PlayStation's Jim Ryan Admonishes Activision in Internal Email to Employees

Good, it's best to bring these actions to light so things can actually be done to fix and improve.
Shame all this had to happen in the first place.

The pessimist in me says Kotick's leadership role won't be affected the WSJ article. He should have gotten the boot a very long time ago, but this isn't how the video game industry works, sadly. Hell, the deplorable head of Ubisoft is still there even after he and his cohorts were rightfully put through the ringer.

So many people in power are just high level scum bags protecting lower level scum bags. It’s so disgusting.

PlayStation might not be perfect, but at least they don't needlessly fire hundreds of people, (completely) abandoned the respect of their fans, punish their players for criticizing China, and they handle sexual harassment cases better.

Is it that hard to fire all the bad employee? But this is activision we're talking about, the company that fires hundreds of their employee and take in some of them again so they can pay less salary.

Nasty company with a nasty environment! And to think that people STILL buy COD or have plans to buy future games from them.
Maybe, just maybe I can understand super casual gamers that are out of the loop, but it's the hardcore crowd that makes me sick. I love how their defense is "We ShOuldN't PunIsh ThE DeVs duuurrr!1!!1"
Why I do even bother...

lol who HASNT criticized activsion over the last decade?

@Pixelated The CEO.

The fact that the board are backing him is utterly disgusting.

Jim and Sony: do not condone harassment and abuse in the work place.

Also Jim and Sony: happy to continue to profit from products built on harassment and abuse.

I'd be much more impressed if Jim Ryan and Playstation as a whole just stopped allowing Activision games on their systems.

Over the years we all thought we couldn't hate Activision more, hein?

But what happened with Insomniac? I am not remembering news about bad workplace environment!

Ive got zero interest in playing any activision blizzard games ever again! To me they are a dead corp anyway. Lets hope the sh*thouse gets sacked, but even then i still won't be buying their products.

kotick made his heaps of cash. he did so dishonestly and by exploiting his staff. we all knew he was a sociopath, which to be fair, tends to be common for higher levels of management. it is time for him to be shunned and leave the industry as the world has been disgusted by his behavior for a while now.

CEO is a made up job position. Kick this guy out already.

Its a disgusting situation but this doesn't earn jim ryan any brownie-points . any sane person would feel this way about the scandal .

I wonder if this email getting out might possibly drive Activision to take away Playstation's COD marketing deal. Regardless of how you feel about Activision it can't be denied how lucrative that marketing deal is for Sony.

And I thought this was going to be a slow wednesday.. Apparently it is not only the PS Plus free games of the month that gets leaked at SIE.

I've been doing my part and not buying Activision or Blizzard games since the PS2 days.

I'm not sure what is says about everyone that after all Activision has done over the years both to customers, employees, and partners, the only thing that garners any strong response is harassment on top of it. Shouldn't kotick have been gone long before anyone even knew about any of this for many other reasons?!

@AFCC

They used to have really bad crunch practices.

The PS3 era was a giant crunch fest.

That said, just about every developer is in a permanent state of crunch. Modern day AAA games are extremely difficult to design and program. That’s not including the hundreds of thousands of man hours poured in by artists. There is the pressure to get the game out by a certain quarter leaning over their shoulders constantly.

That’s why devs who were talking ten years about AAA development being unsustainable are being proven correct. The games are far more complex to build than ever before. Yet publishers are still acting like it’s the PS1 era where developers could put out a game with just six months of development. Mash those two things together and you end up with the modern era. Expectations are higher. Manpower is limited. In the end, I think AAA development is going to have to be scaled back at some point. Maybe release AAA games once every four years and build more AA games to compensate for the loss.

Sort of like a more extreme version of the N64’s game release cycle.

Sending an email to employees referencing the issues at Activision is a good move if it encourages folks, especially management, to keep an eye out for issues like this. These sort of problems tend to fester like mold in the walls. By the time they’re out in the open the damage has already been done.

Also, this is probably a generation gap thing, but there’s no way I would forward or send a screenshot of an internal email to anyone out side my employer, unless I felt it was absolutely necessary. These days there’s no such thing as “internal communications.”

Articles being a paywall should be called out too.
Bloomberg beam in the eye 😒

@wiiware its a question i ask frequently where i work and the short answer is no unfortunatly..ever since the "political correctness" police took over HR its become a double edged sword..on one hand in an ideal world it would be great if those toxic individuals could just be jetisoned but the laws that protect geniune people from harrassment,discriminstion etc also work to protect those who are total horrors to deal with..i'm of the view that if you are a reprehensible malingerer then you should go but these rules are put in place to protect people from misjustice and managerial abuse..i dont like what i'm hearing about activison and i think its disgusting if "proven" to be real and i hope that it isnt but its not looking good for them..

This will have zero effect on Activision, it will only affect them if sales drop, and I don't see that happening. COD is still selling, and quite a lot. If you would like to protest this type of behavior, then stop buying their products.

I'm not a Jim Ryan fan but that open door policy always goes down really well for any employee.

@Old-Red and what exactly would you do if you were in Ryan's shoes? It's easy to criticize others, but much harder to offer viable solutions.

