Bobby Kotick Says He Would Consider Leaving Activision Blizzard If Issues Aren’t Resolved Fast Enough

A new report from The Wall Street Jour­nal say that Activi­sion Bliz­zard CEO Bob­by Kotick informed staff that he would con­sid­er step­ping down if he is unable to fix the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent work­place sit­u­a­tion in a time­ly fash­ion. This is accord­ing to com­ments he is sup­pos­ed­ly made dur­ing a meet­ing on Fri­day, Novem­ber 19th (with “senior man­agers at Blizzard).

The sources with this infor­ma­tion told The Wall Street Jour­nal that Kotick said he would think about leav­ing if prob­lems were not resolved “with speed.” A spokesper­son for Activi­sion Bliz­zard did not rep­sond to WSJ’s request for comment. 

Accord­ing to the report, Activi­sion Bliz­zard had “a series of inter­nal meet­ings” in late Novem­ber, were Kotick and oth­er exec­u­tives spoke on improve­ments to the com­pa­ny’s work­place cul­ture. Mike Ybar­ra, Bliz­zard’s cur­rent replace­ment for for­mer pres­i­dent J. Allen Brack, was among the senior man­agers at the meet­ing. Engi­neer Vio­let Klor­er praised Ybar­ra for answer­ing “hard” ques­tions about Blizzard.

Jen Oneal recent­ly served along­side Ybar­ra before decid­ing to resign. She expressed a lack of faith in Bliz­zard’s abil­i­ty to make change. There was also a report that Oneal was only offered equal pay after she announced plans to leave.

Accord­ing to the WSJ report, exec­u­tives at Activi­sion Pub­lish­ing acknowl­edged in a meet­ing that some employ­ees would not be sat­is­fied unless Kotick resigned. More than 1,700 of the staff, or close to 17% of the com­pa­ny’s total work­force, have signed a peti­tion call­ing for Kotick to resign. Dur­ing these meet­ings, Kotick told staff he was ashamed of what hap­pened under his lead­er­ship and apol­o­gized for how he han­dled cer­tain events–insiders claimed.

The report also said Activi­sion Bliz­zard’s board of direc­tors is toss­ing around the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing a “work­place excel­lence com­mit­tee.” No inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion around Kotick is under­way as of yet.

Activi­sion Bliz­zard’s stock prices has been suf­fer­ing since the ini­tial WSJ report was released. The com­pa­ny’s stock has been on a slip­pery slope since the state of Cal­i­for­nia first sued back in July.

After the lat­est devel­op­ments broke, Jim Ryan from Sony and Phil Spencer from Microsoft have stat­ed they are re-eval­u­at­ing their busi­ness deal­ings with Activi­sion Bliz­zard. Also, the Girls Who Code orga­ni­za­tion announced it’s drop­ping Activi­sion Bliz­zard due to the ongo­ing issues.

Activi­sion Bliz­zard’s board of direc­tors con­tin­ues to stand behind Bob­by Kotick through­out these issues.