Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Caudick has now left the company. Although he not only got rid of the suspicion that he had engaged in indecent behavior before leaving, he also received a "severance package" of 110 million yuan. Although Xbox head Phil Spencer politely paid tribute to him as a peer and said that he had a valuable contribution to the gaming industry, it is clear that many Blizzard employees do not think so. After he left the company, some people were finally able to publicly criticize him, including former Overwatch community manager Andy Belford.
He retweeted a tweet from an Overwatch news account that, while reporting on Caudick's departure, also mentioned the CEO's alleged "wasting of the Overwatch 2 team's development time and at one point blaming the game for its stock price decline rather than corporate scandals during his tenure."
Andy Belford said he could finally break his silence and wanted to share some "interesting" facts. "When we were planning the Steam release of Overwatch 2, my team warned (months in advance) that we would be bombarded with reviews," he wrote. "Our requests for more information, more details, and more resources to help us handle the expected influx were flatly denied."
He said that although he refused to let his team be exposed to these very nasty content and posts, they were still asked to control problems in the Steam version. He also said that this was not the responsibility of Blizzard's community management department. "When asked who decided to release on Steam without additional help," the answer they got was: Caudick.
He called this "just one example of the culture that Cowdick cultivated at Activision Blizzard" and said that it was "shit flows down from the top, often landing on the people who are least paid and do the most work", but "management is too busy reacting to wild swings in direction and decisions that make no sense."
Finally, Andy concluded: "At the end of the day, player experience/employees have no value to CSuite and executive leadership. It's all about that quarter's earnings call."