and nope.

Microsoft confirms they are keeping Bobby Kotick after buying Activision, which is already a bad look

 

Welp, that's the fastest I've had emotional whiplash in a while...

 

Oh Xbox what are you doing?

Surely they didn't fall for his "I'll do better" schtick.

 

Fine Print
“Once the deal closes, the Activision Blizzard business will report to Phil Spencer, CEO, Microsoft Gaming."

Him staying atm could only be a contractual thing

 

Ironic because when news of the acquisition first broke, Xbox fans were claiming that Spencer was gonna “fire Kotick and clean up ActiBlizzard”. Looks like they were dead wrong. Microsoft buys up yet another 3rd party game developer, making future sequels to multiple multi-platform games exclusive to their brand, and they don’t even fire the most toxic CEO in the gaming industry. Absolutely amazing.

 

in other words; he'll get an eight or nine-figure payout and suffer no consequences whatsoever.

 

Kotick has/had a shitload of stock in Activision and almost certainly has an ironclad contract with huge termination clauses, getting rid of him isn't going to be cheap or easy if he doesn't want to go.

Welcome to corporate big business.

 

Oof.

 

Head Of Microsoft Says He’s ‘Grateful’ For Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick's 'Commitment to Real Change'


dig UP, stupid...

 

So not so much golden parachute, more neon green....

 

Side note, never would I have thought I'd see the day Xbox owned Crash Bandicoot and Spyro.

Now I pray to god even more they don't go back on their word that newly purchased ips are not going to be made Xbox only.

 

Hope so. If X-Box REALLY wants to win people over with the buyout then they REALLY need to get to work on cleaning up Activision Blizzard otherwise this will only damage it's reputation.

 

Maybe he’s not allowed to badmouth?

 

Looks like Kotick is out

 

Really hope that's true, but I'm not holding my breath.

As for Microsoft now owning Activision...I hate this. Microsoft is slowly becoming the Disney of video games in the sense that they're buying everything to make their empire more powerful than it has any right to be, and everything under the Activision brand is slowly going to be Xbox-only from here on out like what's happening with Bethesda (RIP Starfield for PlayStation consoles). Not to mention the fact that this is ACTIVISION we're talking about, given the shit they've been through the past year (and rightly so), and the very idea of buying out a company with a checkered past like they have screams bad idea to me. If Kotick is out, he's going out with a golden parachute, which is one of the worst case scenarios for this merger.

Then again, having Activision be sold to EA or Sony would actually be worse in some cases. Rare at one point was almost sold off to EA or Activision before being sold off to Microsoft so I guess that would make Microsoft the lesser of few evils for Activision. I don't know. This news just popped up and I'm still trying to process it.

 

This company and news about it is like an up and down roller coaster. Just when you think it's going one way it turns in the other direction.

 

70 billion dollars in cash means your other options are Amazon, Google and Apple. Sony can’t front that sort of money and EA could be brought twice over for that amount.

If they were going to be sold, MS is the least bad option here. Even if Sony could have done it, I wouldn’t want them having it because they are trash at managing back catalogue and there’s too much PC stuff involved for it to go to a company that isn’t in the business of making PC games beyond ports.

 

Is it?

Microsoft consolidating the video game industry is bad for everyone | Engadget

You can expect all their future games to become X-Box exclusives from the sound of it.

Too many of these companies are staring to become ip hoarders in tv, movies and games. As the competition gets smaller the customer gets screwed more and more.

 

If ActBlizz IPs end up Microsoft exclusive, I’m not too worried about it since I have minimal interest in any of them.

Bethesda IPs, though…might result in me buying whatever the hell stupid name the current Xbox is called. Frankly, so far I’ve had no motivation to join the current console generation anyway (except for our family Switch) so maybe it would help me decide.

 

I mean, I can’t help but picture Tencent buying ActiBlizz would be WAAAAAY less desirable than Microsoft.