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[adamsapple]

Activision Blizzard has been accused of discriminating against "old white guys"

A former Activision Blizzard executive has filed a discrimination claim with the company, alleging it of discriminating…

www.eurogamer.net

"Activision placed profits over people by terminating the older, higher paid executives".

As reported by Law360 and spotted by our sister site, GamesIndustry.biz, the complaint includes allegations against former CEO Bobby Kotick for remarks he made at an unspecified leadership conference in which he reportedly said that the "problem" at ABK was that "there are too many old white guys".

The filing – lodged by a 57-year-old white man who worked at the company from 2014 until he was laid off as part of the company's restructure in late 2023 – says that shortly after hearing these comments, a pair of white executives left "based, at least in part, on Kotick's ageist remarks", adding that "Activision placed profits over people by terminating the older, higher-paid executives".

 

[adamsapple]

former CEO Bobby Kotick ... remarks he made at an unspecified leadership conference in which he reportedly said that the "problem" at ABK was that "there are too many old white guys".

Kotick is .. woke ?

 

[Ass of Can Whooping]

Avengers assemble

 

[Represent.]

Old white guys literally own the company

 

[GHG]

Kotick is .. woke ?

No, he's not, but he was usually very good at doing what's required to keep that stock pumped (it should go without saying why I said usually).

Part of that is adhering to ESG duties, aka greenwashing, bluewashing and diversitywashing.

This has unfortunately led to many good people getting pushed out of board/exec level positions at various fortune 500 companies.

 

[SJRB]

Here we go

 

[Warnen]

As an old white guy…..

 

[RedC]

It's highly unlikely it had anything to do with him being White and/or a Man, but his age and overall productivity or lack thereof relative to his overall compensation are highly likely one of the key reasons he was considered expendable when they had to make cuts.

 

[Flash Junkins]

It's highly unlikely it had anything to do with him being White and/or a Man, but his age and overall productivity or lack thereof relative to his overall compensation are highly likely one of the key reasons he was considered expendable when they had to make cuts.

HR Nerd above.

It's clearly a cost cut who hit the highest paid employees. If he was black he'd get the same.

 

[Elysium44]

Reminds me of this story I saw earlier. This nonsense is everywhere now.

Bank worker wins £490K after unfair dismissal for using the N-word

Carl Borg-Neal, 58, (pictured), from Andover, was awarded almost £500,000 in damages. Added to Lloyds's legal costs and tax, the bank has a bill of nearly £1million.

www.dailymail.co.uk

He told The Telegraph: 'I often wonder if I wasn't a white middle-aged male would I have had to go through everything I went through. There is no way of telling. You are bottom of everything.'

 

[realcool]

HR Nerd above.

It's clearly a cost cut who hit the highest paid employees. If he was black he'd get the same.

sounds like the opposite of what kotick wanted

 

[RedC]

HR Nerd above.

It's clearly a cost cut who hit the highest paid employees. If he was black he'd get the same.

Yeah, I've been a Sr Talent Acquisition Specialist within the IT industry for 2 decades working with Tech Startups to Fortune 500 corporations.

 

[Elysium44]

No, he's not, but he was usually very good at doing what's required to keep that stock pumped (it should go without saying why I said usually).

Part of that is adhering to ESG duties, aka greenwashing, bluewashing and diversitywashing.

This has unfortunately led to many good people getting pushed out of board/exec level positions at various fortune 500 companies.

More to the point, Kotick is Jewish and that group don't usually identify as 'white people' but as Jewish, a distinctly different ethnicity (to them).

 

[BlackTron]

He just wanted to trim the highest paid employees.

They just all so happened to be white

 

[Moriarty1889]

‘To many old white guys’ said Kotick……….who is an old white guy himself regardless. This whole war on white men or whites in general is getting ridiculous and is usually being led by……..wait for it…….WHITE PEOPLE who want to be seen as upstanding virtue signalers selling out their own race. These people are all lunatics and are the ones who should be replaced.

 

[RedC]

‘To many old white guys’ said Kotick……….who is an old white guy himself regardless. This whole war on white men or whites in general is getting ridiculous and is usually being led by……..wait for it…….WHITE PEOPLE who want to be seen as upstanding virtue signalers selling out their own race. These people are all lunatics and are the ones who should be replaced.

 

[ShadyAcshuns]

Ageism has always been a thing, and it's always been present in gaming from the start.

 

[Spukc]

Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool
Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool
Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool Cool
Cool Cool Cool
Cool Cool Cool
Cool Cool Cool

 

[Joramun]

No, he's not, but he was usually very good at doing what's required to keep that stock pumped (it should go without saying why I said usually).

