Bye Bye Bobby

 Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

So by the time this blog comes out I know one thing for certain: Incredibly Bobby Kotick, CEO over at Activision, will still have a job. But I entitle this piece 'bye bye Bobby', because I think it's not hard to see that the writing is on the wall for this embattled public figure, as his tenure as one of the highest paid executives in entertainment burns down to ashes in the ruins of his credibility. And it wasn't the years of hack-job games that did the killing blow, nor was the general dislike that many had for this ghoulish little gnome, no, instead it was the very real cost of keeping a tyrannical sycophant in the headseat of your multibillion dollar company without placing the slightest amount of leashes or checks on his position to make sure your little dog was barking as intended. Yes, I do blame the Activision investors to some degree for what has come out over the past few days specifically, perhaps even more so than Bobby, because it's hard to attribute blame on a literal muck-monster; they just act as their nature demands.

Bobby, who tried damn hard to get that same distended Cheshire grin on every single odd photo of him perhaps in some grand plan to convince everyone that he is actually human, (not buying it) actually started out life as an enthusiast developer for early Apple. And even reading that fact astounds me. Can you imagine someone like him going the distance of actually doing something out of passion? Wild, the people some of us used to be. Of course, as any tech-giant supervillian story goes, he did this in conjuncture with college until he met Steve Jobs who convinced him to drop out. Sounds like the kind of thing that would happen in a bad biopic, but apparently that's accurate according to an interview of Kotick himself for the Wall Street Journal. To my utmost surprise, his early career was actually embroiled with gaming to the hilt, he's not one of those who made it big in other entertainment and just warped over here where the money was at. He did buy his way into Activision however, which was nearing bankruptcy at the time, so at least he can't claim this whole company as his 'labour of love' that he 'nurtured from an infant'; I hate when CEO's get to hide behind that excuse and do the whole Norman Osbourne routine. ("Do you know how much I sacrificed!?")

In the years that Bobby helmed the company, Activision rose from a sickly beast on it's way out to pasture to a regular mainstay of the gaming industrial complex, regularly scouring big licence deals and hit games. Heck, Activision even managed to kick out EA's stranglehold over the then-popular World War II genre in order to institute their own replacement series, Call of Duty, which would go on to gorge up and bloat like a soaked cadaver. What I'm trying to say is that Bobby was a big earner for Activision, which only goes to fuel his bubbling superiority complex eventually leading to a day where he'd feel so above the mere mortals who worked for him that their plights and concerns would devolve into nothing more than the nattering of ants to his god-like ears. He minted his reputation on the hard-won millions he scoured year in and year out, and I'd imagine that's what fuelled his desire to pressure the board of directors for more bonuses until he was one of the highest paid sleezeballs in a suit. 

Does that make the price of financial success on the entertainment scene the loss of one's basic morals as a human being? Well I wouldn't go that sweeping with a conclusion, (although that's obviously not below me to suggest) but I think there's a potential case study to be made for the amount of folk who find themselves in similar mindsets and positions. In fact, the past few years alone have established many parallels across the gaming world between what has happened at Activision and other big-roots studios. Yves Guillemot's Ubisoft have been struck with allegations of rampant sexual harassment, bullying and a fratboy-esque miasma clinging to the whole place wherein every executive is each-others chug-buddy from college. Activision's partner Blizzard is reeling with their own allegations, which they spent the past year deftly avoiding with surface level changes to their games to remove any content with even the slightest reference to sexuality, because that was the problem apparently, and not the real life conduct. (Better luck next time, Blizzard)

But Activision as a whole is said to have been full with debauchery and unethical work conditions for years, maybe even decades, and all under the protective gaze of one Bobby Kotick. It's actually been somewhat darkly amusing to watch the many circus antics of this Bozo-the-Clown impersonator, as Bobby has tried to move the earth and heavens to make everything not his fault. Yes, in typical entitled spoiled rich kid fashion, Bobby wants all the praise and rewards which comes with helming one of the highest paid positions in gaming, without the responsibility of actually being at the head of a company. Many times Kotick has insisted that he knew nothing of the years of unsafe work environments for female employees, nor the incredibly serious accusations that have spawned from those terrains. He was just- what- on holiday throughout his entire CEO tenure? Never once did Bobby hear of any wrongdoings? He never passed an aggrieved employee in the hall? Never got a letter in his digital inbox? Nothing? Oh to have no responsibility and still make over 100 million in bonuses a year, talk about living the dream, eh.

If only the people under him would actually believe his expertly crafted defence of 'it wasn't me.' (Shaggy and Rik Rok proved incredible councillors for this tough time in Bobby's career.) But alas, we're seeing rampant write-in campaigns and the first of what I can only assume will be many demonstrations, if the obvious end is not reached. The message is clear, Bobby is bad at his job, actively bad for the employees and needs to go. Whether he actively hid the many scandals and crimes of his higher paid staff or he truly is so monumentally pitiful at his job that he really did not know anything about this for all these years; either way he's woefully unqualified for his position. Like many of the lucky idiots reigning over this industry, his value to his company dried up long ago and now his influence persists as this gangrenous, gelatinous stain that's going to take a great amount of effort to scrub out completely, but the process can at least be started with the removal of the original offending growth.

And you might be saying 'an employee revolt is hardly enough to dethrone Activision's golden boy', and I would be inclined to agree, however the high profile nature of this whole mess has made sure that the writing is on the wall for this man's career regardless of which way his workers lean. Both Sony and Microsoft have lambasted Activision under his leadership, with Microsoft subtly implying they're intending to revalue their partnership with the company and Sony just throwing their iconic shade at the man himself. (They're deeper in bed with Activision, afterall, so they can't really just start throwing around business related threats willy-nilly.) That's pretty much the death nail for Kotick, you can abuse and fray the trust between management and employee all you want, that's literally the how-to-guide for management, but the second you start threatening the bottom line with your mere presence- you can bet the investors are currently in the midst of constructing a rocket to eject Bobby directly into the sun as we speak.

So good riddance to bad rubbish, as the saying does go, for soon Kotick is to be no more and Activision will find itself under the purview of someone who is destined to be just as bad but in different ways, because gaming companies have a revolving door of factory-grown Satan-spawn executives just waiting to play musical chairs at high office. Whether or not this replacement will get their hands on even a fraction of the bonuses that Bobby was seeing is another matter entirely, afterall the man still has to fund his several retirement homes after he's kicked out, and seeing as how the board of directors over at Activision consists almost entirely of Kotick's friends, you know his severance cushion is going to be their chief priority. Let this whole sorry affair be a lesson to any and all that bad people may get what's coming to them, but if you're bad enough you'll still come away with a mint, and so take that for what it's worth...