Activision Blizzard employees stage another walkout, call for CEO Bobby Kotick to resign

Earlier this year, massive video game company Activision Blizzard—the publisher behind Call Of Duty, World Of Warcraft, and Overwatch—was sued by California’s Department Of Fair Employment And Housing for allegedly fostering an environment of discrimination and harassment toward female employees. After that, the proverbial floodgates opened with stunning new allegations coming out, employees staging a walkout, and Blizzard president J. Allen Brack resigning.

Now, things are getting even worse for Activision Blizzard, as the misconduct allegations against the company have bubbled up to CEO Bobby Kotick—famously, or infamously, one of the most high-paid executives in the whole country. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kotick not only knew about the allegations against the Blizzard half of the company years ago, but that they also extend to the Activision half as well (the two companies merged a while back).

The WSJ story contains new allegations, including one from a former employee at Activision subsidiary Sledgehammer Games who said she was raped by a supervisor “after she had been pressured to consume too much alcohol in the office and at work events.” Activision settled with her out of court, but Kotick supposedly didn’t pass any of this information to the company’s board of directors and has claimed over the last few months that he “wasn’t aware of many of the allegations of misconduct” that have been raised.

Dan Bunting, the co-head of Treyarch (one of the main studios in the cycle of developers that make Call Of Duty every year), has also been accused of sexually harassing an employee, with the company’s human-resources department reportedly recommending that he be fired after an internal investigation in 2019. Instead, the WSJ story says Kotick himself “intervened to keep him” and had him go through counseling instead.

Also revealed by The Wall Street Journal: New Blizzard co-head Jennifer Oneal, who was promoted after Brack stepped down, will also be leaving—after only a few months in her position—because she realized that “the company would never prioritize our people the right way.” She also said that she had been “tokenized, marginalized, and discriminated against” at Activision, referencing an Activision party she attended with Kotick in 2007 where “scantily clad women danced on stripper poles” and “a DJ encouraged female attendees to drink more so the men would have a better time.”

Activision and Kotick have said they’re making an effort to change the culture at the company, but the WSJ story says it has gotten conflicting information on how deeply involved Kotick is in the culture at Activision Blizzard. Either way, the new information has been so thoroughly directed at him that employees of the company held another walkout today and began demanding that Kotick resign from his position.

That’s according to The Washington Post, which also says that Kotick today shared a video statement with employees in which he denounced the WSJ story as “an inaccurate and misleading view of our company, of me personally, and my leadership,” adding “anyone who doubts my conviction to be the most welcoming, inclusive workplace doesn’t really appreciate how important this is to me.”

Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard’s board of directors has released a statement saying that it is still “confident in Bobby Kotick’s leadership.”