Kotaku - Tomorrow, you can play the new Call of Duty. Separately, you will also be able to play as Bobby Kotick, chief of CoD publisher Activision, in the free (well, mostly free) online shooter Offensive Combat.
Following the Wii U and 3DS servers being taken offline, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Ghosts are officially dead.
Call of Duty players are jumping into Black Ops 2 for the final time before its Wii U servers go offline for good.
With Bobby Kotick no longer at Activision, some developers who worked on Call of Duty and more have begun speaking out about his actions.
"Glances at Bungie Studio"
Hell yeah, the monetization got sooo much better when they ditched Activision, oh wait . . .
We'll see how much better their games are without Kotick. He’s a scum but a good business man.
Everybody virtual signalling about this man to put on a show that they actually give a damn about staff working conditions. I don't know what he did or didn't do but armchair gamers who believe public persona is the most important to a video game company's success are misguided. Phil Spencer is always celebrated for being 'good guy Phil' and he probably is, but being a good guy persona didn't help him make Xbox into a stronger division - if anything it's got worst. If Bobby Kotick had been put in charge of Xbox at the time Spencer was then I'm 100% certain Xbox would be in a much stronger position, possibly market leader.
So you will get people expressing why Kotick was bad but the bottom line is he made Call of Duty the behemoth of gaming that enticed Microsoft to pay $67 Billion dollars for it. Now Microsoft owns it, it would be wise not to put Spencer in charge of its decisions.
They won't, at the end of the day it's about making the most money. They already see whales eating the slop they chuck out on the market. Why would they grow a conscience and kill sales? Kotick was one player out of many in the industry. Losing him isn't going to impact much, if anything at all.
I strongly doubt MS will fully utilize Activision Blizzard. I mean, look at their track record with output from aquired studios already. They're doing a great job with Bethesda, amirite?
Frankly, I have no respect for many of these devs "speaking out" now. They allowed a lot of pretty horrible shit to go down and even participated in the culture of harassment. Someone died, and that seems to be forgotten.
I have no respect for Microsoft, who provided Kottick and other execs an out for the sake of improving their content. For fuck's sake, people. It's so weird to me. I would be in support of this acquisition 100% with everything getting pulled off other platforms if the end result was all of those cockroaches get their skulls crushed by the justice system. I could overlook the industry consolidation if it made an example of Kottick that no one is safe and the industry needs to do better. Instead, the opposite happened and they let this slippery fuck wriggle away. It is profoundly irritating how broken society is. It is comically absurd, and really reassures me of my decision to stop giving this company any money since 2005.
Rant over.
please.
ifs easy to come forward after your boss was let go. haha.
we all know what goes on in those offices
Because speaking out about your current boss is almost career suicide. I don't blame these people for venting, now that they can.
as suppose to what?
slaggin off your former boss while ur current boss hears about it ?
sure makes u look better doesnt it. /s
Unfortunately, this is leadership everywhere in major corporations. Toxic, unethical, ignorant.
The Peter Principle in a nutshell.
As far as the games, I struggle to see MS as doing better but we'll see, their track record so far is not the strongest argument in their favor.
But Kotick belongs in prison, dude is literally scum, still find it weird how his sexual assault charges went completely silent and seem to have disappeared as soon as the MS acquisition was announced, shady AF if you ask me.
Gah. Someone had to go and remind me that Bobby Kotick exists. BO2 will be the first CoD I've bought since W@W and I'd rather not think about contributing to that jackass's bank account while I play it.
Can we reverse the rolls?
Will we be able to loot the corpses afterwards?