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Blizzard CFO leaves to join Square (The payment company. Not Square-Enix)
- Thread starter ponzies
- Start date
Nah, there are tons of ex-Activision people at Blizzard now - it's not just one exec. And it's COO Armin Zerza who heads up publishing/finance/biz dev/etc.
I have no idea why Ahuja left, but her job was to balance the spreadsheet, and now someone else will come in and balance the spreadsheet. I wouldn't expect much to change in terms of cost-cutting, potential upcoming layoffs, etc.
For your third point. He was poached by Netflix. He didn't fall on Netflx's lap because he was fired. He was fired because Activision found out and fired him for cause. He was still under contract so they needed to fire him.
Anything juicy you know about Activision / Blizzard internally? Or any studios like IW/Treyarch?
Yep, where there is smoke...
Could be victims of their previous success and Activision and the investors are raising the bar to a ridiculous standard and Activision wants their own people there.
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Sure, but why was Netflix negotiating with him to begin with? I mean he might have been the one starting the talks with them due to unknown reasons. I'm making this sound like no one moves on to different companies which they do, I am just curious since all of these events are coming from the same company.
He actually has ties to the current Netflix board and executive team. He worked with them before.
From the WSJ:
Before working for Activision Blizzard, Mr. Neumann held multiple positions at Walt Disney Co. in its theme-park and television divisions. He also had stints at private-equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Summit Partners.
At Netflix, Mr. Neumann will be reunited with several former Disney colleagues, including board member Anne Sweeney, who oversaw a large chunk of the company's television operations. Earlier in December, Netflix hired away longtime ABC programming executive Channing Dungey into a senior creative position.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-hires-activision-cfo-11546317573?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4
Why? EA is making ton of money every year, investors want money, Wilson makes money, he wont leave anytime soon
I mean it can be as simple as Netflix thinks he's doing a good job and can hire him on with a bigger salary. That's most likely all it is.
well the stock aint doing so hot for acti-blizz right now but it seems more like a market correction than anything. and while it is a publicly traded company we only get quarterly results and we see them well after a CFO would. and 1 exec leaving is nothing, having so many execs and senior people leaving in the past year is the thing, it's just another thing on top of everything else going on right now. From my perpspective it's still a "hmm, is something going on with acti-blizz?" not "OMG Acti-Blizz is doomed!?"
I know 2 guys who run engineering teams at Blizzard and everything is normal there. This is just C level people waiting for 401K/stock matching on 12/31 and them moving on after the fact to not lose tens of thousands.
Problem was he was fired, if it was a simply a better job offer he would have left in the same way the overwalming majority of people do when they get a better job. They give their notice, serve out the notice period shake hands and move on.
He was fired because Activision found out he was being poached. They didn't fire him and then he got into bed with Netflix.
Blizzard is almost 30 years old of course it's original people are gone. Blizzard hasn't exactly been the company they where in the late 90s early 2000s so honestly Activision getting more internal control of the studio isn't going change much.
Off topic question, is it normal for such high executive jobs to switch between companies, instead of just promoting someone from inside the company?
Switching companies is almost always better if you want your pay to increase.
The Kotaku articles by Schreier painted a very different picture and he had many sources at Blizzards. We'll just have to see what happens next I guess.
Yes, of course, but I meant more for the companies. Like, isn't it better to just promote someone from inside (a VP or whatever) instead of bidding for some outside who, yeah, has all the experience and whatever, but would be way way more expensive?
You do not fire a CFO, or any other executives, because they are being poached, if you did this would be so common world wide nobody would take notice of it.
And seriously no company would want to fire a CFO days after the close of your 4th Quarter, it is one of the most critical dates of the financial year. The rumours this causes alone could tank your stock price, damage your credit rating - let alone all the chaos it would cause in getting the final accounts closed for they year.
EA had a major PR/sales issue both the last 2 holidays with Battlefront 2 microtransactions and Battlefield V delay. Their stock went down both times.
Not that worrying of news. The CFO is just the head of finance, not creative decisions. Not much will change in that regard.
What I'm most worried about is the news of Activision pressuring Blizzard to sell a big title every year. Sounds like to me Activision wants the Blizzard equivalent of CoD.
What I'm most worried about is the news of Activision pressuring Blizzard to sell a big title every year. Sounds like to me Activision wants the Blizzard equivalent of CoD.
Maybe you should read some more. There are some people who have left within the past year or so couple of whom were big with the community for Hearthstone among other games.
Like Diablo, some of the old leads talk about changes within the company. Seriously wtf kind of response was that? It's like you don't pay attention to things going on in the industry?
Here:
Here:
All that paints a certain picture of things changing internally leadership wise, and heavily influence to have Blizzard operate similarly to activison in how the company is run.
