On November 22 2025 01:30 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I can't understand why Bobby Kotick did not want to fund this amazing game. What a dumb move. He could've had a 2nd Call of Duty level franchise in Activision-Blizzard's portfolio.
Seeing all these guys from Mike Morhaime to Rob Pardo to Tim Morten go on to incredible levels of success after leaving that shithole Activision shows us all what an incompetent video game executive Bobby Kotick was.
I’ll never understand why you bemoan industry trends and love Bobby Kotick at the same time. Pick a lane maybe?
I have complicated feelings about Bobby Kotick.
For the ten years I was at Activision, we never saw him. He never ventured far out of California, and certainly couldn't be bothered to visit a studio as far away as (checks notes) Vancouver, British Columbia. So the only interaction we ever had with him was watching a video every year where he sat awkwardly and talked awkwardly about... stuff.
But at work we always jokingly called him "Uncle Bobby", especially when it was time to thank someone for paying for our latest work lunch or dinner. We had a lot of perks at work, but mostly that was because they had to somehow offset the fact that Amazon and Google would pay server engineers twice as much as they got working for Activision. Because working in video games is FUN, right?
Anyway, then the sexual harassment stuff at Blizzard came out in the open, and it was revealed that not only did Uncle Bobby not give a shit, but that he harassed the women on his own personal staff on the regular.
But the State of California did give a shit, and sued Activision Blizzard, and that's when Bobby (we all stopped calling him Uncle Bobby at that time) decided that he would accept an offer from Microsoft to buy out the company he had spent his entire adult life building.
And Microsoft gave him, literally, a billion dollars just to go away.
Presumably, now that he's a real billionaire, he's hard at work actively trying to burn the entire world down as fast as possible, which seems to be what billionaires do.
Was he always an asshole or did money make him one? I'd lean towards the former, even though I used to have a soft spot for him because he started actually programming games, and because he tried (at first) to enact a hands-off policy with the studios he acquired, unlike EA.
But in the end, I realized that knowing how to program doesn't make anyone more empathic or virtuous. And it's not like Bobby ever really cared that much when Activision slowly wormed its way into every studio's existence. Plus, most of the studios were run by massive shitholes in the first place! It's easy to just throw your hands up, say that you're "letting the studios run themselves", and absolve yourself of any responsibility to take care of your employees. Even though some of them were getting harassed to the point of suicide.
On November 22 2025 04:33 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Even though some of them were getting harassed to the point of suicide.
evidence?
the entire investigation surrounding those alleged incidents is tainted. Wipper was fired and her office went far off the rails. DFEH interfered with the EEOC. They are supposed to work together.
Termination and Resignation: Wipper was fired by the governor's office on March 29, 2022. The following day, Proctor resigned in protest over the firing and the alleged interference. Both lawyers had previously stepped down from the Activision case without public explanation earlier that month. Newsom's Response: A spokesperson for Governor Newsom stated at the time that the accusations of interference were "categorically false". Whistleblower Considerations: Wipper's attorney, Alexis Ronickher, stated that Wipper was considering "all avenues of legal recourse including a claim under the California Whistleblower Protection Act".
Kotick ran Activision for 30+ years and had many thousands of employees. How many suicides were there? What evidence do you have that harassment led to suicide? Jeanette Whipper got fired for trying to do too much with no evidence. She ended her reign with an open ended threat that Newsome had silenced a whistleblower. Her accusations went no where. She just ran around pointing fingers in every direction.
On November 22 2025 04:33 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Anyway, then the sexual harassment stuff at Blizzard came out in the open, and it was revealed that not only did Uncle Bobby not give a shit, but that he harassed the women on his own personal staff on the regular.
the investigation was tainted. wipper was fired. other than a bunch of web site quotes from anonymous sources do you have evidence of this?
On November 21 2025 23:55 Manit0u wrote: Haha. Meanwhile, a strategy game made by like 2-3 developers It has 1v1, 2v2, 4p FFA special mode (all with ranked ladder), survival mode (challenge mode), automated weekly tournaments for 1v1 and 2v2, different unit skins etc.
Difference between a cash grab and actual passion project. All of the Mechabellum devs are quite high on the ladder, constantly battling among the top players in the world. This is what you get when you're making a game you want to play yourself.
