[Megathread] Activision-Blizzard Employee Moves

[MoanaLisa]

I made up a fake linked in file before. I'm looking for for things like wall street journal, news, and such. I went to blizzards site but it says the CFO is the guy they are firing.

https://www.activisionblizzard.com/s...ate-management

One more time:

Activision Blizzard has a CEO who is being fired.

Blizzard Entertainment, a part of Activision Blizzard, has their own CFO who is not being fired (that we know of).

I've given you a link and quote. Live long and prosper. Happy New Year.

[The Anax]

She's mentioned in the Kotaku article that everyone was talking about on Blizzard cutting costs.
https://kotaku.com/with-activisions-...ing-1831263741

Really. It's a different person. I've seen her entire LinkedIn profile. She's real. The person you're writing about in the thread is someone different.

Thanks, I read the kotaku article and it does call her CFO. I can finally go to bed! That was going to keep me awake indefinitely. Thank you incredibly much.

[MoanaLisa]

Thanks, I read the kotaku article and it does call her CFO. I can finally go to bed! That was going to keep me awake indefinitely. Thank you incredibly much.

Sure. Getting stuff like this right is important and people have difficulties understanding the corporate differences between Activision Blizzard and Blizzard Entertainment all the time.

[Toho]

WoW is doing fine if anything its the shenanigans of call of duty and destiny.
Blizzard is still activisions cash cow.

[MoanaLisa]

Isn't this the CFO people said was bringing up problems? This might be good news.

No, it isn't. Totally different CFO. See posts previous to this one.

[babyback]

I'm always constantly amazed by the fascination this board has with C-level people, enterprise organization, business unit arrangements, stock-market deals, how software development works and what developers do or should be doing.

Most of the time it seems these concepts get completely mixed up and it seems strange conspiracy theories and ideas (like a CFO faking their LinkedIn page) gain traction over simple common sense and cursory wikipedia reading.

This thread is a very good example of the "daily WTF" that happens here and very little of it has anything to do with World of Warcraft.

This. Many who post on those forums are very young and have no clue how a corporation operates let alone never even had a job.

An example is a thread that was around yesterday were someone asked about what Blizzard should discuss in their development meetings in January. Majority of the answers were about Blizzard firing and finances. Most sbsolutely clueless about the difference between a board meeting and a development meeting.

[Gadzooks]

Here's a link

https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/financ...231800509.html


The company did not provide a specific reason for the announcement about Chief Financial Officer Spencer Neumann but said it is "unrelated to the company's financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures."

Shares of Activision Blizzard have fallen 26 percent this year.

Activision Blizzard ATVI shares moved down 1 percent in after-hours trading on Monday after the company said that it has informed its chief financial officer, Spencer Neumann, that it plans to let him go. For now he has been placed on a paid leave of absence.

The news comes after a rough year for the gaming company, whose shares have fallen 26 percent in 2018. Last month the company's stock fell 10 percent after it reported a decline in its number of users .


The plan to terminate Neumann, who joined in 2017 after a stint at Disney DIS , is "unrelated to the Company's financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures," according to a regulatory filing . Neumann will have a chance to argue that there isn't reason to terminate his employment. But effective Tuesday, the company's chief corporate officer, Dennis Durkin, will take on CFO responsibilities.

Neumann, 48, received $9.47 million in total compensation in Activision Blizzard's most recent fiscal year, a filing says. He sits on the board of the nonprofit Make-A-Wish Foundation of America.

I'm on my small phone screen, so I have no idea how this looks, anyway, I thought I would share this news, since I did not see anyone else doing it.

20 years at Disney, 18 months at ATVI, now onto Netflix. Nothing strange there - sounds like ATVI lured him over with a big salary, Netflix offered him something better. For all anyone knows, he may have taken the ATVI gig to pay the bills while still casting around for a job that's interesting - he's going to Netflix, which is current, hip, and cutting edge, instead of managing the finances of a holding company, which is probably all paperwork. Or he wanted to get back into entertainment. Or he doesn't like Kotick and his crew. Or he's a big rat, jumping off a sinking ship. Pick your version.

