Yesterday, at the exact moment Activision Blizzard chief executive officer Bobby Kotick hopped on a quarterly earnings call to inform shareholders that his company had just gone through a “record year,” employees across the publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and more were being brought into conference rooms and informed that they were losing their jobs.
Earlier this morning, Blizzard management began informing staff that employees would start being made redundant from today, with layoffs to affect the company worldwide. Around the same time, Activision Blizzard executives were holding an earnings call with investors, outlining more detail about the company's future strategy and the layoffs that were afoot.
Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick's compensation for 2017 was $US28,698,375 ($38,273,588), according to filings the video game publisher submitted earlier this week to the US Security and Exchanges Commission. Don't be too jealous, though - that's actually a pay cut. But it's still over 300 times what the median Activision employee made.
It's official: Activision has indeed purchased Major League Gaming, as was rumoured over the weekend. The most interesting part? They want to take esports to television.
Activision has a lot of money. Bobby Kotick has fat stacks, too. The publisher's CEO saw his compensation jump from $US8.1 million in 2011 to $US64.9 million in 2012, reports Bloomberg. He's the second-highest paid CEO among publicly traded US companies.
Today's New York Times profiles Bobby Kotick, the boss of Activision Blizzard and longtime bête noir of many a longtime gamer, many of whom have created unflattering portrayals of him quickly found by Google Image search. Well, he wants you to know this doesn't help his game. See, he's divorced and on the prowl.
Having done a lot of business with Lucasarts -- Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, Star Wars: STFU -- Activision boss Bobby Kotick knows who comes out ahead in that relationship. It ain't the publisher, he said, when asked his thoughts on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Honestly, this interview -- by Alex Navarro, ex-Harmonix employee -- is one of the best I've ever read and absolutely deserves to be read in full. In this wide ranging interview with his former employers they discuss the past and future of Harmonix and Rock Band, and broach the subject of the relationship with Activision and Bobby Kotick.
To call Bobby Kotick's appearance in Moneyball a cameo is a bit of a misnomer. The Activision boss has two significant scenes and plenty of lines in the sports flick as Stephen Schott, the co-owner of the Oakland Athletics. It's not to say he plays much of a character, but he doesn't have to. He simply has to be what he is in real life.
Bobby Kotick's cameo in Moneyball, even after it was confirmed by Activision, remained quite the WTF mystery of June. Why was he appearing as the Oakland A's owner in a sports flick? Did he know Brad Pitt? Did he know the director? Was this some hint at a Call of Duty movie?
Activision boss Bobby Kotick didn't buy MySpace. Someone else will for a measly $US35 million (considerably less than the $US580 million IGN owner News Corp. paid in 2005). Furthermore, also-dying social network Friendster is now a social gaming hub.
We were all surprised to discover early this morning a smiling Robert Kotick, Activision Blizzard president, apparently landing his first acting gig opposite Brad Pitt in upcoming sports drama Moneyball.
This is a trailer for an upcoming Brad Pitt movie called Moneyball. It's about baseball. And at 0:58, you can see that the owner of the Oakland A's baseball team is being played by none other than Activision boss Bobby Kotick.
According to "three people familiar with the matter", Reuters is reporting that a group of investors including none other than Activision boss Bobby "What, Me Worry?" Kotick is in talks to buy dying social networking site MySpace.
According to CVG, Activision CEO wandered by the E3 booth of Battlefield 3, the regicidal threat to his company's own Call of Duty franchise, for a friendly look at the competition. He was denied.