Part of that is adhering to ESG duties, aka greenwashing, bluewashing and diversitywashing.

This has unfortunately led to many good people getting pushed out of board/exec level positions at various fortune 500 companies.

Reminds me of OceanGate. The submarine that imploded.

Missing sub CEO didn't hire '50-year-old white guys' with experience

Literal DIEversity hires.

Kodick was trying to rack up those ESG/DEI points I reckon: https://careers.blackrock.com/2021/11/22/category1/how-to-approach-equity-in-your-dei-strategy/

It's literal brainwashing.

A good explanation here:

 

[RedC]

The problem is some of ya'll hear a few keywords, lose all nuance, and flatten the argument to a specific confirmation bias.

 

[analog_future]

please won't someone help the old rich white guys

 

[K2D]

Corporate culture and ageism. What else is new?

 

[proandrad]

Maybe they just discriminate against people not named Bobby Kotick.

 

[RayBoy]

 

[Bonfires Down]

I know this will give Gaf a heart attack but maybe bringing in other perspectives for leadership can be a good thing.

 

[a multicultural team of v]

I know this will give Gaf a heart attack but maybe bringing in other perspectives for leadership can be a good thing.

Worked great for Harvard.

 

[Red5]

Old people who have been in a company for too long with fattened paychecks are usually the first to go. My dad and his coworkers got axed two years away from retirement, replaced by young contract workers.

 

[Gaiff]

former CEO Bobby Kotick ... remarks he made at an unspecified leadership conference in which he reportedly said that the "problem" at ABK was that "there are too many old white guys".

 

[GHG]

Worked great for Harvard.

And Boeing.

 

[mitch1971]

HR Nerd above.

It's clearly a cost cut who hit the highest paid employees. If he was black he'd get the same.

If he was Black he wouldnt be one of the highest paid to get the push in the first place. /s

 

[Fake]

 

[Winter John]

Finally it’s my turn.

 

[Drew1440]

‘To many old white guys’ said Kotick……….who is an old white guy himself regardless. This whole war on white men or whites in general is getting ridiculous and is usually being led by……..wait for it…….WHITE PEOPLE who want to be seen as upstanding virtue signalers selling out their own race. These people are all lunatics and are the ones who should be replaced.

This seems to be getting worse, to the point that CEOs can make blatantly racist statements. Aviva and the Royal Air Force come to mind, even the BBC themselves.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

 

[unlurkified]

The problem is some of ya'll hear a few keywords, lose all nuance, and flatten the argument to a specific confirmation bias.

I agree that whether or not this instance is an example of anti-white racial bias is unclear, but you can’t deny the fact that for some reason, he felt comfortable with using the term ‘white’ pejoratively, which is something the current culture spuriously allows for.

 

[Moriarty1889]

This seems to be getting worse, to the point that CEOs can make blatantly racist statements. Aviva and the Royal Air Force come to mind, even the BBC themselves.

Very true.

 

[FalconPunch]

Worked great for Harvard.

And Boeing.

Nah, I can’t let these lazy comments slide. Boeings problem has nothing to do with “diversity” and has everything to do with greed. Greed so prevalent in America that it erodes the morals of a nation. They let MD buy them out, replace all the engineers with c-suite beam counter executives, outsource most of the work to China, and do anything to make a dollar regardless of whether it’s right or not. Now they’re reaping the rewards.

Boeing is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of America today. Greedy at the expense of its people. All the big American companies outsource their jobs to “make more profit”. What they forget is that people need money to buy your products. If they don’t have a job, they can’t pay. So Joe blow in China who makes your iPhone can’t afford to buy it and John whatever in the states doesn’t have a good job so he can’t buy it either.

All this culture wars nonsense is just nonsense. Nothing other than a distraction to keep poor folks busy. People can’t be calm and have measured discussions because their life is fubar’d. Too much debt, poor working conditions, many cant even buy a house, etc.

I hate to go off on a tangent but I can’t stand lazy comments like these smh. My guy, go look up Maslows hierarchy of needs and you’ll very quickly understand why we have so many edge lords walking around. When most people can’t even get past the first 2 levels, it’s not surprising that we see so much cultural extremism.

 

[TransTrender]

I know this will give Gaf a heart attack but maybe bringing in other perspectives for leadership can be a good thing.

Worked great for Harvard.

And Boeing.

This can work, but it cannot in the current Clown World.

Nah, I can’t let these lazy comments slide. Boeings problem has nothing to do with “diversity” and has everything to do with greed. Greed so prevalent in America that it erodes the morals of a nation. They let MD buy them out, replace all the engineers with c-suite beam counter executives, outsource most of the work to China, and do anything to make a dollar regardless of whether it’s right or not. Now they’re reaping the rewards.

