Activision Blizzard CEO, who was forced to lay off by employees, was forced to quit school by Jobs that year

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 over. He was recently sued by New York City for "suspecting that he harmed the company in Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard."

Because Microsoft gave the price of $95 per share when it was acquired, and not long ago Activision Blizzard's stock price was as high as $104.5.

The fall was due to Activision Blizzard's sexual harassment scandal, which resulted in employee suicides, and hundreds of Activision Blizzard employees demonstrating to demand the resignation of Bobby and several of the executives involved.

They marched because Bobby acquiesced to various incidents of sexual harassment in the company and did not deal with the employees involved.

This eventually led to a collapse in the trust of a generation of legendary game companies, and the stock price plummeted. At this time, he wanted to sell the company and pat his ass and leave, so wouldn't the remaining shareholders lose a lot of money? So these shareholders banded together to sue him. For Activision Blizzard, he is important because during his tenure, Activision's stock price has doubled dozens of times.

But it is also because of him that 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.

How did he get mixed up to what he is now infamous? Bobby Kotick has held many, many titles, such as CEO of Activision Blizzard, Coca-Cola Company, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and board member of the Harvard-Westlake School.

Games, beverages, art, academia, so many unrelated industries, he can go in and mix it up. If one word to describe him is to be distilled from so many complex ingredients, it can only be "born businessman". According to Bobby's mother, this trait was already on the cusp of something he was already on display at a young age: Young Bobby sold her ashtray to a friend who came to play at home and made $3.

It is really a horse with thin hair and long hooves, and the son who steals his mother is not a thief, right? After that, Bobby was full of thoughts about how to make money, and he had his own business card in junior high school.

He delivered sandwiches, threaded tennis rackets, and sold wallets.

By the time he got to high school, Bobby, who was getting bolder and fatter, began renting out nightclubs in Manhattan on his night off, partying underage children, and frantically probing on the edge of breaking the law.

Although he has done all kinds of business over the years, Bobby did not delay his studies and successfully entered the University of Michigan.

With his nature, naturally he will not finish college safely and steadily and then go to work for others, in fact, he, like many successful big men, dropped out of school before finishing.

It's just like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg both wanted to drop out of school, and Bobby was forced to drop out of school. Jobs.

Not long after entering college, he and his friend Marks founded a company called Arktronics to develop software for the Apple II computer at that time. The company has it, and it must find a way to get some start-up capital, right? After all, neither of them could program and had to pay for people.

So Bobby, 19, flew to Dallas for a charity ball called Cattle Baron's Ball.

Bobby stopped a middle-aged man like a stunned young man and introduced him to his company and business, which is now a proper social cow.

The middle-aged man, Steve Wynn, a well-known Casino Tycoon in the United States, hosted Bobby and Marks in his office a few weeks later and gave them a check for $300,000.

After getting rich, Arktronics made an operating system for the Apple II called Jane. It's also popular with users because it only sells for $295, which was $10,000 for Apple's Lisa operating system at the time. The French version is called janet ▼

When Jobs heard about the software, he thought of letting them develop a set of software for the new Apple II GS, so he came to meet Bobby.

As a result, Jobs found that the owner of the company was still a college student, and he still read art history that he felt was completely useless, so he persuaded Bobby to quit school and concentrate on running the company, which was a ruin.

Bobby disagreed at first, as he had promised his parents that he would finish college even in business. Jobs said on the spot that if Bobby didn't drop out of school, he would tear up Arktronics' contract with Apple.

Faced with his studies and the company, Bobby did not hesitate to choose the latter and immediately went through the withdrawal procedures.

Although it was clear that Jobs forced Bobby to quit school, in fact, Jobs probably saw the young man's ambitions, so he pushed the boat along the water to help him. It turns out that Joe's vision of the master is still very accurate.

If Bobby had been allowed to juggle his studies and career, he might not have been able to do any big tricks, and there would have been no big businessmen worth more than a billion dollars who later swept across all walks of life.

Bobby's official entry into the gaming industry was in 1990. At that time, he found that EA made a lot of money by making games, and 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 in terrible shape, with assets of only $2 million and debts of up to 30 million, and it was about to go bankrupt.

But Bobby discovered that the company was founded by four former employees of Atari.

Unable to bear the tens of millions of dollars they had made for Atari and the unfair treatment they could only get more than $20,000, they left in 1979 to start Mediagenic.

To know that at that time, Atari was a well-deserved game leader, and the development strength of these people is also worthy of recognition. Bobby and several of his partners threw up $440,000 on the spot, giving Mediagenic a one-third controlling stake, with Kotick as CEO and a 9 percent stake. They then renamed the company Activision and in 1994 launched a fundraising in which Kotick, who successfully raised $42.5 million with his eloquence and "pie-making."

The money was mainly used to acquire studios and develop games. According to Forbes, Kotick himself is not a particularly enthusiastic person, he liked an arcade game called Defender as a teenager, and basically did not play any games in college.

