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Harrow posted:I’m sure many would love to but don’t have the financial security to just leave a job and hope for the best. Even if they don’t have the financial security to just leave, it’s high time to man the lifeboats, a leaking ship is a sinking ship, and Activision Blizzard is awfully leaky.
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Nov 16, 2021 21:48
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unionize already ffs if the board stands by bobby for this, theres nothing else you can do
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Nov 16, 2021 21:49
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William Bear posted:The fact that they had a man and a woman co-leading Blizzard after a sexism scandal, and they paid the man more for doing the same job, is so tone-deaf that I can't believe it's real. it boggles the loving mind, even knowing how stupid and inept activision leadership is, it's still jaw dropping
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Nov 16, 2021 21:50
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William Bear posted:The fact that they had a man and a woman co-leading Blizzard after a sexism scandal, and they paid the man more for doing the same job, is so tone-deaf that I can't believe it's real. it's surreal to hear when the dumbest possible scenario that people joked about is exactly what happened
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Nov 16, 2021 21:52
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stev posted:He didn't even deny that one. Jesus loving Christ what an awful human being. While it's probable that the root cause of the "we can't fire Kotick" is the fact that they'd have to pay him a third of a billion dollars, might also be worth looking at the board to figure out who old mate's holding skeletons against. WSJ posted:In 2006, one of his assistants complained that he had harassed her, including by threatening in a voice mail to have her killed, according to people familiar with the matter. He settled the matter out of court, the people said. christ alive, he really is just going to post through it.
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Nov 16, 2021 21:59
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William Bear posted:https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1407658278893592579 This makes the fact that the board is stickin' with him make more sense. 292 is a ridiculous sum for making a CEO leave, so the fact that they haven't taken the most obvious move makes much more sense. I don't know why they signed this contract, but knowing it's like a AAA budget to fire the guy is an understandable barrier protecting his neck.
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Nov 16, 2021 21:59
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Grondoth posted:This makes the fact that the board is stickin' with him make more sense. 292 is a ridiculous sum for making a CEO leave, so the fact that they haven't taken the most obvious move makes much more sense. I don't know why they signed this contract, but knowing it's like a AAA budget to fire the guy is an understandable barrier protecting his neck. they signed the contract because in spite of bobby kotick being a monster he made them a lot of money and gave them the infinite growth shareholders desire
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Nov 16, 2021 22:05
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Grondoth posted:This makes the fact that the board is stickin' with him make more sense. 292 is a ridiculous sum for making a CEO leave, so the fact that they haven't taken the most obvious move makes much more sense. I don't know why they signed this contract, but knowing it's like a AAA budget to fire the guy is an understandable barrier protecting his neck.
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Nov 16, 2021 22:11
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https://twitter.com/HardDriveMag/status/1460722257949564930
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Nov 16, 2021 22:53
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anime was right posted:unionize already ffs
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Nov 16, 2021 22:55
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https://twitter.com/Pedro_Anonimo/status/1460648278740160512?s=20
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Nov 16, 2021 23:13
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I can't believe the pedophile billionaire turned out to be a bad man!
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Nov 16, 2021 23:23
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https://kotaku.com/bobby-kotick-actually-wrote-fran-townsends-deranged-co-1848069983quote:Today, somehow, this email has returned and become even more explosive, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Townsend didn’t even write it. Besieged Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick did. The story says that Kotick, who “approves most internal companywide emails, as well as media responses”, drafted the email himself, and then directed that it be sent under Townsend’s name, likely because she was one of the few women executives at a company run predominantly by men. 
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Nov 16, 2021 23:43
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https://twitter.com/xpatriciah/status/1460736555803455488 If nothing else the man's getting mad exposure. 
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Nov 16, 2021 23:48
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That Jen Oneal cut+paste.
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Nov 16, 2021 23:50
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The remaining wow players are going to get cross faction guild housing in the next patch, that'll be nice for them
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Nov 16, 2021 23:51
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stev posted:https://twitter.com/xpatriciah/status/1460736555803455488 The progression from top to bottom is like watching a jack o lantern rot in real time
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Nov 16, 2021 23:52
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The Lord of Hats posted:https://kotaku.com/bobby-kotick-actually-wrote-fran-townsends-deranged-co-1848069983 So let me get this straight: He wrote the letter that said "We value women and minorities here actually and everyone who works here thinks so", then forced a female underling to sign her name on it before publishing it This is the $440m/y guy?????
