Blizzard employees share bad experiences with Bobby Kotick

With Bobby Kotick no longer the CEO of Activision Blizzard, employees are coming out with some serious allegations against their former leader.

It’s no surprise that Blizzard has been a big mess the past few years. The game company was sued for gender discrimination, and male employees were accused of some serious allegations, including harassment and assault. Many esports have also been suffering, especially the Overwatch League.

While the drama and allegations are nothing new for Blizzard, employees are now free to talk about their experiences with Kotick specifically.

Bobby Kotick accused of threats, losing Blizzard money

Employees took to Twitter to share some horrifying experiences with Kotick, and if they are all to be believed, the former CEO is guilty of not only treating employees poorly but mismanaging the business as a whole.

Call of Duty writer, developer, and programmer Christina Pollock opened up on Twitter about her experiences while employed at Demonware. She stated that Kotick “made the game worse” with his decisions. The verbal abuse and decision-making were so bad, in fact, that she personally demanded he be fired.

“We all need to revolt against people like this every time,” she tweeted, giving advice to other teams that have bad management problems.

i worked on COD for two years as a programmer at demonware

bobby's decisions made our games worse

in my first month it came out he threatened to have an employee killed. in the all-hands that followed, no-one wanted to speak first. so i demanded his firing in front of everyone https://t.co/yhlM5xqPPg

— christina 死神 (@chhopsky) December 29, 2023

More recently, Kotick was also accused of making Overwatch 2 perform worse than anticipated. When the game launched on Steam, Kotick warned the team that it would be review-bombed, but he allegedly refused to give more information to anyone and didn’t provide extra support.

“This is only one example of the culture Kotick bred at AB: shit flowed downstream, usually landing on the lowest-paid and most overworked individuals. Management was too busy reacting to wildly vacillating direction and decisions that made zero sense,” community manager Andy Belford wrote.

Breaking my silence to share a fun fact: when we planned OW2’s steam launch, my team warned (months in advance) that we’re going to be review bombed. We begged for more information, more details, and more resources to help us with the anticipated influx, all flatly denied. https://t.co/bALYcb0lg0

— Andy Belford (he/him) 💙 (@andybelford) December 29, 2023

Not only did the Overwatch 2 team feel overwhelmed with a lack of management during the backlash, but Kotick also “cost the team months of development time,” possibly one of the reasons that the game was unable to keep the PvE promises. He often blamed Overwatch 2 for Blizzard’s problems, trying to avoid taking any blame.

It’s safe to say that the Blizzard employees, as a whole, are not upset to see Kotick leave. But only time will tell if another leader will help the struggling publisher.