Boeing is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of America today. Greedy at the expense of its people. All the big American companies outsource their jobs to “make more profit”. What they forget is that people need money to buy your products. If they don’t have a job, they can’t pay. So Joe blow in China who makes your iPhone can’t afford to buy it and John whatever in the states doesn’t have a good job so he can’t buy it either.

All this culture wars nonsense is just nonsense. Nothing other than a distraction to keep poor folks busy. People can’t be calm and have measured discussions because their life is fubar’d. Too much debt, poor working conditions, many cant even buy a house, etc.

I hate to go off on a tangent but I can’t stand lazy comments like these smh. My guy, go look up Maslows hierarchy of needs and you’ll very quickly understand why we have so many edge lords walking around. When most people can’t even get past the first 2 levels, it’s not surprising that we see so much cultural extremism.

I disagree, coming from the perspective of family being executives there and other places.

It's woke clown world and giving mental midgets much more of a voice than they should ever have. Reasoned nuance has no place anymore.

 

[Moriarty1889]

This can work, but it cannot in the current Clown World.


I disagree, coming from the perspective of family being executives there and other places.

It's woke clown world and giving mental midgets much more of a voice than they should ever have. Reasoned nuance has no place anymore.

The world has definitely gone woke my friend and the lunatics are running the asylum in many aspects.

 

[Mr Moose]

Can confirm. They hid the event tab from me in Call of Duty. It's ageist and racist.

 

[FalconPunch]

This can work, but it cannot in the current Clown World.


I disagree, coming from the perspective of family being executives there and other places.

It's woke clown world and giving mental midgets much more of a voice than they should ever have. Reasoned nuance has no place anymore.

If this is in reference to Boeing as in you have family working in the executive branch at Boeing, then I'm afraid to say, your family doesn't know what they're talking about. Under Boeing of old, the 737 Max is not being built period. It's an engineering nightmare and would never be approved by the engineering executives of the Boeing of old. The current 737 MAX is a product borne purely out of greed, taking shortcuts and having absolutely no integrity. Boeing of old took pride in doing the right thing properly the first time. The executives at current day Boeing are corrupt moral-less hacks that are a cancer to be purged. How they've soiled the once great Boeing name. In the past, the slogan used to be, "if it ain't Boeing, I ain't going". Now it's "if it's Boeing, I ain't going". What a stark reversal in the company.

 

[DaciaJC]

Reminds me of this story I saw earlier. This nonsense is everywhere now.

Bank worker wins £490K after unfair dismissal for using the N-word

Carl Borg-Neal, 58, (pictured), from Andover, was awarded almost £500,000 in damages. Added to Lloyds's legal costs and tax, the bank has a bill of nearly £1million.

www.dailymail.co.uk

A bank manager who was unfairly sacked for seeking advice on what to do if he heard a black person using the N-word at work has won a £490,000 payout.

Father-of-two Carl Borg-Neal, 59, from Andover, Hampshire, raised the question during a Lloyds Bank race education training session on July 16, 2021, but in doing so inadvertently used the word in full himself. He apologised immediately.

It left the woman leading the exercise apparently so 'badly distressed' that she had to take a week off – a 'key reason' for the decision to dismiss Mr Borg-Neal for gross misconduct.

Fucking LOL, you cannot make this shit up.

 

[Jubenhimer]

Part of that is adhering to ESG duties, aka greenwashing, bluewashing and diversitywashing.

Liberals like to complain about big business and billionaires ruining everything. But notice how the one group you're not allowed to criticize, is major investment firms and banks like BlackRock and Vanguard that enforce this ESG nonsense to begin with. They're the real enemy, big corporations are just the useful puppets.

 

[Ailike]

Hey GAF. Woke. Now gimme points.

 

[Quantum253]

Kotick is .. woke ?

In the corporate world, it's called playing ball. Doesn't matter your own views and opinions only the overall organization. I've watch plenty of directors sell their souls in corporate meetings and board reviews enforcing ideologies they themselves don't believe, but will make sure everyone is "onboard".....they say socialize the idea

 

[kiphalfton]

Yeah, I've been a Sr Talent Acquisition Specialist within the IT industry for 2 decades working with Tech Startups to Fortune 500 corporations.

 

[ungalo]

For mainstream website to relay this, they must really hate Bobby.

 

[March Climber]

There’s no way some of you here and elsewhere online are falling for this. After he’s finally been outed and done with, all it takes is for Ol’ Bobby to side with anti-woke and he’s forgiven and welcomed with open arms?

 

[Rentahamster]

We have too many old white guys, says old white guy.

 

[FearlessBelgian]

We have too many old white guys, says old white guy.

He don't consider him like a white guy