Remember Bobby Kotick? He is the CEO of Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft a while ago. The story of Activision Blizzard has come to an end, but the story of Bobby Kotick is not.He was recently sued by the City of New York over “suspects that he harmed the company in Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.”
Because Microsoft bought it at $95 per share, while Activision Blizzard’s stock price was as high as $104.5 not long ago.
The drop was due to Activision Blizzard’s sexual harassment scandal,Some employees committed suicide, and hundreds of Activision Blizzard employees demonstrated to demand the resignation of Bobby and several of the executives involved.
Ultimately, the trust of a generation of legendary game companies collapsed, and the stock price plummeted.
And at this time, he wanted to sell the company and walk away. Wouldn’t the remaining shareholders lose a lot of money? So these shareholders joined forces to sue him.
He’s important to Activision Blizzard, as Activision’s stock has doubled dozens of times during his tenure.
But also because of him, the trust of players, employees and shareholders in the company has dropped to the bottom, and there have even been large-scale sexual harassment incidents and office bullying culture.
Bobby Kotick has held many, many titles, such as CEO of Activision Blizzard, Coca-Cola Company, Los Angeles Museum of Art, and board member of Harvard-Westlake School, to name a few.
Games, beverages, art, academia, and so many unrelated industries, he can go in and get involved.
If one word to describe him was to be distilled from so many complex ingredients, it would have to be “born businessman”.
According to Bobby’s mother, this trait was already present at an early age:Young Bobby sold her ashtray to a friend who came to play for $3.
It’s really a horse with thin hair and long hooves. A son who steals his mother is not a thief, right?
After that, Bobby was all thinking about how to make money, and he had his own business card when he was in junior high school.
In high school, the increasingly daring Bobby began to rent out Manhattan nightclubs on his off nights, throw parties for underage children, and frantically test the law.
Although he has done various businesses over the years, Bobby did not delay his studies and was successfully admitted to the University of Michigan.
With his temperament, naturally he would not finish university safely and then go to work for others. In fact, like many successful bigwigs, he dropped out of school before finishing his studies.
This has to start with Bobby’s entrepreneurship. Not long after he entered college, he and his friend Marks founded a company called Arktronics to develop software for the then Apple II computer.
Now that the company has it, you have to find a way to get some start-up capital, right? After all, neither of them can program, and they have to pay to hire people.
So 19-year-old Bobby took a special plane to Dallas to attend a charity dance called Cattle Baron’s Ball.
This charity dance is full of celebrities. Bobby stopped a middle-aged man like a stunned young man, and introduced his company and business to him. According to the current saying, he is a proper social cow and gave him They have a check for $300,000.
After getting rich, Arktronics made an operating system for the Apple II called Jane.
This thing is quite popular with users, because it only sells for $295, knowing that the price of Apple’s Lisa operating system was $10,000 at the time.
The French version is called janet ▼
After Steve Jobs heard about the software, he wanted them to develop a software for the new Apple II GS, so he came to meet Bobby.
Bobby disagreed at first because he had promised his parents that he would finish college even if he was in business.
Jobs said on the spot that if Bobby didn’t drop out of school, he would tear up the contract between Arktronics and Apple.
Faced with studies and the company, Bobby chose the latter without hesitation, and immediately went through the withdrawal procedures.
Although Jobs apparently forced Bobby to drop out of school, in fact, Jobs probably also saw the ambition of this young man, so he helped him along the way.
Facts have proved that Joe’s gang leader is still very accurate in seeing people.
Bobby officially entered the game industry in 1990.
At that time, he found that EA made a lot of money by making games. He felt that he could make more money, so he wanted to find a game company.
It just so happened that a company called Mediagenic was doing badly at the time. It had only $2 million in assets and $30 million in liabilities, and it was about to go bankrupt.
But Bobby found out that the company was founded by four former Atari employees.
You must know that Atari was a well-deserved game leader, and the development strength of these people is also worthy of recognition.
So Bobby and several of his partners spent $440,000 on the spot to get a one-third controlling stake in Mediagenic, and Kotick became CEO and held a 9% stake.
They then renamed the company Activision and did a fundraising in 1994, led by Kotick, who managed to raise $42.5 million for his eloquence and “painting the pie.”
According to Forbes, Kotick himself is not a person who is particularly keen on games. He preferred an arcade game called Defender when he was a teenager, and he basically never played any games in college.
Even so, at the time Kotick at least gave Activision studios what they needed most: creative autonomy.
At the time, these studios were said to be able to decide their own projects, how many people to hire, how long it would take, and a budget, and Activision would pay for it.
