Former Call of Duty dev slams Bobby Kotick for making games ‘worse’

Bobby Kotick has only been gone from Activision/Blizzard for a few days, but a former Call of Duty developer has claimed his decisions made the game ‘worse’.

Bobby Kotick has departed from his role as the big boss of Activision/Blizzard. In light of this, many former workers for the company have been revealing their negative thoughts on the former CEO and how he negatively impacted the games they were working on.

Recently, a former Call of Duty developer spoke candidly about the former CEO in a thread on Twitter. “Bobby’s decisions made our games worse.” Said Twitter user chhopsky, a former programmer on Call of Duty at Demonware.

She then went on to outline an instance where she was forced to stand up for a fellow employee after Kotick “threatened” to have them “killed.”

She wasn’t the only person working at Activision/Blizzard who felt Kotick’s decisions were detrimental to the games, and the teams working on them.

Andy Belford, a Blizzard community manager, also spoke about decisions made by the then CEO which caused problems for Overwatch 2’s launch on Steam.

Belford’s thread claims Kotick denied the Overwatch 2 community team resources to help them adequately deal with review bombings on Steam. As well as forcing the team to moderate Steam, even though that wasn’t actually part of their roles with Blizzard.

“At the end of everything, player experience/worker meant nothing to CSuite and exec leadership. It was all about that quarters earnings call.” He ended the thread.

Currently, there’s no official announcement regarding who will replace Kotick as the company’s CEO.

While his exit from Activision/Blizzard has been celebrated by fans, it remains to be seen what sort of changes his departure will bring.