Activision has a release every year, now with games like crash/spyro/ctr they have more coming out each fiscal year. Blizzard is slower in their releases compared to that, but have a higher residual I would argue.
Now with them hyping up Diablo Immortal at a fan event shows how tone deaf they are, and that would be because of a lot of people who were part of the culture of blizzard have left or are in preperation to leaving/retiring.
Does not paint a great future for Blizzard and the community it has a close relationship with.
So I guess go ahead and have a knee jerk reaction without seeing whats been happening the past couple years.
The knee jerk reaction is assuming Activision is going to turn Blizzard into a Husk by announcing that they are cost cutting. Blizzard wastes millions of dollars and years on rebooting games like Starcraft 2, Starcraft Ghosts, Diablo 3, Project Titan ect.
I thought she was the CFO brought on just last year to cut costs (from kotaku piece) so why would her departure be a sign of resistance when she was part of the the new plan?
All gaming related stock is down. Check out ATVI, UBI, TTWO. Stock value falling is not exclusive to us. :)
Blizzard was founded in 1991 so there's nothing abnormal about that, when it's so long ago
They seriously need her with some of the inept management they've seemingly had in recent years.
While this is true. Some have dropped much more than others and there is something to be said for sentiment online and right now it's very negative towards certain publishers that have been putting out lackluster products.
Are they making year on year growth profits? I thought battlefield and other games did not reach projected sales.
I never said that Activision was going to turn blizzard into a Husk. But the truth of the matter is the company we knew as blizzard has been changing and not for the better. Their legacy of those games like starcraft are the reason Activision wanted to merge with them. They were making a lot of money off of their lagacy on top of all the WOW subs.
Like though it was not super great, Vanilla diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 sold a lot. On top of millions in sales for each WOW expansion. Overwatch sold over 25 Million within it's first year. Not everything works out like Project titan. But they have other IP's cooking, just not ready to show. It feels like activision is in a way putting pressure on them because they don;t release games like they do with the revenue streams attached like season passes. Blizzard seemed ok with what they were making with MTX'S in hearthstone and Overwatch. but I guess Activision is looking at their revenue compared to blizzards and wanting to tighten up things. Which meant cutting support staff which has happened.
Blizzard now, seems to be changing in terms of internal leadership, not all is bad, as person who took over for IP's has a great background from being creator director or big WOW expansions.
But it does feel like there is more of the Activision higher ups swaying Blizzard leadership in changing how they do financials and what not. Which is not a good sign.
Blizzard never really needed activision, and activision could have survived fine.
Apparently he knew back in 2008 during WotLK, Blizzard would feel the Activision pressure 10-11 years later.
You will never hear any of those CEO announcing numbers which would make the company look bad. They will bundle sales of successful and unsuccessful games into one clump, concealing the failures. Instead, they will announce some of the stats like X million players did this, or reviews are X%.
This is a great way to avoid detailing anything about ME:A:
Andromeda "performed really well", so the plan is to halt fixing/expanding ME:A, shut the studio down and shelve the IP.
We know that Blizzard used to run by a guy who didn't care about profitability. We know Vivendi shielded them. We know Wehn Activision Blizzard bought itself out from Vivendi that Activision got a majority share in Blizzard. We know Activision loves money above all else. That does not mix well with Blizzards philosophy. Shit was going to go down sometime after AB broke free from Vivendi.
Whether that is Activision pressuring/buying out Blizzard staff we can only assume.
Following Blizzard for many years, the only thing that I know that has bubbled up from internal Activision/Blizzard disagreements is the Warcraft movie, thanks to the Sony Pictures hack. We found out that Bobby Kotick hated that Blizzard ended up pursuing the movie and as a result he wanted all future projects to be done internally.
This was before the movie was released so his attitude has no bearing over how well it did.
Blizzard had no say. Blizzard was owned by Vivendi. Vivendi merged with Activision, and created Activision Blizzard as a holding company for it's gaming housed Activision and Blizzard. AB then bought itself out from Vivendi giving Activision a majority stake in Blizzard. Blizzard needed something bigger because Mike Morhaime didn't know how to run a company. Well he did know how to run a gaming studio. But he never cared about making a profit, which does not bode well if you are a publicly traded commodity. Do I think Blizzard should have had some balls and bought themselves out from under Vivendi and gone private? Yup. Do I think Activision is doing the right thing? Depends on how you look at it.
Blizzard as a company is highly inefficient and wasteful. Not good if you are beholden to stockholders. However, you cannot rush art. Just look at the quality of games of that Blizzard has produced vs Activision. There is no comparison. Avctivision tries to put out games and sequels yearly. Most are rehashy, samey, garbage. Blizzard on the other hand Usually puts out polished products that are meant to last more than a 365 day cycle. Activision will ultimately destroy Blizzard if it continues to pressure it to be like them.