Saw the title to this Kotaku article and laughed.
Acti/Blizz got a second lawsuit to go with their first lawsuit, dawg!
The contents aren’t as funny though.
Another article from Ars Technica:
Rich 
-holes are angry other rich -holes hid info that made the first group of rich -holes lose money.
This whole mess has me as all three of these people.
On a serious note:
The first lawsuit was likely going to be something Acti/Blizz could virtually shrug off.
This second lawsuit, though? This is probably going for the frickin’ knees. Rich people don’t like other people screwing with their money, even (or especially) other rich people, so the only white collar crimes that ever carry meaningful consequences tend to carry heavy consequences.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this lawsuit hits Acti/Blizz at least as hard as the DFEH’s, and for once I’m actually cautiously optimistic that the shareholders will direct the board to kick Bobby’s 
to the curb, or even demand his resignation in the lawsuit itself – these people don’t really care about Hong Kong, sexual harassment, or any of that pish-posh plebeian stuff those of us with a conscience do, but they do care about their money.
Or maybe Bobby just gets away with it all again. That’s honestly just as likely. But hey, equal odds are better than anything we’ve had up to this point.
Did Acti/Blizz digged their own grave? Will their era comes to an end? Probably not, but there will be massive changes, if they want to save their rep from this storms.
After reading your insights about forcing the President out of business, because he created an gap between truths and lies between the company, I am not sure about it.
I meant the legal penalties sought by the DFEH in the lawsuit. The fines and conduct changes and such. Blizzard would shrug at those, pay up/do the bare minimum to comply, and then resume business as usual.
The thing with JAB isn’t part of that. That is the result of the public and shareholder backlash to the allegations.
And even then, I doubt that alone would change much at Acti/Blizz. So they ousted their subsidiary’s President and an HR person. So what? They’ve had Presidents and other major managers and execs leave or get fired before. They just hire or promote a replacement and then move on.
Okay, this is a little over the top, dude. We get it, you don’t care about the lawsuit and you love Activision, you made that clear in the other thread.
But I don’t think anyone would ever call Bobby “I laid off 800 employees to squeeze out a $200M bonus for myself” Kotick a “cool guy.” More like an utter scumbag.
Furthermore, the fact that Bobby has made them lots of money in the past may not matter to them as much as the fact that he has just now lost them lots of money. I mentioned loss aversion in another thread, and it applies here – people react more strongly to perceived loss than to gain (or lack thereof).
Bobby just lost a ton of trust with his shareholders, and trust is very hard to rebuild once you’ve destroyed it.
Those closed-door settlements almost always end in executives resigning or being demoted and the company paying compensation to shareholders.
And?
Not only is this a Red Herring, it is also a stupid one.
Do you really expect devs, all of whom are under NDAs, to just freaking Tweet out all the plans for new content every day?
And these are personal accounts. What’s wrong with them tweeting about social justice and causes they support? Are you admitting that you’re against people being treated like human beings simply because they’re an “other?”
Only particular devs, usually high-ranking ones, are able to publicly tease or unveil new content, almost always carefully selected, curated, and censored by their PR department and superiors.
The rank-and-file devs don’t really get much opportunity to do things like that.
Some people aren’t allowed to know or divulge certain information.
Some people like to keep their personal life and work separate.
Some people are out of the loop about any big news at their job, often by design.
Some people don’t have anything they think is worth them sharing.
What’s your job? Do you want to tweet about it all the time? Should you have to share with us any major updates at your job even if you don’t want to or don’t think it’s important? What did you have for lunch? What kind of paperwork did you fill out? How long till you think that paperwork you filled out gets processed?
Do you see how ridiculous that sounds?
Its great. They deserve every bit of it. I look forward to them losing it and having to sell blizzard off to another company so hopefully these games can be fixed.
Fixed.
Lawsuits like this are actually rather common, and most companies that get hit with something like this take as part of being a publicly owned business. Something to remember: you can sue anyone for just about anything… and no that’s NOT an exaggeration.
That said, in this case the plaintiffs look like they really do have cause for action given the evidence that has come out over the past month. I’m interested to see where both of these lawsuits go.
Also, all kinds of people are invested in the tech sector, and therefor own stock in Activision Blizzard. Not all of them are “rich”.
There’s an old saying: “What have you done for me lately?”
We’ll see if the voting shareholders still feel like he has both hands on the wheel; it’s hard to tell at this point.
That’s not what happened. He received stock in exchange for revenue generated.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/78327/no-activision-ceo-bobby-kotick-didnt-get-200-million-bonus-payout/index.html
I’m not defending the layoff, but let’s deal with facts.
Only the rich – millionaire/billionaire investors, hedge funds, investment advisors, etc. – actually have enough resources and stake in this game to be willing and able to do something about it.
