need to have made a bad attempt at looking contrite.
- RNCTX 5y agoNothing says "CEO" like offering up the firing of ~3 dozen employees to try and cover up his own misdeeds.
- robaato 5y agoIf only we didn't have a prime minister trying the same thing...
- bob1029 5y agoKotick has taken a dishonorable path. He should be first person out the door. Situation in the industry feels kind of bleak to me now. One of these days I am going to be able to trick my investors into letting me start a game studio. I really don't understand why there isn't more intense competition at the AAA tier. I know for a fact I can do it cheaper and faster. Not sure about better, but I'm willing to fail a few times...
- nchi3 5y agoIt's for the same reason that there aren't more companies coming out of nowhere to make Hollywood blockbusters. I think you might be underestimating how many man hours it takes to create the content for an AAA game.
- vinyl7 5y agoThat's basically what AA games are, and are sometimes somewhat successful...but usually not as successful as AAA games. Then you have the indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed. So not only do you need a game idea that is attractive to gamers (AAA games are established franchise with decades of releases and marketing), it also has to be implemented well (see the failures of this years CoD and Battlefield) AND you need a huge marketing budget to get your game in front of eyes (maybe you could get lucky going "viral") to stand out from everyone else.
- dataduck 5y ago> indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.
- Tangokat 5y ago"They expect one of us in the wreckage brother" as one Reddit comment put it. Bobby has to go, no matter if this is "his fault" or not. Shareholders lost a lot of money, Blizzard lost a lot of reputation. It happened on his watch and new blood is needed. To be honest I think the studio is lost, we can only hope that some of the spin off studios will turn out to be great.
- meatsauce 5y ago
- meatsauce 5y ago
- bovermyer 5y agoActivision Blizzard is dead to me forever. No amount of token firing will change that. However, if all of their IP were to be given to a completely different company and Kotick were to be made penniless for the rest of his natural life, I could see myself playing a formerly-Blizzard game again.
- gameswithgo 5y agofree hong kong
- throwaway59553 5y ago
- boringg 5y agoThis is Kotick cleaning house before microsoft take over. Too little too late he still has a short shelf life after microsoft transition complete.
- rickstanley 5y agoToday I only play Heroes of the Storm from Blizzard... It's a nice alternative to other MOBAs, simple and fast when compared to. But I don't waste a penny on their store nor give any helpful feedback. I just play with my friends, and when we're done, that's it, logout and forget.
- voakbasda 5y agoSurely the timing of this is coincidence, what with Microsoft announcing their purchase of Blizzard? Nope, probably not. Kinda sad to see that’s what it took to motivate them to take action. I’m not a gamer and have no horse in this race, but what initially seemed like a change of pace turns out to be the entirely laughable status quo of management giving lip service to these issues. Given the timing, there should be no question that this was done in direct response to the acquisition, and only expendable tokens have been remove from play. Meanwhile, the management that led this shit show will avoid any consequences and laugh themselves all the way to the bank.
- LocalH 5y agoFuck Bobby Kotick