He’s also sworn to share new data that should dispel claims of Activision’s toxic workplace culture (Picture: Variety)
Two years after Activision’s string of lawsuits and harassment allegations, CEO Bobby Kotick maintains he and the company are blameless.
Video game executives aren’t generally the most popular people within the gaming community, but Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick may just be the most unpopular of the lot.
Cartoonish pictures of him dressed as the devil are commonplace thanks to him raking in massive bonuses while simultaneously and routinely laying off employees. He’s also the public face of a company that, just two years ago, was drowning in allegations of sexual harassment, workplace toxicity, and just overall awful behaviour towards its female and minority employees.
At the time, Kotick denied such allegations and that hasn’t changed, as he’s claimed in a new interview that it’s ‘outside forces’ and labour activity surrounding the company that’s to blame for Activision Blizzard’s image problems.
Despite multiple lawsuits and accusations that he was not only aware of instances of harassment but involved in them too, Kotick maintains that there were actually very few workplace complaints.
He also intends to release a new transparency report that will combat the allegations of Activision’s ‘frat boy culture.’ As a reminder, Activision once dug its heels in to prevent publishing a discrimination report and conducted an investigation of its own, one which unsurprisingly deduced that everything was actually fine.
‘We’ve had every possible form of investigation done. And we did not have a systemic issue with harassment – ever,’ Kotick tells Variety. ‘We didn’t have any of what were mischaracterisations reported in the media. But what we did have was a very aggressive labour movement working hard to try and destabilise the company.’
Kotick seems to be referring to unionisation efforts within Activision’s studios, a couple of which have since been successful, as well as the Communications Workers of America union, which had filed numerous complaints against the company.
Call Of Duty Black Ops: Cold War studio Raven Software successfully unionised last year (Picture: Activision)
The interview makes it sound like Kotick has a low opinion of such labour organisations, claiming they’ve been influencing the harassment and gender discrimination investigations.
Yet within the same interview, Kotick stresses that he’s not anti-union, even saying that he’s ‘not like other CEOs.’
‘I’m the only Fortune 500 CEO who’s a member of a union,’ he says, referring to the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). He joined it in 2011 when he was cast in a small role in baseball drama Moneyball (no, really).
‘If we have employees who want a union to represent them, and they believe that that union is going to be able to provide them with opportunities and enhancements to their work experience, I’m all for it. I have a mother who was a teacher. I have no aversion to a union. What I do have an aversion to is a union that doesn’t play by the rules.’
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We can’t imagine his comments will win him any new friends, especially those who still want him fired from Activision Blizzard. Although he insists that his continued presence is proof of his innocence.
‘I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if any of what you read in the inflammatory narrative was truthful,’ he says in reference to The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 report, which alleged he deliberately covered up instances of harassment.
‘No board of directors in a noncontrolled company is going to allow the CEO of an enterprise to stay running the enterprise if those things were truthful.’
Some only support the Microsoft take over in hope that Kotick will be forced out, but Microsoft has made no such promise (Picture: Blizzard Entertainment)
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Two years after Activision’s string of lawsuits and harassment allegations, CEO Bobby Kotick maintains he and the company are blameless.