From 1997 to 2003, Activision acquired nine studios, and in 1999 launched the blockbuster game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Since its launch, the game has brought Activision $1.6 billion in revenue, and it was a major breakthrough in sports games that year, bringing skateboarding to the virtual world for the first time.
Kotick contacted a group of developers who had worked with EA and gave them $5 million to form a studio called Infinity Ward.
With a wave of this little hoe, he dug up the most valuable shooting game IP in game history – “Call of Duty”.
The “Call of Duty” series of games is almost the inspiration of shooting games for all European and American millennial players. Its position in the game industry is unshakable, and it can bring Activision hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year.
In 2006, Kotick paid another $100 million for a game IP called “Guitar Hero”.
It was yet another lucrative investment, proving once again just how vicious Bobby’s business vision was.
Looking at these games, there is only one area that Activision has not set foot in, and that is the hottest massively multiplayer online game (MMORPG) at the time.
Compared with buyout games such as “Call of Duty” and “Guitar Hero”, MMORPGs that can be continuously charged every month are obviously more profitable.
So in 2008, Activision eyed the world’s most popular online game “World of Warcraft”.
At this time, Vivendi’s new president, Jean-Bernard Lévy, also discovered Activision’s desire for “World of Warcraft” and wanted to use “World of Warcraft” to control Activision.
If the game divisions of Activision and Vivendi were merged directly, Activision would still hold a controlling stake in the new company based on the stock price.
And Lévy insisted on giving an extra $2 billion in cash and renewing 52% of the company’s control.
Activision is Bobby’s own “raised baby”, and if he agrees, it means that Bobby gives up control of the company he spent 18 years building.
When they acquired Blizzard North that year, they pointed the finger at game development, which led to the departure of the four founders of Diablo.
Known as “Dark Four” ▼
After that, a total of more than 30 people left Blizzard North, which greatly damaged the vitality of Blizzard North. In 2005, it was directly announced to close, and the “Diablo 3” that was being developed at that time was also postponed indefinitely.
In the eyes of us outsiders, in the face of such a bully, it must be a better choice to keep the company independent.
The eighth game of the Tony Hawk series, the player rating is only 6.2 ▼
On the other hand, Bobby didn’t really appreciate the influence of “World of Warcraft” until he met Mike Morhaime, the main creator of “World of Warcraft”.
Take China at that time for example, pirated games were rampant, and foreign game companies basically couldn’t make money here.
But “World of Warcraft” can bloom in China’s 160,000 Internet cafes, making these players spend $150 million a year on “World of Warcraft”.
In the end, Bobby decided to agree to Vivendi’s conditions, and he held a 2% stake in the new company Activision Blizzard, giving up control of Activision Blizzard.
I don’t know if it is considered a black person. Although Bobby still served as the CEO of Activision Blizzard after this, his image in public opinion is more and more inclined to an evil capitalist.
In 2009, for example, he fired the creators of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Jason West and Vince Zampella, just before the bonus.
You must know that “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” set a sales record of 1 billion US dollars at the time, and according to the agreement, the two main creators can share millions of dollars in bonuses.
As a result, Activision sued the two in turn, saying that the two wanted to be two or five boys when they were at the company, and planned to run off to EA’s new studio with project funds and 40 employees.
This is not the end, Activision also sued EA by the way.
Eventually, in 2012, the pair, along with EA, reached an out-of-court settlement with Activision Blizzard, the terms of which were strictly confidential.
It’s just that someone broke the news that the departure of Jason and Vince was premeditated by Bobby long ago, and he specially asked Thomas Fenady, the IT director at the time, to “dig a hole” for the two of them and frame the blame.
Giant Bomb News
Activision , Infinity Ward , and Project Icebreaker ▼
But even if he ended up in the game world in such a notorious way, it still wouldn’t change the fact that he was a successful businessman.
He did a great job of turning a near-bankrupt company into a gaming giant with a market value of tens of billions of dollars after acquiring Activision.
His ability has also made him the highest-paid CEO in the gaming industry in the past ten years, earning tens of millions of dollars in salary every year, and a salary of $154.6 million in 2020.
It can be said that players hate him as much as investors love him. For this reason, players even made a lot of meme pictures about him, such as turning Bobby P into a demon image.
After Activision Blizzard is acquired, maybe players will be sad, and investors will be sad too.
But the saddest thing is that for Bobby Kotick, the money he makes on these people has long been enough for him to spend his entire life.
Does he care what others think of him? I don’t think so.
Hashtag: Steve Jobs Blizzard CEO
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