Bobby Kotick Escapes With A Golden Parachute | Opinion

mmorpg.com:

Bobby Kotick’s last day at renowned gaming megacorporation Activision Blizzard was Friday, December 29th, 2023. He leaves with a $15 million… departure salary? In casual terms, it’s a “golden parachute.” He’s 60 years old. He’ll be fine. 

Anyway. 

Gaming culture was never perfect, but when there’s personal incentive, no matter how mundane or temporal, people in power historically enable bad things to be worse. In fact, he’s proud of sanitizing the companies he’s looked over (and the industry he arose from), with these 2009 quotes from an industry conference [via GameSpot ]: 

Someone in the comments will be sure that these were meant to be jokes—but jokes come from somewhere in the mix of reality, right? 

Alright, to his slight credit, the guy was a hell of a businessman in the 1990s and early 2000s. The man essentially climbed his way up through the gaming and technology industries through merger after merger, concept after concept, until he bought 25% of Blizzard and made its products some of the most successful in history. But that’s extremely foreboding of everything else to come. 

Around the time of the ActiBlizz merger, Kotick had his first major sexual harassment case when his management company fired a flight attendant who complained about sexual harassment by a company-hired pilot. In the end, allegedly ignored advice from his lawyer to settle for $200,000, who later sued Kotick himself; the situation eventually cost the then-renowned businessman $1.4 million. 

ActiBlizz, meanwhile, grew to enable what California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing called “akin to working in a frat house” in 2021’s massive lawsuit, so major that State. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal alleged he personally was aware