And the community has trashed the Mechabellum devs for months now, saying they don't care about the players or their game. It's a circle-jerk, reinforcing the idea that this game is dying. Online discourse is such a shit show.
What? I'm part of this community, checking the discords and stuff (except the official discord) and I haven't really see people be too disgruntled.
I'm on the official discord and people complain quite a bit. Steam comments and streams have been mostly super negative ever since buildings were introduced and the player numbers are dwindeling. It's obviously not everyone and there are still positive people/streamers in the community. But the doomerisms made me avoid certain streamers and their chats, even though I originally liked to watch them. It's so bad that it significantly drags my mood down, which is the last thing I need right now.
the entire investigation surrounding those alleged incidents is tainted. Wipper was fired and her office went far off the rails. DFEH interfered with the EEOC. They are supposed to work together.
The evidence was in the lawsuits? I'm not a law-talking guy. A lot of people came forward with their stories of harassment. It's not like sexual harassment is uncommon in the video game industry. I was in one of the nicest studios in the nicest country on the planet and I still saw it. People's careers were and are absolutely ruined because of it.
A lot of the rebuttal talking points that came out from Activision after these revelations were attributed to a female manager. Then it was revealed that Uncle Bobby actually dictated these letters to this manager. They were his own words. I don't trust him farther than I could throw him.
Is JimmyJ such a boomer that he is defending Bobby Kotick right now?! WTF are we even debating? That Bobby is a nice, ethical cool dude? That Bobby hate is overblown? Who cares, tbh. Fuck Bobby.
C&C4 had a small long term community attached to it. GR.org had an active competitive community around the game. Then on July 27, 2010 it disappeared. What happened on that day?
Many of the "facts" presented in this video are flat out wrong.
On November 25 2025 00:10 Gargonus wrote: Guess who's the only one defending Frost Giant in this thread ?
the entire investigation surrounding those alleged incidents is tainted. Wipper was fired and her office went far off the rails. DFEH interfered with the EEOC. They are supposed to work together.
For an in depth examination of how badly the DFEH bungled the ATVI case and harmed the workers they claim to protect... head over to the ATVI and Video Game Industry thread. Richard Hoeg covered it quite well.
The DFEH fucked over ATVI employees far more than Kotick ever could.
On November 22 2025 07:10 Jeremy Reimer wrote: Uncle Bobby actually dictated these letters to this manager. They were his own words. I don't trust him farther than I could throw him.
Robert is the money man. I trusted him to bring home the money. He always delivered. The money men I work for are not my friends. I produce software... they pay me... we both go home to our families. We're not buddies.
I want the money men for whom I work to get bigger and better projects in the future. I have enough friends.
"poor studio's getting only a budget offer of 2-3 million which means they can't make good games" says the man that blew through 40+ million making an utter failure of a game.
Its sad when you think about how many good Indy games could have been made with that 40 million. Instead of feeding the delusions of Tim Morten.
I genuine think he doesn't see how that post by himself, paints the failure of Stormgate. (other then his idea that if only he had 200 million, he could have made SC 3)
So, I checked the comments, and found this: https://imgur.com/a/BWBXBRC I googled the guy. He is the co-founder of Tri-Arts. They're making the Defcon Zero game. With Tim C as advisor. Right when I thought it couldn't get any better.
I just HAVE to make a script to parse through the LinkedIn comments and create a list of companies to ignore. This is unsufferable.
It'll probably get deleted so just in case : our champion Spartak posted 4 times in the Reddit thread mentioned in my previous post, criticizing the "bad faith" of the author.
Quote from that guy: "The industry is in an unhealthy place right now."
Aren't we in like the golden age of games? It seems like we're constant being bombarded by amazing games all year now.
Playing through FF7 Rebirth these days, and it's like I'd never dreamed this kind of game would be possible when I was younger.
That quote makes it seem like the industry is hurting or going away - I'm pretty sure it's never been bigger?
Maybe from a developer standpoint, it's hard to breakthrough. But as the consumer... I've got a backlog of amazing games that would probably take me 5+ years to get through.
On November 25 2025 04:53 Gargonus wrote: It'll probably get deleted so just in case : our champion Spartak posted 4 times in the Reddit thread mentioned in my previous post, criticizing the "bad faith" of the author.
