I’ve been on a little bit of a “writing break” lately, which really just means “oh shit I need to write this one specific thing and if it looks like I’m writing anything else then it means I’m not writing this one specific thing and now I’m stressed out about it,” but I’ve been following video game industry news as usual, and a ~tale as old as time~ just cropped up: Bobby Kotick rubbing his hands together before a) accepting a truly bewilderingly huge bonus and b) firing literally hundreds of employees in a single pen stroke.
Bobby Kotick, for folks not utterly ensconced in the video game industry, is the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, a game publisher that puts out some of the biggest video games – financially and literally – on the market. The corporation he runs makes an incredible amount of money year-over-year, and while his corporation’s stable of games are not always widely critically acclaimed, they are, by nature of being Activision-Blizzard titles, impossible to ignore.
Despite being rip-roaringly successful at making money hand-over-fist on a constant basis since like 2009, Activision-Blizzard doesn’t actually seem like a very stable place to work. This is because, basically like clockwork, the company seems to lay off hundreds of workers at the beginning of every year riiiiight around the same time that Kotick or some other high-ranking C-suite executive makes a ridiculously large amount of money. In 2019, for example, nearly 800 people at the company across all lines of business lost their jobs, in some cases mere weeks after starting. This was a move that even that Publisher’s Clearing House of bad capitalist takes, Forbes, called “uniquely cruel.” Kotick, meanwhile, “just” made $2 million in bonuses (for a total yearly income of $30.8 million), but gave $15 million in a signing bonus to the company’s new/returning chief financial officer, Dennis Durkin.
This year might actually take the cake, though, and I mean that in the classical Marie Antoinette sense.
Right this second, Kotick is eyeing a nearly-Two Hundred Million Dollar stock bonus as news came out this week that nearly 200 people in Activision-Blizzard’s eSports division would be losing their jobs thanks to a “restructuring” in how the company dealt with live events, and even more mass layoffs across Germany, France, the UK and Spain are on the way thanks to “a shift” in the company’s European strategy. According to GamesIndustry, this is the company’s fourth round of layoffs in six months.
“What’s the big deal?” I can hear a random libertarian passerby ask. “Are you saying companies-” sorry, “firms shouldn’t be allowed to restructure their business models based on the fluctuations of the free market? Why should firms be forced to hold onto employees, even in underperforming or ill-fitting business lines? Are you saying these people are entitled to the sweat of another man’s brow?!” Ah, yes, let’s talk about brow sweat for a second.
See, this $200m bonus is not a usual payout, assuming Kotick gets the full amount. It’s a provision in his employment agreement that got triggered after the company’s stock values hit a certain threshold and held steady for at least 90 days. That threshold has been passed, according to Activision-Blizzard’s recent SEC filing, which means Kotick is – per the agreement – due a big payday. It’s money he was legally promised five years ago, provided the company he runs could “work hard” enough, produce enough value, for him to take it. If we’re using tired Bioshock analogies, not only is this not the sweat of his own brow, it’s the collected sweat of thousands of other people’s brows.
Here’s my whole shit on this: Kotick has been playing his company like a video game for years to try to get the highest possible “Long-Term Performance Grant” he could. In the process, he played with the lives of thousands of people who typically work for – according to CtW Investment Group – “less than 1/3 of 1 percent of the CEO’s earnings.” This $200m possible payout isn’t immoral in the sense that, like, “how dare he cash in on an investment,” or some such other strawman. It’s amoral, in the sense that Kotick absolutely, 100 percent does not give a shit about people. His company will continue to be a revolving door of mass layoffs and hiring sprees, he will continue to make obscene amounts of money even in comparison to other tech CEOs, and he will continue being the asshole of assholes.
(As an aside, I was checking out Bobby Kotick’s political campaign donations via OpenSecrets, and as you can imagine, he donates to Republicans basically all the time. But then I found this:
Lmao. Honestly his campaign contributions going back to like 1994 are buck wild, he at one time donated beaucoup bucks to fuckin Ed Markey from like ‘94 to 2005. Anyway, fuck him.)