Bobby Kotick has now officially parted ways with Activision. Or, at
the very least, he's no longer its CEO (given all the stock options
he's collected over the years, I'm sure he still has significant voice
on the board).

Kotick was a divisive figure at Activision. Under his guidance, he led
the company to become one of the premier publishers in the video game
industry. Activision wasn't a small company (even if it was struggling
financially) when he bought in to Activision back in '91, but it was
just one amongst many. 32 years later, it's one of the 'big three' of
video-game publishers.

But outside of finances, his tenure has had problems. He's always been
more focused on the monetization of games than the art, his business
techniques have always been somewhat skeevy, and his leadership has
been less than stellar, with many accusations of sexual harassment and
bullying. Under his guidance, Activision jumped head-first into
"annualization" of video-games, ignoring new IPs over safe franchises.
Later, he helped lead Activision into MTX and games-as-a-service. From
an economic standpoint, it was great for Activision, but for his
employees and customers? Not so much.

"Bobby [Kotick]'s decisions made our games worse," says one former
employee*. Kotick himself was infamous for saying "The goal that I had
.... was to take all the fun out of making video games"**. He was quick
to layoff employees even as the company itself made increasingly huge
profits. He did little to assuage the victims of sexual harassment
that there would be any change in policy, and in fact protected the
victimizers from being fired. Is it any wonder he was once voted one
of the "most over-paid chief executive officers of the United States"?

And what did we get out of this? Endless Call of Duty games on the PC
and MTX-ridden games on mobile, mostly. Old IPs were largely ignored
(Activision isn't quite as bad as EA for killing IPs and studios it
acquires, but it's not much better either), and few new IPs were
created.

Many celebrated the Microsoft-Activision merger, believing (correctly,
as it turns out) that it would lead to Kotick's ouster. And while it's
all well and good that he's no longer CEO, the leadership he installed
in the company remains, and there's little reason to hope there will
be a sudden change for the better at Activision. And why should it?
Kotick proved that making quality products is not necessary to
becoming a financially successful company; you can just shit out the
same game year after year and still rake in billions, even as you
treat your employees (and customers) like crap. Why would Microsoft
want to change such a winning formula?

So, hurrah! Kotick is gone. I just wish it would really matter.

*
https://www.eurogamer.net/bobby-koticks-decisions-made-our-games-worse-says-former-call-of-duty-dev
**
https://kotaku.com/bobby-kotick-warm-and-fuzzy-defends-notorious-no-fun-5474949

On Tue, 02 Jan 2024 13:17:36 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>Many celebrated the Microsoft-Activision merger, believing (correctly,
>as it turns out) that it would lead to Kotick's ouster.

Which is about as difficult to predict as identifying which US cities
will have the most homeless tents pop up next year (hint... look for
ones with high drug tolerance, "defund the police" attitude etc)...

....Ousting the existing CEO is usually one of the first things that
happens in an acquisition situation like this. Even if the actual
termination date doesn't come immediately, the plans to get him out
happen before the acquisition deal ever takes place. And no one savvy
enough to scam their way into the CEO position is naive enough to
believe that it's going to turn out any other way, so they've often
protected themselves with various severance clauses. I literally have
a good friend that does this for a living (gets hired as CEO of a tech
start up, and spends every hour helping them with funding rounds with
the ultimate goal of selling the company to someone else, only so he
can get himself fired with a golden parachute, and rinse and repeat.
He even describes that process in more diplomatic terms in his online
profile).

Now, whether or not that situation is good for customers or employees
is another matter altogether....

It really depends on the product, the situation, and in the case of
software/gaming/tech etc. the internal culture of the engineering
division versus the rest of the corporate culture. Sometimes an
acquisition causes the morale and effectiveness of the internal
engineering team to completely implode, and in other cases they
continue to thrive for decades.

I know a guy who worked for Sybase about 4 decades ago before
Microsoft acquired the product and branded it SQL Server. He is just
as happy under MS as he was back then, and his salary has not suffered
much, he was making over $350k a year last time I talked to him not
including the stock options he's amassed.. And the fact that the two
homes he owns that I'm aware of (which I confirmed via property tax
records) add up to approximately $8M in tax valued real estate, I do
not doubt his salary claim at all (not uncommon for someone of his
status that's been at MS that long).

So it can work out well. It depends on whether the acquisition ends
up with new management coming in and rocking the boat in engineering
and changing all the things that made the original company successful.

I've seen many times a CEO with a background in marketing or
accounting come in and utterly destroy a company in a matter of months
simply because they don't understand the first thing about software
development. They are clueless idiots that think "lazy developers"
are behind every situation that doesn't accomodate their ideal vision
so they start trying to "fix things".....yet because they are that
fucking stupid, they have no idea how to fix anything about software
engineering. It doesn't matter, they parachute out after a few years
anyway leaving the company in ruin in the wake of their incompetence,
and most of the folks below them and another little chunk of the
economy is perma-fucked.

Microsoft is usually a bit smarter with staffing placement than most
companies, so if they put a team in charge that has a few decades of
what REALLY makes an effective engineering team, Activision will
probably continue to be what it is. Maybe with a little luck it can
become something better. Not all Microsoft gaming ventures have been
failures after all... Flight Sim, Age of Empires, etc..

>So, hurrah! Kotick is gone. I just wish it would really matter.

As if who is in the CEO seat of a tech company ever really does??? The
exception to that is very rare circumstances where the CEO is one of
the key founders of the organization.

In most cases, what matters is who is REALLY in charge of product
development... in some companies that's the CTO, but in larger
companies sometimes it is several layers below that... even below the
VP of Engineering level... sometimes its even a middle manager or a
tech lead who is the real wizard behind the curtain.

On 02/01/2024 18:17, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> Many celebrated the Microsoft-Activision merger, believing (correctly,
> as it turns out) that it would lead to Kotick's ouster. And while it's
> all well and good that he's no longer CEO, the leadership he installed
> in the company remains, and there's little reason to hope there will
> be a sudden change for the better at Activision. And why should it?
> Kotick proved that making quality products is not necessary to
> becoming a financially successful company; you can just shit out the
> same game year after year and still rake in billions, even as you
> treat your employees (and customers) like crap. Why would Microsoft
> want to change such a winning formula?

That's pretty much what I find to be the worst aspect of it. There's a
large enough customer base who in the long run just don't seem to care
how they are treated or how a company acts. Yeh there may be a little
bit of outrage here and there but there's a lot more wallet opening.