Former Call of Duty Dev Says Decisions Made by Bobby Kotick 'Made Our Games Worse'

One of the worst people around. Wonder if he’ll turn up on a certain list.

This is a really creatively bankrupt company. The last thing with their name on it that was worth anything was Sekiro and they only published that game. This isn’t so much a video game developer as a IP regurgitation machine.

If this is true, this is IN-TENSE! The day my boss threatens my life, is my last day of work at that job. Either because I find a new job, or I go to prison…for defending myself.

Let see how activision / blizzard games differ in quality after he left, I hope the games get better under microsoft. It will be cool if we get proper warcraft 3 remaster though, I remember getting hyped for that game before watching the end result lol.

When you quit and the company gives you more than a few banks-full of money on the way out the door, you no longer need to work for a living. You just need to install a super-fancy security system and hire a security staff to protect your compound and the booty that’s been stashed within it. He has an estimated net worth of USD $7,000,000,000.00 or GBP £5,538,680,000.00. It’s insane.

And he's going to be laughing all the way to the bank, working class can suck it for all he cares. While encouraging a million of the next generation kids to become the next Bobby Koticks.

Nature of public limited companies who have to answer to shareholders, hire a CEO like him who maximizes short term profit from the consumer base, keep your employees in line to keep the costs low, and find some obsessive fanbase who buys the same game each year by the millions.

Get sued? Hire an expensive lawyer. Bad publicity? Who cares, I got my millions as did the shareholders. Internet fanbase whines? Who cares, they're too niche to matter. The rest of the world (other industries in other countries) is full of Bobby Koticks, has always been full of Bobby Koticks and will remain full of Bobby Koticks and an angry internet tweet at the end isn't going to do much.

Well now it will be decisions made by Microsoft which will make your games worse 😁

I kind of hate articles like this. Kotick certainly sounds like he had problems and a lot of criticism is fair, but some of this strikes me as sour grapes and wanting to pile on and join the mob.

Kotick made COD worse? Seems like he did something right, as he oversaw its rise and hold at the top of the industry for almost 20 years. Not to say he never made a bad choice, but I think COD has overall been managed quite well.

Kotick didn't do enough to help the Overwatch 2 team prepare for review bombing? Bad games get panned, no changing that. Make a better game to prevent the bombing in the first place (which also falls on him, just saying this is weird criticsm).

The man did some ***** things, but let's be fair with the criticism. He had an insanely successful run leading Activsion. That wasn't all luck and he deserves credit for the incredible success the company had during his tenure.

Bobby on April 1st: "I am absolutely humbled to announce that I will now be acting as Sony Interactive Entertainment's newest CEO!"

@UnusedBabyWipes Yeah, it makes perfect sense after he f'd them over, Sun Tzu and all that.

I still believe that "CEO" is a fake job title people use to funnel money directly into their bank accounts.

@Cjam36 no,no no stop..you do not want to try and reason that Activision or kotick have ever done any good here. I've tried to point this out in the past and tried to make people understand my reasoning and all you'll get is tarred and feathered..best to just jump on board and rattle your saber or just not say anything that sounds like a reasonable opinion.

He pumped out games as fast as possible to make the most money before leaving that's what I think personally.

I would have been shocked if there was a bunch of tweets telling us that Bobby was much loved and a all around cool dude, these tweets just confirm that a pile of poop turned out to be pile of poop

This is something I’ve been saying for a long long time. Blizzard was and still is my favorite gaming company ever. But when they became part of ABK. Bobby made sure they were no longer a gameplay focused company. They had to make games that made money and i ain’t talking sales, i am talking micro transactions and cheap skins and pay for power etc etc. this nearly killed Blizzard as talent left and they were no longer looked at as a gaming powerhouse. Now i do think Diablo 4 is the best game blizzard has made in years and under MS and not having to find ways to sell stuff it will only get better. At least it don’t have pay for power. But Bobby was awful and he made franchises worse and i know this is a Sony PS site and it’s “wrong” to say anything good about MS. But i know for a fact they are going to let Blizzard be Blizzard again and they will start to dazzle their gameplay magic that made the studio a legend. So glad he is gone and gone for good.

@Cjam36 Exactly this! Thank you.

Bobby's Activision has killed Blizzard. They basically took all of the fun out of World of Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch. Great job, Bobby!

Photogenic? He looks like a malicious little gremlin in every image.

@Ludacritz Out of interest why do you attribute ongoing issues with Blizzard titles with Activision or Kotick, and not Blizzard themselves? It’s always seemed to me that Blizzard themselves are largely responsible for the decisions they made with their releases.

COD is still gonna be trash so

@Gaia093 Seriously he genuinely looks like a goblin

Bobby truely is the worst thing that ever happened to gaming.