Even so, Kotick at the time gave at least a few Activision studios what they needed most: creative autonomy. It is said that at that time, these studios could decide for themselves the project, how many people to hire, how long to spend and the budget, and Activision was responsible for the money. From 1997 to 2003, Activision acquired nine studios and launched the blockbuster game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999.

Since its launch, the game has brought $1.6 billion to Activision, and it was a major breakthrough in sports games that year, bringing skateboarding to the virtual world for the first time.

After this, Kotick's operation was even more disturbing, and at that time, in the American game industry, Activision's biggest opponent was EA. Kotick reached out to 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, it dug out the most valuable shooter IP in the history of the game - Call of Duty.

The Call of Duty series of games is the first time for almost all European and American millennial players to shoot the game, and its position in the game industry is unshakable, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to Activision every year. In 2006, Kotick spent another $100 million on a game IP called Guitar Heroes.

This game is a multiplayer party game, which can be played with plastic guitar controls instead of gamepads, which was a very new game type at the time, and it was easy for novices to get started. It's another lucrative investment, once again proving how vicious Bobby's business vision can be. Looking at these games, activision has only one area that it has not been involved in, and that is the hottest massively multiplayer online game (MMORPG) at that time. Compared to buyout games like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero, M MORPG, which can be charged continuously every month, is obviously more profitable. So in 2008, Activision set its sights on the world's most popular online game "World of Warcraft".

At this time, Blizzard, which developed World of Warcraft, has long been in the shape of Vivendi. It was at this time that 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 original gaming divisions of Activision and Vivendi were to merge directly, Activision would still hold a controlling stake in the new company based on the stock price. Lévy insisted on giving an extra $2 billion in cash to replace 52 percent of the company with control. Activision is Bobby's own "big baby", and if he agrees, it means that Bobby has given up control of the company he spent 18 years to create.

Vivendi is a well-known bully in the gaming industry. When they acquired Northern Blizzard that year, they pointed out the game's development, leading to the departure of the four founders of Diablo. Known as the "Dark Four"

More than thirty people left Northern Blizzard, causing great damage to Northern Blizzard, and in 2005 it was directly announced to be closed, and Diablo 3, which was under development at the time, was indefinitely postponed. In the eyes of our outsiders, in the face of such a bully, maintaining the independence of the company is definitely a better choice.

However, on the one hand, Activision's own several old IP sequels are not as good as a year, and they are sprayed by players, and Bobby is also a little worried about the future of Activision. The eighth game in the Tony Hawke series, the player rating is only 6.2 ▼

Bobby, on the other hand, only after meeting Mike Morhaime, the creator of World of Warcraft, did he realise how influential World of Warcraft was. In China at the time, for example, pirated games were rampant, and foreign game companies made little money here. But World of Warcraft was able to blossom in 160,000 Internet cafes across China, costing these players $150 million a year on World of Warcraft.

For him, this cake was so delicious. In the end, Bobby decided to agree to Vivendi's terms, taking a 2% stake in the new company Activision Blizzard himself, giving up control of Activision Blizzard.

I don't know if it is close to ink black, bobby after this is still the CEO of Activision Blizzard, but his image in public opinion is more and more biased towards an evil capitalist. In 2009, for example, he fired Jason West and Vince Zampella, creators who developed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, just before the bonus.

Remember that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 set a sales record of $1 billion at the time, and according to the agreement, the two creators can share millions of dollars in prize money.

Who is not angry with this wave of operations? So they took Activision to court.

Activision in turn sued them, saying that the two men wanted to be two or five boys when they were in the company, and planned to run away to EA's new studio with project funds and 40 employees. And that's not all, Activision also incidentally sued the EA along. Eventually, in 2012, they and EA reached an out-of-court settlement with Activision Blizzard, the terms of which were kept strictly confidential. But after this, someone broke the news that the departure of Jason and Vince was premeditated by Bobby, and he also specifically sought out Thomas Fenady, the IT director at the time, to "dig a pit" for them and plant a bribe. Giant Bomb News Activision , Infinity Ward , and Project Icebreaker ▼

And then the story, everyone knows. But even if he ended up exiting the game world in such a disreputable way, it still wouldn't change the fact that he was a successful businessman.

He did a great job of doing his job, buying Activision and turning a company on the verge of bankruptcy into a multi-billion dollar game giant. His abilities have also made him the highest-paid CEO in gaming for the past decade or so, earning tens of millions of dollars in salary each year and $154.6 million in 2020.

But this salary is accompanied by activision Blizzard's reputation is getting worse and worse, the charges are becoming more and more unreasonable, and the game is becoming less and less fun. It can be said that as much as investors love him, players hate him, and players even do a lot of memes about him, such as making Bobby P a demonic image.

After Activision Blizzard is acquired, perhaps players will be sad, and investors will be sad. But the saddest thing is that for Bobby Kotick, the money he made on these people was enough for him to spend his whole life. Does he care what others think of him? I don't think so.

Otherwise, how could Activision Blizzard become the ghost of "just wanting to teach players to play games"?