Any one want to guess who will really end up paying for the price hike?

It’s not AT&T.

Let me try.

By creating a culture that singularly valued money and production over all other concerns, including the well-being of staff, Kotick created and cultivated the conditions needed for abuse to set in.

And Kotick is the kind of sociopath that leads to this when other things are swept under the rug.

Maybe it wasn’t a line item on his payslip though.

Yeah, but Kotick was not really the real issue. He’s a straw man of sorts, a target dummy, designed to draw fire for unpopular decisions.

It is the board and shareholders who massively incentivized him into that behaviour. CEOs are brought in to act in the interests of shareholders, while also abstracting them away from blame and direct culpability.

The goal of blizzard (and any other publically listed company) is wealth creation for shareholders via share price growth, not making games per se.

The CEO and his management team created this, they did not take care of the workforce, and they cultivated the most recent reputational damage.

I believe the answer is “A lot of Americans”.

Doesn’t matter, company will just try it again later in some other way. The decision making process that went along with trying to change the monetary model under the feet of developers is still there. The greed.

Corporates gonna corporate I guess.

Congratulations, which sport?

If this game releases with good quality my friends and I are day 2 customers for sure. Seems fun as hell from the videos.

This guy was brought on the team as a distraction, and his axing is already planned for a moment where they want to steal the news cycle

And for them to both be eclipsing at the same time, crazy odds… or, dare I say it, astronomical