Call of Duty developers have spoken out against now-ex Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. After decades of running the CoD publisher, developers reveal that Kotick’s actions made “games worse” over the course of his career.
Following the Activision Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft, Kotick is now leaving the gaming giant. With the CEO’s departure, workers on the publisher’s biggest franchises are now explaining just how the executive ruined their work.
Christina Pollock, a programmer at CoD support company Demonware, alleges that Kotick’s appearances at the studio only served to make situations worse.
“In my first month, it came out he threatened to have an employee killed. In the all-hands that followed, no one wanted to speak first. So I demanded his firing in front of everyone,” she explained.
Pollock revealed that Kotick “made our games worse” through this behaviour. The programmer also explained that workers in senior positions need to protect juniors by speaking out against these types of actions.
“I get that I am very loud and very annoying and that with my seniority and ease of other opportunities, that affords me certain protections and safety to do such things,” they explained. “But you all need to get on board this train. we all need to revolt against people like this, every time.
Kotick’s tenure at Activision Blizzard has been long and hard for workers at the company with strict development cycles, turning studios into CoD farms and allowing a history of abuse at the massive publisher. While the publisher has settled with abuse victims, the company’s wrongdoing has been long documented.
The poor management of Activision at the behest of Kotick can be seen as recently as the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. With Treyarch’s upcoming Black Ops game needing a delay, Sledgehammer Studios was pressured to make an entire Modern Warfare sequel — multiplayer, zombies and campaign — in just 16 months.
Call of Duty isn’t the only product to be ruined by the actions of Kotic, either. Blizzard employee Andy Belford revealed that the Steam launch of Overwatch 2 was botched by Kotic’s actions.
“when we planned OW2’s steam launch, my team warned (months in advance) that we’re going to be review bombed. We begged for more information, more details, and more resources to help us with the anticipated influx, all flatly denied,” Belford explained.
“Moderation of steam was put on the community team (not a function of community at Blizz), despite my refusal to want to expose members of my team to that level of toxic content/posts. When asked whose decision it was to launch on Steam with no additional help: Bobby,” he continued. “This is only one example of the culture Kotick bred at AB: shit flowed downstream, usually landing on the lowest paid and most overworked individuals. Management was too busy reacting to wildly vacillating direction and decisions that made zero sense.”
Under the new management of Microsoft, and sans Kotick, Activision will remain separately managed from the Xbox division. However, some titles (not Call of Duty) will remain exclusive on Microsoft machines.
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