Plot twist : he hasn't even watched the video.
I couldn't make it funnier if I tried hahahah
I’ve given Spartak a lot of benefit of the doubt, I think he gets some flak that isn’t entirely merited, and I’ve defended him plenty.
But that thread, yeah absolutely not.
I was expecting a clickbait hatchet job just based on the video title, but actually I think the guy was pretty fair, and rather than shitting on the games I think he was actually pretty positive about the games and their strong points, and it was more a sadness they didn’t work out.
I’m probably giving away what my username is on Reddit by making the same points but ah well :p I’d have some variant of Wombat on there too if they weren’t all taken!
On November 25 2025 04:55 SoleSteeler wrote: Quote from that guy: "The industry is in an unhealthy place right now."
Aren't we in like the golden age of games? It seems like we're constant being bombarded by amazing games all year now.
Playing through FF7 Rebirth these days, and it's like I'd never dreamed this kind of game would be possible when I was younger.
That quote makes it seem like the industry is hurting or going away - I'm pretty sure it's never been bigger?
Maybe from a developer standpoint, it's hard to breakthrough. But as the consumer... I've got a backlog of amazing games that would probably take me 5+ years to get through.
Depends what you want to do, and what your tastes are.
I see a lot of parallels to the music industry. As a consumer it’s great to have basically all the music for a monthly price equivalent to what a single album would cost adjusted for inflation. As a musician (in which I’ve dabbled and known quite a few pros) it’s far easier to produce quality stuff, and in theory stick it out there for anyone to listen to.
The flipside of that is there’s a metric fuckton of stuff for your music to compete with, which can be hard.
The ridiculous part of Tim’s LinkedIn journey is I actually think he’s right on a lot of his points. But they seemingly only occurred to him after his game bombed, so they come across as very sour grapes and out of touch
That's what I love about these people. Selective bad memory.
We've got the exact same argument with Sparty. Some content creator used the old Amara model in his video. Sparty called it a bad faith argument, because it was changed later. I argued that the point of the video is highlighting the reasons of SG's failure. It doesn't matter if they changed the character model AFTER the game already failed. Sparty stays silent just to accuse another content creator of the same thing.
On November 25 2025 04:55 SoleSteeler wrote: Quote from that guy: "The industry is in an unhealthy place right now."
Aren't we in like the golden age of games? It seems like we're constant being bombarded by amazing games all year now.
Playing through FF7 Rebirth these days, and it's like I'd never dreamed this kind of game would be possible when I was younger.
That quote makes it seem like the industry is hurting or going away - I'm pretty sure it's never been bigger?
Maybe from a developer standpoint, it's hard to breakthrough. But as the consumer... I've got a backlog of amazing games that would probably take me 5+ years to get through.
Yes, I think he's looking at this from a developer standpoint. As some argue in his LinkedIn comments, why get the programmer in Los Angeles when you can hire someone cheaper in South East Asia?
So he argues that it's a race to the bottom for devs. I can see that argument being valid, on the other hand indy devs are whooping AAA studios' ass with shoestring budgets.
Tim should look at Hoyoverse and how they release success after success.
On November 25 2025 04:55 SoleSteeler wrote: Quote from that guy: "The industry is in an unhealthy place right now."
Aren't we in like the golden age of games? It seems like we're constant being bombarded by amazing games all year now.
Playing through FF7 Rebirth these days, and it's like I'd never dreamed this kind of game would be possible when I was younger.
That quote makes it seem like the industry is hurting or going away - I'm pretty sure it's never been bigger?
Maybe from a developer standpoint, it's hard to breakthrough. But as the consumer... I've got a backlog of amazing games that would probably take me 5+ years to get through.
Yes, I think he's looking at this from a developer standpoint. As some argue in his LinkedIn comments, why get the programmer in Los Angeles when you can hire someone cheaper in South East Asia?
So he argues that it's a race to the bottom for devs. I can see that argument being valid, on the other hand indy devs are whooping AAA studios' ass with shoestring budgets.
Tim should look at Hoyoverse and how they release success after success.
Its a race for the bottom for some/many but you can't forget he was sitting on a pot of gold. FG wasn't one of the poor ones.
EPT
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