And yes im counting lootboxes and live service games.

@Cjam36 I guess the success of Activision differs if youre investor or a consumer.

If I was this dude, I'd take that parachute, retire, and go live a quiet life somewhere.

Given that very recently we saw CoD devs being a bunch of crybabies over a joke on TGA, I doubt any claims coming from both current and former devs.

Don’t forget when he impersonated the HR rep by sending an email through her address. Effectively chucked her under the bus, even though she was far from a saint (both supported bringing in Wilmer Hale).

Shame that all this means absolutely nothing as he’s a billionaire most likely.

Kotick made their games worse? Yea, not exactly rocket science!

I'm not surprised

This isn't surprising at all. Having said that, I doubt MS and Old man Spencer will do much to change that.

Milking MW in name only clearly not a good idea.

The more studios working on Warzone/main entries, a waste of their time when they could be doing more. More games. More flexibility. Better working output when balanced better.

Less employees and better management of before in the older games, better quality too. What else wasn't surprising.

Hope they do well now. But seeing as Microsoft also pushed Forza Motorsport to be more boring with Motorsport 5 to 8/reboot in safe design and many tokens/online required and more. Halo being a mess too. Sea of Theives and others are probably doing fine but I'm not playing them.

The other IPs whether Indie or AA devs have had some good games come out but that doesn't change much hope.

Am I buying Activision games no. Only their retro titles. I want to see some IPs return from both Microsoft/Activision happen but do I have much hope no.

Bethesda still pushed Arkane to do Redfall a game structure they weren't used to. Did WB with Monolith for Hogwarts Legacy (both studios with no open world experience at all of prior products) after saving them when Disney killed them? Who knows they still follow formulas after all.

Some studios can do well but just following trends doesn't cut it. COD and Candy Crush work as their 1 game people focus on for those platforms. Microsoft can have more mobile games maybe? But at the same time wanted Warzone, they wanted COD advertising they don't care about the other IPs why would they. Voodoo Vince remastered is fine, Blinx 1 but no Blinx 2, others. Project Gotham Racing series would be worse if they did actual make it return let alone compete/have a lesser name than Forza Horizon and it's current direction. Fable/Perfect Dark may be fine we will see.

But they need more going on. I only care about the old Activision IPs for Xbox BC at the moment, if not that (I doubt they get added to the BC program at all even though Bethesda titles still did after the purchase) getting the PS2 versions instead physical then the OG Xbox/360 versions physical to put the disk in is good enough for me.

Spyro 4 maybe but even then I'm not that excited for it. Character weight, replacing Spyro 3 Sparx levels rewards that didn't happen (as quality of life in the other games), fair modern changes, eh modern changes aside. I hope it's varied but I don't want Spyro 3 like bloat. I hope not.

Let alone Indie platformers are too Mario 64/Banjo design. I already have no interest in them why because other N64/PS1/Saturn and more platformers were more exciting, varied ideas, mechanics and more fun level design. Clive n Wrench is a fine game but I'm more bored then I am having fun with it. Demon Turf is fine but even still. Give me more exciting platformers Indies. Because I keep looking for original Indies then I do nostalgic Indies.

@Smigit It wasn't until the merger of Activision Blizzard that Blizzard started heavily monetizing their games including WoW Classic which has led to a mass exodus of it's players. They took the lifeforce out of their games in order to make a quick buck on things like auto-levelling.

"golden parachute" of at least $15 million"
"blamed a decline in stock price on the game, deflecting scandals during his tenure"
"threatened to have an employee killed"

This is also the same guy who said, to paraphrase, 'the problem with hiring creatives like writers and artists is they ask for too much money, that's why we need AI'.

But this guy was worth the money apparently? Absolute joke. His golden parachute alone could pay for a years wages for 150 - 200 or more mid to senior level artists and writers (depending where you live of course). That many highly skilled and experienced, talented people's livelihood, or one scumbag's leaving gift.

@Ludacritz do we know that wasn’t Blizzard leadership chasing trends in mobile gaming etc though. The monetisation and move towards ‘games as a service’ could have happened without Activision or Kotick forcing that on Blizzard. Arguably they were moving towards that sort of model with World of Warcraft and it’s recurring subscription well before Activision entered the picture and the evolution of that in the past decade could well be driven by Blizzard rather than or just as much as Activision.

There was signs before the merger that they may not be the same company that had put out Star Craft, WC1-3 and Diablo 2 over a span of a few years earlier.

The majority of programmers today are mostly younger compered to those that are still around that come from the 90's/00's era. And Bobby's a true Boomer that comes from that era in the game's industry. It was a much tougher work environment than it is today and he probably thinks he's being nice to ppl.