I doubt little Timmy’s dad who hobby-invests on Reddit has enough money riding on Acti/Blizz alone to be more than a little miffed, and even if he did he’d have no power. He’s not rich enough to run a lawsuit like this himself, and even if he could magic that money up he’d spend more money paying the lawyers than he’d get back in damages.
People might sign on to this lawsuit, but only the rich could and would actually file it in the first place.
Here’s a source that is both more recent and is from a site I’ve actually heard of before. Eurogamer has some credibility to its name, unlike whatever the hell this “tweak town” site is.
He’s set to receive up to $200M in stocks (depending on stock prices) according to an investment research group hired by the Acti/Blizz shareholders. We don’t know how much of it he’s received yet, or how much more he’ll receive.
In short, yes, Bobby Kotick is, in fact, slated to receive a $200M bonus, among other things in his new contract.
All of this was agreed on shortly after Acti/Blizz announced 800 people were being laid off due to budget cuts and “restructuring,” which artificially boosted short-term profits but will likely cause greater long-term expenses. Awfully convenient.
Blizzard stocks are already sky diving down. It felt from 91$ to 78$.
Yep. 10-15% drop in 1 week.
This is a lawsuit on behalf of investors; as a class action, anyone who owns securities in the company can be a part of the suit. The lawsuit itself is being “run” by the attorneys, who are the ones who filed the suit in the first place.
More to the point: if “little Timmy’s dad” has a retirement account which has money invested in the tech sector (many do as part of a diversified holdings), then yes, he might be “a bit miffed” at something like this. The stock market doesn’t purely consist of the uber-rich and the hobbyist Robinhood crowd; plenty of middle-class people are invested in stocks directly, or indirectly through an IRA, 401k, or other kind of fund.
Incorrect. We know two things:
First, we do know how much he received. Since you didn’t like my first source, how about this one?
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/718877/000135202721000019/xslF345X03/wf-form4_161481613516282.xml
The 200m was a claim by CtW as to what he could potentially receive. It was not the amount which was actually awarded.
Second, we know that he may recieve additional bonuses should the company meet certain financial goals in the future.
https://contracts.justia.com/companies/activision-blizzard-19/contract/174930/
Third, we know that amount received was not because of the layoff, but of the performance of the company over a four year period . Again, a direct quote from the SEC filing:
- On March 1, 2021, the performance conditions for the four-year performance period from 1/1/17 through 12/31/20 underlying these performance stock unit awards were achieved at the maximum level.
Now, $41.2 million is not small chunk of change, but he did not - repeat, did not - “lay off 800 employees to squeeze out a $200M bonus”. He may be entitled to a big fat $200M bonus under his new contract… assuming that the company meets the financial target set in said contract.
You act it is a necessity when it is in fact a choice.
All game developers are entitled over what they tweet and what they don’t want to tweet.
On this note, feel free to Bing “10 People Who Sued Themselves”. Quite entertaining.
I don’t really use twitter, but are you sure you’re not confusing it with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDgVLpehajs?
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn’t agreeing with you. I don’t know how you got to that conclusion.
Let me be clear here:
Are you saying that people on twitter, tweet whatever comes to their mind? They have no filter, no little voice that says “No, this is probably a bad tweet” or “Hmm, now that I’ve written this, it looks really dumb”? Just like in the South Park skit, as if they literally have a device attached to their head that directly uploads every single thought to their feed?
Which is just very very wrong. People are CONSTANTLY self-sensoring. Both on twitter, but also on all other forms of communication. Otherwise 95% of all tweets would be of a … well, 18+ nature.
Of course you have people that say whatever comes to their mind with no filter, but those are the exception, not the norm.
Not really. Or rather, I’m not really into that whole argument you got going here. I just found your statement that
to be an extreme statement that I just can’t imagine is true.
I would reckon that Twitter makes such people, atleast, more likely. Because no matter what kind of stupid stuff they say, somebody is going to agree with them or praise them for saying it, and thus only enforcing their weird ideas to speak whatever they say. And they’ll just ignore the people who respond negatively and refer to them as haters or whatever.
Are you talking about me, when you say you, or are you just generalizing the general populace? Or refering to these game devs on twitter?
It’s very vague and confusing atleast. You keep switching between saying you, persons and they.
What exactly am I, or they, or the persons, investing into that don’t improve my/they/persons skills?
You need to work on your writing skills, mate.
Second one is a fairly common type and might as well be unrelated to the first. Companies like Nvidia, Tesla, Intel and the like get them on a regular basis. Basically any time someone with a lot of money loses a lot of money due to gambling on stock market going wrong, they sue as it is everyone else’s fault but their own.
Yeah, they are, it’s called a personal account.
In which part you didn’t get the memo? Or are you this shocked over that people post on a lot of stuff that doesn’t really interest you on their personal account?