Not really exciting news, but I see Heelvs is milking it for clicks already.

[apples]

continued proof that blizzards new model of charging people every time they swing their sword and rewarding players who do nothing with the best items in the game and punishing the average player will just push people to vanilla and force them to realize that the old model of wow was terrible and the new model is vastly superior so that they subscribe for 12 months so they can get a dirigible mount that cant fly until 25 months after an expansion releases so they can then fly around a zone and do world quests to make sure they definitely have enough ap to get not picked up by raids because raids are too busy picking people who have never raided before or picking people who have a 35m raider.io score because blizz thinks that raiding is only fun if you spend 15 minutes a day doing it every day by raiding lfr in order to get useless epics and waste 6 hours of your life with people who have never played a video game before

classic blizz

[Low Hanging Fruit]

You can read a lot into this but this is honestly not that unusual. Stocks are down. Sure that has a lot to do with the markets but investors need to see something being done anyway and a CFO lifting is a good example of that. Any CFO at a company like Activision knows this to be the case. So he got let go and was hired immedately at another high tier corporation. He knew it was coming and other companies were waiting to pick him up. Once you make it into his world firings just happen. They usually sign contracts that pay them well on the way in and well on the way out if its early. I wouldnt doubt if he is happy and made out with a ton of money ontop of that instant hire that was assured before he left.

What does it mean for us though? Well it tells us stock price does matter. It also likely means a bad investor earnings call is coming up. But remember what bad is to these people. Bad is not hitting a certain level of growth in profits not a loss. I have no doubt Activison will still be well into the green with profits. It just will not have hit the growth in them they wanted. So it was LIKELY a two punch knock out for this guy to please investors. One they lost money on the market and don't want them to continue a sell off and two earnings didn't meet a likely high expectation which could also trigger a sell off.

So it is just a company asking for another chance to investors. Not gamers. I would suspect things to get worese for gamers as this new guy does whatever it takes to get more cash at a lower cost.

[LordAshar]

20 years at Disney, 18 months at ATVI, now onto Netflix. Nothing strange there - sounds like ATVI lured him over with a big salary, Netflix offered him something better. For all anyone knows, he may have taken the ATVI gig to pay the bills while still casting around for a job that's interesting - he's going to Netflix, which is current, hip, and cutting edge, instead of managing the finances of a holding company, which is probably all paperwork. Or he wanted to get back into entertainment. Or he doesn't like Kotick and his crew. Or he's a big rat, jumping off a sinking ship. Pick your version.

Not really exciting news, but I see Heelvs is milking it for clicks already.

18 months is actually a really short time to be a CFO - just took a quick look at some surveys of average tenure of CFOs in the USA and it is around 5 years. You are absoultely correct - there could be a number of reasons for the move. In saying that 18 months is really short. I used to sit on some boards for large public companies in a different company and we would have been quite shocked to see a senior exec leave in such a short period. HeelsvsBabyface is hardly the only one jumping on this - it's across the major finance news services. Given the performance of the company in the past year, it is not a positive sign for the start of 2019.

[Quixef]

I was SOOOO hoping this was them firing Ion. T.T

Why would they do that? He is doing a spectacular job.

[justandulas]

Classic case of creating a fall guy for their problems.

- - - Updated - - -

Why would they do that? He is doing a spectacular job.

Ion, is that you?!

[Lochton]

Fair game to him, Blizzard is losing its old identity.

Man had nothing to do with Blizzard's identity. He was poached and accepted with a chance of more money, ATVI found out and fired him.

