Thirty-two years and ten months. It’s difficult to find a video game studio boss who has stayed in office longer than Robert A. Kotick. Better known as Bobby, the American leaves his position as CEO of Activision Blizzard on Friday, December 29. His departure was announced a week earlier in a public message addressed to the nearly 16,000 employees of the American publisherrenowned for the series Call of Dutythe massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft or the colorful puzzles of candy Crush.
This change comes two months after the validation of the takeover of his company by Microsoft, for a value of nearly 69 billion dollars (62.5 billion euros). Since the announcement of this acquisition in January 2022, the most expensive in the history of the video game industry, the boss was in the hot seat and the transition at the head of the publisher had been set for 2024.
It would be time for the handover, according to Bobby Kotick. In his last statement, the sixty-year-old was delighted to“a very exciting new chapter that opens to [Activision Blizzard] ». Its future is now in the hands of Phil Spencer, president of Microsoft Gaming – the video game division of the American giant, formerly Xbox –, who launched the acquisition.
Without successor
But at Microsoft, the time has come for the reorganization of the group built by this video game ogre. “We are entering a new stage to align Activision Blizzard with Microsoft Gaming”announced Phil Spencer, in an internal press release released Wednesday by the American site The Verge. Activision Blizzard’s top executives now answer to the orders of Matt Booty, one of Xbox’s strong men. No one is replacing Bobby Kotick at the moment. If the position remains vacant, this would constitute a liquidation of his inheritance by the Redmond firm.
His empire has been built thanks to the irresistible progression of video games over the past three decades. “You have transformed amateur entertainment into the most engaging media in the world”, he wrote to his teams in his public message. The formula is less a tribute to the work of its troops than a summary of its legacy: that of having anticipated the evolution of the sector, which was often in the hands of creatives and programmers in the early 1990s, in the biggest cultural industry in the world. The turnover of video games exceeds that of cinema and is estimated at 164 billion euros in 2023, according to the specialist firm Newzoo.
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