Employees at Activision Blizzard walked out Tuesday to call for CEO Bobby Kotick’s resignation. The protest followed a disturbing Wall Street Journal report earlier the same day about Kotick’s handling of sexual misconduct allegations at the company. Now a group of employees have decided they will no longer silently tolerate his management.
“There’s just no faith at all among employees in leadership,” says one current Blizzard employee. “Nobody actually likes these guys, across the company.”
The action came together quickly on Tuesday. More than 150 people gathered outside Activision Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, California, many carrying signs with phrases like “NO CONFIDENCE IN KOTICK” and “UNACCOUNTABLE CORPORATE BUREAUCRATS ARE DRIVING THE BEST EMPLOYEES OUT OF ACTIVISION BLIZZARD.” Additional employees joined the protest remotely by stopping their work for the day. “We will not be silenced until Bobby Kotick has been replaced as CEO,” tweeted the Activision Blizzard King Workers Alliance, a group of employee activists who helped organize the walkout.
This is the second employee walkout this year in response to allegations of discrimination and misconduct at Activision Blizzard. The first occurred in July, after California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed an explosive 29-page lawsuit against the company. It alleged that women did not receive fair compensation and were unable to advance on par with male counterparts, but it also contained hair-raising allegations of abuse. In September, the company agreed to pay $18 million to settle a separate workplace harassment and discrimination complaint from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The US Securities and Exchange Commission also began investigating the company. Activision Blizzard has received 500 current and former employees’ allegations of workplace bias, misconduct, or abuse since late July, the The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
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Several top Activision Blizzard employees resigned or were let go by the company in the wake of the DFEH complaint and follow-up investigations. Some were directly implicated in allegations, including former chief technology officer Ben Kilgore and former lead developers for Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft. Company president J. Allen Brack, who the DFEH alleges knew about complaints of harassment, also resigned.
“In the past, we haven’t asked for anyone to resign,” says one Blizzard employee involved in the walkout. “We believed in the ability to fix this and have people learn and grow.” But after The Journal's bombshell report published on Tuesday, the employee says when it comes to Kotick, “there’s the belief that the integrity isn’t there to allow learning and growing.”
The report alleges Kotick misrepresented his knowledge of the depth and breadth of misconduct allegations to both Activision Blizzard executives and board members. The board was reportedly blindsided by California DFEH’s complaint this summer, despite the department’s investigation stretching back two years. “Some departing employees who were accused of misconduct were praised on the way out, while their coworkers were asked to remain silent about the matters,” The Journal reports.
The report also recounts multiple accusations involving the CEO himself. Kotick allegedly harassed an assistant in 2006, including saying in a voicemail that he’d have her killed. A spokesperson for Kotick says he apologized at the time and regrets his tone. In 2007, a flight attendant on a private jet he co-owned sued Kotick after she was fired for complaining about the pilot’s alleged sexual harassment. Kotick settled with the attendant and paid her $200,000, according to The Journal. A spokesperson for Kotick denied there was retaliation.
In a statement, Activision Blizzard denied the WSJ report and said it presented “a misleading view of Activision Blizzard and our CEO … The WSJ ignores important changes underway to make this the industry’s most welcoming and inclusive workplace, and it fails to account for the efforts of thousands of employees who work hard every day to live up to their—and our—values.”
Kotick himself also sent a video message to employees on Tuesday in which he said the report “paints an inaccurate and misleading view of our company, of me personally, and my leadership.” He added, “Anyone who doubts my conviction to be the most welcoming, inclusive workplace doesn’t really appreciate how important this is to me.” Kotick added that the company is moving forward with “a new zero-tolerance policy for inappropriate behavior—and zero means zero. Any reprehensible conduct is simply unacceptable.” An Activision Blizzard spokesperson told WIRED that the company had no further comment.
“I don’t know that anyone I know at the company actually thinks Bobby Kotick and his Trump-era goons have employees’ best interests at heart,” says one current Blizzard employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions. (Chief compliance officer Frances Townsend worked as president George W. Bush’s homeland security adviser, and chief administration officer Brian Bulatao has worked with the Trump administration.)
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Former president Jen Oneal, who replaced Brack this summer, resigned earlier this month in part because of misgivings about the company’s direction. In September, according to the WSJ report, she sent an email to Activision’s legal team saying the company “would never prioritize our people the right way” and wrote that she had personally suffered harassment and discrimination.
Kotick has been CEO of the storied gaming company for 30 years. In 1990, he and his partner, casino mogul Steve Wynn, purchased a quarter stake in Activision, which was nearly bankrupt at the time. Activision went on to publish top games, including Call of Duty, and has rolled a half-dozen gaming studios into its ranks, including World of Warcraft and Overwatch publisher Blizzard and Candy Crush publisher King.
Kotick has weathered several controversies during this time. His compensation has been a point of contention for years; in 2018, his pay amounted to more than 300 times that of the median employee salary. While the company has consistently posted record revenues, it has also undertaken rounds of layoffs the last several years. The most recent round of layoffs took place in March 2021, when Kotick was slated to receive nearly $200 million in compensation. (In October, Kotick asked the board to deflate his compensation to $62,500 “until the board has determined that we have achieved the transformational gender-related goals and other commitments described above.”) Activision Blizzard’s customers have also criticized the company for some of its business strategies, including charging players for additional features and content in games that already cost $60. Activision Blizzard earned $1.2 billion through in-game microtransactions in just one quarter of 2020.
“Usually when there’s a change that was clearly for monetary benefit,” says one current Blizzard employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, “we colloquially referred to it as ‘Bobby did that.’ We understood that it was Bobby making these pushes, making sure his vision for continued monetary growth [was implemented], even in the face of its impact on employees or players.” In 2009, speaking about his hyper-focus on Activision’s bottom line, Kotick came under fire for saying he wanted to “take all the fun out of making video games” and that the company has “a real culture of thrift.”
Employees are fighting an uphill battle to remove Kotick. Activision Blizzard’s board stands behind him. In a statement today, the board reiterated its support of Kotick, maintaining that it “remains confident in Bobby Kotick’s leadership, commitment, and ability." (Three current Blizzard employees said they were not surprised by the board’s continued support.)
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Activision employees’ morale may in a trough, but some sunlight shines through. Employees remain at the company to create games players love, despite the controversy and whiplash they have experienced from this year’s stream of devastating revelations. For employees who want things to change, their resolve has become more emboldened and directed. “I’m still optimistic,” says one current employee. “There’s more of a sustained desire for change and more people speaking up and more people working together to demand change than I’ve ever seen before here. People are standing up. They’re not giving in to apathy. They’re not accepting. They’re not just saying, ‘This is how it is.’”
*Photographs of Tuesday's walkout were taken by an attendee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions
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