[Sansnom]

continued proof that blizzards new model of charging people every time they swing their sword and rewarding players who do nothing with the best items in the game and punishing the average player will just push people to vanilla and force them to realize that the old model of wow was terrible and the new model is vastly superior so that they subscribe for 12 months so they can get a dirigible mount that cant fly until 25 months after an expansion releases so they can then fly around a zone and do world quests to make sure they definitely have enough ap to get not picked up by raids because raids are too busy picking people who have never raided before or picking people who have a 35m raider.io score because blizz thinks that raiding is only fun if you spend 15 minutes a day doing it every day by raiding lfr in order to get useless epics and waste 6 hours of your life with people who have never played a video game before

classic blizz

Sorry. I ran out of breath before I could finish reading that one long long sentence. Seeing the first few words are nonsense. I doubt the rest is any better.

[The Iron Fist]

Amrita Ahuja is the CFO who was transplanted directly from Activision to Blizzard to "cut costs" as dictated by daddy Kotick himself.

[Gadzooks]

continued proof that blizzards new model of charging people every time they swing their sword and rewarding players who do nothing with the best items in the game and punishing the average player will just push people to vanilla and force them to realize that the old model of wow was terrible and the new model is vastly superior so that they subscribe for 12 months so they can get a dirigible mount that cant fly until 25 months after an expansion releases so they can then fly around a zone and do world quests to make sure they definitely have enough ap to get not picked up by raids because raids are too busy picking people who have never raided before or picking people who have a 35m raider.io score because blizz thinks that raiding is only fun if you spend 15 minutes a day doing it every day by raiding lfr in order to get useless epics and waste 6 hours of your life with people who have never played a video game before

classic blizz

This has very little to do with Blizzard. This is the CFO of ATVI - he was the head accountant for a holding company, he had nothing to do with game development.

[fiestatastic]

We can only hope that shes next to go, or that the new CFO who takes this guys spot comes down on her hard for killing the customer base.

CFO is something you should look up and find out what it is before you write something as stupid as ^ again on the internet.

[Nzx]

I'm always constantly amazed by the fascination this board has with C-level people, enterprise organization, business unit arrangements, stock-market deals, how software development works and what developers do or should be doing.

Most of the time it seems these concepts get completely mixed up and it seems strange conspiracy theories and ideas (like a CFO faking their LinkedIn page) gain traction over simple common sense and cursory wikipedia reading.

This thread is a very good example of the "daily WTF" that happens here and very little of it has anything to do with World of Warcraft.

A clarification like this should be tacked on to the top of every single forum thread on this website, imo. There are so many totally uneducated people here, whether children or adults with the mental ages of children, who think someone with "Chief" or "Executive" in their title gives a single flying fuck about WoW buffs or nerfs.

To be honest, I'd probably take it one step further and start swinging cease and desists at the YouTubers who doom-and-gloom every single time this kind of news comes out as well. A lot of those people narrate on things they don't understand and in my opinion could be seen as misleading potential investors in ATVI and driving away their customers based on false information/conjecture. It's disappointing in the same way that me starting a channel in order to claim the local McDonalds manager had left because they were serving radioactive cheeseburgers would be disappointing - these people are actively profiting from inventing lies about a company and causing that company to lose profits. Really, really strange imo. If it were 50 years ago and people were running print columns constantly claiming objectively untrue things about factories etc it wouldn't fly, so I think the only reason it gets by now is because the law hasn't kept up with technology.

Anyway, that was a rant - people here are stupid, and because they're majority <15 years old (literally, or just mentally) they want something negative to latch onto.

[Gorsameth]

Informed he will be fired and forced to take a payed leave of absence is just PR speak for saying he was involved in some sort of scandal and dumped.
That's not what a firing for lack of performance looks like.

[Exerionx]

I'm always constantly amazed by the fascination this board has with C-level people, enterprise organization, business unit arrangements, stock-market deals, how software development works and what developers do or should be doing.

Most of the time it seems these concepts get completely mixed up and it seems strange conspiracy theories and ideas (like a CFO faking their LinkedIn page) gain traction over simple common sense and cursory wikipedia reading.

This thread is a very good example of the "daily WTF" that happens here and very little of it has anything to do with World of Warcraft.

What's there to be surprised about? This is a gaming news website after all. It's wiser to expect most of the user base to not really have a genuine grasp of how it all works.