As you may have seen, Microsoft just bought Activision Blizzard King in a deal worth $70 billion. If you haven't heard, then we have failed terribly - this is one of the biggest news stories to hit our medium ever. It's six times as expensive as the second biggest acquisition, and it comes off the back of a series of huge scandals for ABK involving harassment, discrimination, workplace abuse, and murder threats. This is a big story with lots of pieces to it, lots of angles to consider, lots of repercussions for various lawsuits, the pursuit of justice, the fate of abusers, and the well-being of employees. So naturally, there's only one thing to do - chat about all the cool games Activision owned but screwed up that Microsoft can now make! Yay, gaming!
Respect For Workers
I love this game. It's been my GOTY for the past few years, and I just can't get enough of it. A live-service title made by multiple studios, it keeps getting a load of really weird updates. Sometimes it gets huge buffs for the workers, such as the Unionisation Patch, the Four Day Week Patch, and the No Crunch Patch. Unfortunately, these come with massive nerfs from elsewhere, like the Crunch Patch, the Crunch Again Patch, and the Death March Crunch Patch. ABK have been dropping a lot of nerfs over the past decade, to the point where they're being sued for being a terrible company that treats its workers terribly, by shutting down studios, cracking down on unionisation, and allowing a culture to fester where male employees would crawl around on their hands and knees while drinking beer and peer up women's skirts.
Microsoft, on the whole, seems to be pushing buffs more often than nerfs. The problem with games is that if you assume by default that every studio is operated in a way that makes life miserable for the workers, you'd be right way more often than you'd be wrong. Touch wood though, Xbox's various studios don't seem to be caught in these scandals very often, and are generally thought to have a good culture. Activision Blizzard aren't great at sequels to live-service games (zing, Overwatch fans!), but hopefully Microsoft's merger means a new Respect For Workers for Activision Blizzard soon.
Going On A Work Trip Without Taking A Sex Toy
Remember when this was a thing? Activision had the rights to Going On A Work Trip Without A Sex Toy, but if it takes the merger for that to become a reality, then at least that's one good thing to come out of all this, right?
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I don't blame you. There are far too many details in the Activision Blizzard lawsuits and scandals to keep up with, from the cube crawls, to the sexual harassment room named after Bill Cosby, to the fact Bobby Kotick admitted he threatened to have an employee killed and then completely got away with it under the defence of "it was just a prank, bro!"
One of the more sordid details though emerged right at the start, in the initial California lawsuit that opened the floodgates. One female employee had naked pictures of herself passed around at a Christmas party, then later went on a work trip with a superior where he took a butt plug and lubricant with him. She killed herself on the trip. The people at Activision Blizzard were fucking scum. Anyway, let's get back to all those nifty games Microsoft can make now! Maybe we'll even see a Wumpa League announcement, wouldn't that be swell?
Female Leadership
A classic. Remember Female Leadership, that beloved - if slightly pro-capitalist - tale of female empowerment and equality? Activision Blizzard could have made Female Leadership at any time it wanted, but it seems stuck on the spin-off, Male Leadership. A little while ago, it tried a soft reboot, called Female Leadership But We Pay You Less Than The Men, with Jen Oneal as the protagonist. For obvious reasons, the whole thing didn't prove very popular and the project was shelved in favour of yet another sequel to Male Leadership. Tiresome. Boring. The cause of virtually every war in human history.
While Xbox has its own version of Male Leadership: The Phil Spencer Edition, by all accounts Spencer is at least a decent guy, and the leadership team at Xbox is far more diverse than not just Activision Blizzard's, but practically any in gaming. Of the 12 people directly under Spencer, seven of them are women. Four are people of colour, with three of those women. Just two of Activison's 12-strong board are women.
No Bobby Kotick
This one's kinda linked. If Female Leadership is the Super Mario, No Bobby Kotick is the Mario Kart. The ever-popular spin-off that we've been waiting way too long to see again, No Bobby Kotick hasn't been a thing at Activision since the '90s. He's been at the helm ever since the merger with Blizzard in 2008. No one likes him. Tim Schafer, head of Double Fine and, for now, Kotick's colleague, has called him a "total prick". We all wanted him to go - in fact, Kotick and his reaction to the various Activision Blizzard lawsuits are the reason we at TheGamer have boycotted coverage of ABK outside the lawsuits and this sale. It seems no one can officially say whether or not he's leaving, but it looks like the writing's on the wall once the acquisition goes through. He'll probably get a lot of money for leaving, and that sucks, but I really want No Bobby Kotick back. Microsoft, I don't care what it costs, please give us No Bobby Kotick again.
Prototype
This one's just for me, I guess. Probably should do the ones above first, though.