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Nov 16, 2021 23:56
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Chillgamesh posted:So let me get this straight: He wrote the letter that said "We value women and minorities here actually and everyone who works here thinks so", then forced a female underling to sign her name on it before publishing it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_nUztwPiEY
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Nov 17, 2021 00:10
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Don't worry, the board of directors says Bobby is clean as a whistle! https://twitter.com/mrfeelswildride/status/1460699458019102721?t=TelGemwFVy7NqPPg0nKbow&s=19
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Nov 17, 2021 00:12
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Chillgamesh posted:So let me get this straight: He wrote the letter that said "We value women and minorities here actually and everyone who works here thinks so", then forced a female underling to sign her name on it before publishing it Kotick is dumb as a post- read this article about the flight attendant case. https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/08/activision-ceo-kotick-loses-battle-with-top-hollywood-litigator.html 1. Fires first lawyer who won't fight a losing battle 2. Hires big name attorney for a shitload of money and tells her never to settle no matter what even if it'd be cheaper to do so. 3. Refuses to actually pay them halfway through the case, gets fired as a client 4. Brings on a third attorney and ends up paying what the first two laywers told him to settle for + the plaintiff's attorney fees. 5. Second lawyer sues him for the money he owes and he goes into arbitration. 6. Arbitrator rules for the lawyer, and then he spends a shitload of money appealing that and loses. The guy would just go into negotiation meetings and talk about how he was going to ruin the plaintiff's life right in front of her attorneys and then get mad when it got brought up with the arbitrator, like they were cheating. Just one of the world's dumbest and most evil people.
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Nov 17, 2021 00:16
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B...b...but he makes good business decisions!  Sure, if you consider trading short term profit in exchange for destroying studio's reputations a good business decision.
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Nov 17, 2021 00:45
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Considering how many billions he has siphoned off to himself and shareholders and how big Activision-Blizzard has grown over the years, yes he has made objectively good business decisions. It just so happens that things that are good for business are awful for workers and everyone else.
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Nov 17, 2021 01:03
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stev posted:If nothing else the man's getting mad exposure. no wonder hes so well paid
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Nov 17, 2021 01:06
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sharknado slashfic posted:The remaining wow players are going to get cross faction guild housing in the next patch, that'll be nice for them Nah, they’ll get five new endgame progression systems that each take a thousand hours to max out for a 0.4% damage increase
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Nov 17, 2021 01:22
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Why would investors be satisfied by Kotick? ATVI has had it's stock price decline 26% since the beginning of 2021. The S&P is up 27% over the same period. Though to be fair, video game stocks have done poo poo this year. EA is 0.04% up. Take Two is down 10%. Ubisoft is down 47%.
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Nov 17, 2021 01:43
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If it cost nine figures to fire me, I'd be pretty bad at my job too. Annual pay, a zillion dollars to take me off the payroll? You're never seeing my rear end again. Come to think of it, they should have been suspicious of Kotick's judgement the moment he showed up to work on day one, like some kind of sucker.The Gadfly posted:B...b...but he makes good business decisions! Short term profit really might more valuable than a studio's reputation, possibly even in the long term if Kotick weren't so aggressively failing to stick the landing.
