Or hell, co-op. Video game development is the platonic ideal of workers producing all value. There are no material inputs besides time and electricity. Studios got big because scale provides reach and makes risks survivable… and then stayed big because some projects were only possible with a metric shitload of people.
But it’s just people. There’s no raw ore coming into a million-dollar factory and leaving as patio furniture. Capital mostly provides desktop computers… and desks. The boss can’t fire everyone and hire scabs because they will never make the same product. No more than you could fire all the members of a band and still get their next album.
I find it baffling that anyone would think the next guy in the chair is going to be any different. This is the type of people who are CEOs. There are no CEOs at that level of business who are not exactly like Bobby Kotick. This is the type of person who the people hiring CEOs hire.
Shit like this is cringe. Kotick makes money and turned a failing company into a successful studio. You might not like it but he makes games for the majority and he wouldn’t have been successful otherwise.
Either you're blissfully ignorant toward the truly heinous shit Kotick has done and has allowed to be done under his watch, or you're aware of those things and are okay with them.
I really hope it's the former, because that's at least correctable.
You joined lemmy after the reddit protests. Either you came here to make it a worse place or you came here because you disagree with the scummy shitty decisions that people like spez and bobby make so they can make more money.
So you are either suffering a huge amount of cognitive dissonance, smoking some mad copium, or you are a massive troll.
You have -2000 or so karma already so im guessing its all three.
Wotlk WoW era Blizzard was a failing company? In what metric?
Money makers like OW2/Diablo Immortal aren’t designed for the majority either, but for the 1% willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money. He made a successful studio develop into a souless money printing machine.
Edit: If you want to credit him with everything Blizzard’s achieved since his tenure, why not also credit him with sinking Blizzard’s reputation into the ground for the current generation of youths, ensuring that whoever comes after will have nothing to work with?
Not defending kotick but, isn’t that what a big corp CEO’s job is? Make money for the shareholders, at any cost? I hate what he’s done. But I don’t see a point in bashing him for doing exactly what your typical scum big corp CEO does.
Short term profit is great, but if I was a shareholder I’d rather get a Bezos or Murdoch making sustainable scummy decisions rather than a Kotick or Musk damaging the company’s long term reputation and haemorrhaging skilled workers in the process. I believe Kotick is lacking as an ‘ideal’ scum big corp CEO, as do his workers and Microsoft.
No. It’s not generally the CEOs job to cover up rapes and sexual assaults. There’s a line and Kotick crossed it. Whatever money he made wasn’t worth the shit he did. If you participate in covering up for rapists you are not serving your shareholders, you’re destroying the reputation of the company as soon as what you have been doing gets out. Which is exactly what happened and led directly to Microsoft taking the company over.
Which is weird because they don’t seem to understand a lot of the appeal of Minecraft and tend to boil it down to the aesthetic. When seeing talk of Minecraft dungeons, I was amazed that there was no dungeon crafting tool. Seems like it would have added a ton of value to a game and made it far more related to a game about… crafting.
Microsoft will have made this guy a billionaire, and he doesn’t deserve a penny. Oh well, at least we get to keep specific games away from another game platform, I’m sure that makes it worth it.
I have every console from the 2600 to the PS3Wii360 but stopped buying them when I realized they’re just low-powered, locked-down PCs now with HELLA EXPENSIVE after-purchase costs.
Hot damn. I’ve seen friction between upper management before but it’s literally inconceivable to me that I would ever wake up and see that level of genuine hatred from like, one of my place’s senior management tweeted out to an ex-CEO.
I guess Bobby was a very special guy to the Blizzard crew, huh?
Yeah, I worked there back in the day. Started when we were still owned by Vivendi. Quit after about a year of ownership by Activision. Fuck Kotick. Seriously.
There was also one string of Tweets in which many seniors from the Overwatch crew blamed Kotick for sabotaging the franchise and ruining Overwatch 2 with terrible decisions from higher up getting in the way of development. I really felt that one since I used to be an OW fan.
Everyone knew something was off when the game director which was extremely passionate (Jeff Kaplan) just straight up left the team after OW2 was announced. Really sucks, but at least we got some context.
If the people who make those profits could make another 5% at the expense of a million people dying, then a million people will die, and it won’t be the first time.
If you take it to mean achieving a given set goal, then i am as successful as bobby k.
I have achieved many of my goals and would consider myself very successful.
But bobby has significantly more money than i do. Does that make him more successful than me? I would argue he is less successful as his goal isn’t to make the amount of money he has made up to this date. He won’t have achieved his goals/success until he has bled dry every single game company he can get his gruby hands on.
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