I see a lot of people saying they are not buying products from Activision again and where I applaud the passion there is this level of exploitation and worse around the globe in places like China. May as well put your game controller down and remove the chips from your consoles and the battery from your devices. There's probably a lot that we use on a daily basis that are some part of an exploitation case. I'm not saying we should ignore this but it would be naive to think that stopping supporting Activision and Blizzard is stopping the problem. The industry needs to do a lot more.

This blizzard activision snowball just keeps rolling doesn't it,
I think blizzard are trying to pull a sneaky one also received an email from two days ago about the battle net app used to launch their games will now be handled under activision name and the app will undergo some changes, maybe blizzard will get fully eaten by activision in the hopes this will all go away?🤫🤣
Mr Kotick will be removed from head of blizzard by weeks end they have no choice

Not to be cynical but given communication via PlayStation/Sony is zero and anything sent out, leaked or otherwise is calculated, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been leaked on purpose to force the departure of Kotick.

Good decision from PlayStation if so.

Basic human decency, respect and dignity. not much to ask for, unfortunately you get a lot of vile sociopaths running big companies, they're all smiles for the public but they're always happy to degrade their employees for a few more cents like it's an achievement to be proud of. This is why unions exist, they're not just in place to beg for more.

As that WSJ piece is behind a paywall, could anybody summarise the allegations and evidence? I get the impression it’s failing to investigate some allegations of harassment at the company(?)

@Sakisa can you just imagine that. Thry would liturally have too reach into there pockets and give any money made with activision back too players and pull all of activisions content. Of course that would never happen they are more likely too fire jim ryan then back him on his words in a random tweet or post.

@thechetearly Corporate culture and success attracts sociopaths.

@itsfoz what are they gonna do force kotick out?? Yea good luck. The guy liturally owns activision and as its not publicly traded meaning he has all the power. Only way would be too stop purchasing activision games.... i dont see that happening

@oconnoclast yea im not clicking that....

Still no smoking gun. Unless he is caught as a culprit of the actions that have caused direct harm to the employees he's gonna stay as CEO. Look at practically every politician the world over for reference. And corps have had more power than politicians for a while.

Credit to Ryan where due, then... but are these mails a public thing? Or is Schreier acting under permission to read and/or publish them? Or, a better question, why do I even bother asking what I may already know?🙄

Kick him out and put a limit on how many call of duty games can be released let's say one every three years.

This will come down to one thing for ANY company: Has the CEO been making the company money and will the CEO continue to make the company Money? If the answer is yes, the executives will always keep their job. It's about the money, not the morals.
I have worked at a couple places with horrific CEO's/CFO's/Presidents, etc...and blind eyes are always turned if they made us money.

Kick out those who should be kicked out, keep the innocent hard working folks under fire of all this BS and keep grinding away at Diablo 4 please and thanks

@Old-Red let me ask the question again: what specifically would you have done on a practical level? Forget what you wouldn't do or what would happen if they asked you to do x or z.

What specific course of action would you follow in Jim Ryan's position to deal with the whole Activision situation?

@Alpha_Pulse very well said.

oh my! Activision Blizzard situation is worse then i expected, someone need urgently to fire Bobby Kotic and stop this horrible toxic workplace.

Words are fine, but Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo should also cease any exclusivity deals, collaborations or special promotions involving Activision/Blizzard at this point.

@nessisonett It's like a small-scale corrupt country. Rich CEOs keep the corrupt president in power, so they can make even more money, and the president gets to live in luxury as well. It's a win-win for them, but everyone else loses. These large companies are no different.

@Divergent95 Says the person using the internet and has a mobile phone what came from Corps who are just as bad as Activision. Fact is if we stopped buying stuff from Corps what have done wrong we would be living like nomads in the forest. The fact you even game means you have and are supporting these practices, why don't you live up to what you say and stop gaming all together instead of attacking gamers because they don't do what you wish. You're part of the "problem" sunshine just like everyone else and you will always will be as long you buy and support stuff from Corps. Its why i don't boycott because doing so means i have to give it all up because otherwise i'm hypocrite and only support half measures.

@Northern_munkey The whole point of HR has always been to provide a legal cover for the company they work for. Political correctness has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, California where Activision is heaquartered is a "fire at will" state (as is 49 other US states), meaning you can fire anyone for any reason. You don't need a reason. The idea that it's too difficult to fire people is completely ridiculous. It's incredibly easy in 49 states. The reason why he isn't fired is cause the board doesn't want to get rid of him. It's that simple.

@JimBeam42 it works a bit different over here bud and political correctness covers a broad spectrum of what and how you approach people in terms of interaction..it used to be very easy to fire people but now everything has to be so carefully investigated so as not to upset anybody that may belong to certain gender specific/non gender specific,relions,races etc..see where i'm going with this..and HR is not only there to protect the companys as their role is supposed to be non bias..

@Northern_munkey Maybe it used to be very easy to fire people in the UK, but in the US it's still very easy to fire people. A board of directors have immense capabilities and could easily can him and replace him with someone else. Uber's board of directors kicked out CEO Travis Kalanick in 2017. This stuff happens all the time cause it's very easy to do here in the US lol

@JimBeam42 👍

@Old-Red I understand your point perfectly. You simply have nothing to say. It's typical unfounded criticism.

@WallyWest exactly.

@HotGoomba lol well besides the internal power structure lol