More than 800 Blizzard Activision employees and contractors have signed a petition calling for Bobby Koick’s CEO to be removed as CEO. Workers walked out in the protest earlier this week, following a report published by the Wall Street Journal, who accused Koick knew about incidents of sexual violations in the company and ignored to tell the board of directors about them. This report also notes that Kotick has been accused of persecuting women on many occasions.
“We, the undersigned below, no longer have trust in Bobby Koick’s leadership as the CEO of Activision Blizzard,” reading petition. “Information that surprises behavior and practice in running our company runs against the culture and integrity we need from our leadership – and directly conflict with the initiative started by our friends.”
Handa asked Kotick to retreat and for shareholders to choose a new CEO without its influence. The petition noted that Kotick “has most of the voting rights of shareholders.” When the employee advocacy group, a better ABK shared a petition on Twitter, he said more than 500 workers had signed it. Hundreds add their names in a few hours.
Among the claims in the report is that Kotick is a person who wrote an email sent to employees by Frances Corporate Townsend’s executive vice president after the California Department of Work and Housing filed abuse and discrimination against Activision Blizzard in July. “The submitted lawsuit recently presents a distorted and incorrect image of our company, including factually wrong, long and outside the context story – some of the past decades ago,” the memo was reading. Hundreds of Blizzard employees slammed a message and demanded “direct correction” from company leaders.
The report also explained Jen Oneal’s departure, which was named Blizzard co-lead in August but announced three months later that he left his position. In September’s e-mail to the company’s legal team, Oneal (who was Asia-American and Gay) was said to have written that he had “to -enize, marginalized, and discriminated against” and that he was paid less than a storm of Mike Ybarra. Ign then reported that Ybarra and Oneal asked management for the same compensation, but Oneal said they were only offered equal offer after he submitted his resignation.
After the journal report, Activision Blizzard Board openly gave his support to Koick. However, backlash is increasingly intensive. Before the petition, Polygon and Eurogamer called for him to resign in an editorial. A group of activist shareholders, who detained around 0.6 percent of the shares and had long criticized Koick, demanding that he retreated.
In addition, Interactive Entertainment CEO Sony Jim Ryan told his employees that he was “discouraged and frankly stated to read” The Journal’s Report. “We reached for Activision as soon as the article was published to express our deep concerns and to ask how they planned to deal with claims made in the article,” Ryan wrote in an email, leaked. “We don’t believe their response statements correctly overcome the situation.”
This week’s report and the next pressure on Kotick followed Torrid several months for leaders at Activision Blizzard. After DFEH filed his lawsuit, he appeared that the Securities Commission and Exchange were investigating the company. Activision Blizzard also faces a class action lawsuit from shareholders, who claim it violates securities law. In addition, US workers and communication workers submit complaints of unfair work practices of the company.
