Bobby's bounced

 Kotick Down

So Robert Kotick has officially flown the coop. He has based jumped off the top of the Activision ladder with his pockets stuffed full of bills and bullion and his parachute glinting a special gleam of glorious gold. The man has succeeded to such an extent that the many alleged crimes that he committed, actual crimes not just crimes against art, have bounced off him like water off the back of a duck and now he is free to pollute some other business with his presence and start the cycle all over again, all whilst giving that rodent-like grin he saved for all of his public press photos that make him look like discount Peter Pettigrew. (I know: "Personal insults- so mature!" But the guy is a colossus now, I hardly think a snide comment on his wavering public image is going to hurt the man's pride.)

Bobby is a mystery of a man all to himself, slipping from business to business all of his life before landing on the Activision train that he decided to suck dry. You can't call him a career business creep that fell into the world of gaming, because Bobby was hovering our industry like a vulture for years before taking his top role, picking at the body- trying to extract whatever carrion the man could stuff down his maw. I would imagine there was even a time where his presence was looked on with some sort of respect, or even favourability. A man with as long as a tenure as he commands some natural aura of intrigue and consideration. Luckily, though, the rot beneath the flesh is never quite so easy to hide, and Bobby leaves us all glaring red for all of his many faults. So let us all shout them out before he publishes a book deflecting all of them onto other people.

Kotick has been a plague which has slowly picked up more and more steam as the years have gone by to the extent of serious business wide ramifications. We know that Kotick made significant effort to do nothing about and cover up the sexual harassment claims bubbling about his office- facilitating it's perpetuation into the work culture. Kotick was revealed to have voiced a message for assistants back in 2006, threatening to have them killed. Bobby is implicated in several improper termination disputes wherein he is alleged to have cut people from the payroll that might be considered 'problematic' or 'trouble starters'. And to round things out I do believe he is also listed in the Epstein flight logs- which is just a really bad look ontop of everything else, now isn't it?

Of course, the real measure for the person that someone truly is does not fall on solely on their public perception. Afterall, who's to say that Bobby isn't just the lightning rod martyr absorbing all of the controversies of a rotten system, burning on the cross for everybody else's sins? (Excluding the flight-logs thing. Not much can be said in defence of that.) But you can get a better grasp of who the person is by the opinions of the people they leave behind. Afterall, what is legacy but the living imprint of our lives left on the faces of all those who remain? And what exactly does Bobby's Legacy say about him? Hmm? Oh, the moment he was officially out the company there were already tweets of former employees wishing upon him to digest faecal matter. So we'll call his legacy 'mixed', shall we?

A senior world designer for WOW leapt up to let his feelings known with a very aggressive "Eat s*** Bobby Kotick you pathetic ghoul, waste the millions you didn't earn from people whose talent and light you will never understand." Which highlights one of the key contentions about the man. You see, Bobby wasn't just morally bad, but the guy was bad for business. On the level of who he is drawing controversy, and by the account of some even to the decisions he made that ended up scuppering the quality of products under his supervision. This is a real 'he said, she said' sort of situation, but it can't be denied that Blizzard's reputation has gone off a cliff in the past few decades, whereas once they were a bastion of player-championing heroes- now they are a cistern for the worst practices across the industry. How much of that is directly Bobby's fault? Well, even if none of it was due to his direct interference, that reputation dithered under his watch- thus he takes responsibility.

We have a COD designer coming out to label Bobby directly as a cause for their games being made worse. (Which is quite the change in tune from the last time we heard about COD devs discussing their games! I though COD gets more playtime which makes it the best game ever made and better than multiple award winning title: God of War!) Another claims that the Overwatch team was well aware of the hate storm they would receive for launching on Steam- (which was somewhat deserved given their blatantly misleading advertising selling a key design aspect of the game that was scrapped before launch) but received no additional support thanks to the executive choice of Bobby; who probably couldn't have cared less when he made that decision.

Although few have more bones to pick with Kotick than the nation of China, from whom every beloved Blizzard game was ripped following a dissolution in the relationship between Activision Blizzard and their Chinese partners- because of Kotick's many controversies. World of Warcraft's gigantic Chinese player base had their servers indefinitely withdrawn thanks to his machinations and that counts literal decades of gaming history thrown in a vault and locked away. Needless to say those effected were bitter, burning effigies and raising metaphorical middle fingers across the ocean, and they among the rest of the world see Bobby's flight as a happy development in these companies trajectory- although that bridge won't be automatically healed anytime soon. Bobby's destruction lives past his departure.

Bobby's reputation has made him the boogey man of the games industry for many years, and I'm quite curious to see just how much of the industry he helped shape is going to take advantage of his absence to mold itself into something better. My suspicion, is that the vacuum he leaves is only going to become clotted up by the deluge of identical sycophantic cronies he has groomed into following his every tradition. Activision Blizzard aren't free of the monster, they're simply orphaned and helpless for the next despot to don their crown and become the subject of the industries spite and hatred. And Bobby will just be remembered as the old dark lord. Like the Morgoth to our coming Sauron. That's just my take though, who knows where we're going?