155 million to ruin the company completely
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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I thought that was a stock photo, not the actual CEO of Activision. Guy looks like a used car salesman who is gloating over just having defrauded a customer.
For better or worse Bobby Kotick, unlike the car salesman that nobody gives a shit about, is a history book defining businessman.
Guy bought a literal bankrupt company, with money he got from dropping out of college and running his own business making software, and turned it into a literal unstoppable juggernaut of the industry.
He is a terrible person morally for the customer, but in terms of how to conduct business he succeeded more than basically anyone in gaming history relative to where he started. He increased shareholder value 8100% in less than 20 years, and took the company from sub 10m to over 70b dollars, which is insane.
Honestly I don't want to fully attribute his success to business acumen. His most prominent strategy has been "run any profitable franchise into the ground through oversaturation and diminishing quality." Multiple franchises have risen and fallen under his leadership and they all suffered from the same failure of death by suicide. Call of Duty, for whatever reason, has been the only exception. He sent all of his companies to work on Call of Duty without a backup plan in case the series loses the popularity it needs to remain profitable. The success of Call of Duty has obscured the layers of rot that have built up over time within Activision Blizzard, and I think Microsoft's leadership will fully expose the rot.
That's all true, but that's still looking at it from a consumer perspective instead of a pure stock/business one.
He turned a nothing of a company into something that printed billions every year, that was so lofty they felt comfy giving him hundreds of millions in bonuses just as a reward for how massively he grew every year regardless of how much people hated him or the company.
That's top tier amoral business strategy in the shareholder market, including hiding the rot until you have jumped ship and cashed out. Which every single shareholder and member of the board would also do at the drop of a hat.
CoD keeps surviving because there's little competition for the normie market. Battlefield isn't as tight as CoD with longer TTK and most other competitive FPS games are either confined to PC, or too hard-core for the normies.