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Nov 17, 2021 01:46
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William Bear posted:ATVI has had it's stock price decline 26% since the beginning of 2021. ... Ubisoft is down 47%. coincidence, but maybe having shitbags for leaders can be bad for a company. one can hope
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Nov 17, 2021 02:07
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William Bear posted:Why would investors be satisfied by Kotick? ATVI has had it's stock price decline 26% since the beginning of 2021. The S&P is up 27% over the same period. Probably because of this:  ATVI spiked to about $18 on July 2008 when it merged with Blizzard and peaked at $101 this year in February before settling down to a little north of $90 until the scandals started breaking. The S&P went up 312% in the same period.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:11
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Nybble posted:coincidence, but maybe having shitbags for leaders can be bad for a company. one can hope Unironically it's starting to look like repeated scandals from untouchable leadership has very tangible results on productivity because everyone is too busy printing resumes and posting on twitter about what a shithole the company has become. This then gets compounded by key people leaving and hiring basically outright stopping. Next thing you know it's taking you 4 years to develop OW2, which is a glorified expansion pack Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Nov 17, 2021 |
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Nov 17, 2021 02:12
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Unironically it's starting to look like repeated scandals from untouchable leadership has very tangible results on productivity because everyone is too busy printing resumes and posting on twitter about what a shithole the company has become. This then gets compounded by key people leaving and hiring basically outright stopping. Next thing you know it's taking you 4 years to develop OW2, which is a glorified expansion pack It's not like it matters because investors have already reaped huge returns from ATVI. Making a Good Product can be pretty orthogonal to what's best for shareholders when a company is publicly traded.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:20
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Eej posted:Probably because of this: A fair point. I guess the question is if the damage to ATVI in the last year is transitory.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:34
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Grondoth posted:This makes the fact that the board is stickin' with him make more sense. 292 is a ridiculous sum for making a CEO leave, so the fact that they haven't taken the most obvious move makes much more sense. I don't know why they signed this contract, but knowing it's like a AAA budget to fire the guy is an understandable barrier protecting his neck. Boards and CEOs are a circlejerk of back-scratching, that's why CEO salaries have soared into the stratosphere over the last few decades compared to worker wages. Board directors and CEOs are usually friends, and CEOs themselves often serve on other boards where they decide salaries of other lovely CEO friends. So obviously they'll approve constant raises and ridiculous contracts as they're all playing golf together this Saturday and the CEO you just raised a salary for is on your own board. Or at the very least he's a best friend or a cousin of one of your board directors and will make a phone call if you don't rubber-stamp his crazy new contract. Back in the day, large companies owned by the public would typically have some oversight from the shareholders, however, companies discovered a loophole by selling stock with no voting rights. Your favorite Google stock you're buying on Robinhood comes with no voting rights, unlike the higher class shares that executives and billionaires own. Or it's a crazy ratio like shares sold to the peasants come with 1 vote per share, and each higher class share for the insiders is equivalent to 10 votes per share. That assures that all board control and CEO pay decisions stay with very few individuals. Both of the above should be much more strictly regulated by the govt but alas, you're going against big money donations in that case. Rad Russian fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Nov 17, 2021 |
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Nov 17, 2021 03:10
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Yeah in modern capitalism publicly traded stock prices are so utterly divorced from good, sustainable business practice as to render them almost meaningless unless you are a speculator or a scammer.
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Nov 17, 2021 03:13
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Ouroboros posted:unless you are a speculator or a scammer. Why'd you write the same thing twice?
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Nov 17, 2021 03:30
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Rad Russian posted:Boards and CEOs are a circlejerk of back-scratching, that's why CEO salaries have soared into the stratosphere over the last few decades compared to worker wages. Board directors and CEOs are usually friends, and CEOs themselves often serve on other boards where they decide salaries of other lovely CEO friends. So obviously they'll approve constant raises and ridiculous contracts as they're all playing golf together this Saturday and the CEO you just raised a salary for is on your own board. Or at the very least he's a best friend or a cousin of one of your board directors and will make a phone call if you don't rubber-stamp his crazy new contract. Doesn't help that the Chairman of the Board and the CEO in most American companies are the same person, so they person that proposes the wages changes are the same person that benefits from it. In Denmark, that's illegal, the Chairman and CEO most be different person, but that's due to some accounting fraud back in the late 80's and early 90's.
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Nov 17, 2021 09:31
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RagnarokZ posted:Doesn't help that the Chairman of the Board and the CEO in most American companies are the same person, so they person that proposes the wages changes are the same person that benefits from it. For US publicly traded companies, executive compensation is set by a subset of the BoD, the Compensation Committee. The committee must be composed of “independent” board members, those not employed by the company. This gives the veneer of avoiding conflict of interest. However, given the nature of board composition this has little real impact.
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Nov 17, 2021 14:02
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https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1460921049139273728
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Nov 17, 2021 15:27
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I'm convinced at this point that Act-Blizz is engaged in amateur-grade financial fraud. Specifically the sort that you could only get away with because no one would think that a multi-billion dollar corporation would do something so stupid.
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Nov 17, 2021 15:38
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SirPhoebos posted:I'm convinced at this point that Act-Blizz is engaged in amateur-grade financial fraud. Specifically the sort that you could only get away with because no one would think that a multi-billion dollar corporation would do something so stupid. One of the investigations will no doubt turn up a whiteboard with "COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF CRIMES DONE" written on it.
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Nov 17, 2021 15:42
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