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Image credit:Activision Blizzard
Image credit:Activision Blizzard
An unnamed former Activision executive is taking the Call of Duty publisher to court in California, accusing the company of age discrimination and violating the state’s whistleblower protection law. Said executive is a 57-year-old who worked at the company from 2014; apparently, he and six other men aged 47 or older were cut from a team of 200, as part of broader Activision Blizzard restructuring efforts last August.
According to the suit, one of the above departing execs recommended the plaintiff as his replacement, but Activision Blizzard promoted a younger non-white employee instead, who became the plaintiff’s manager. The manager in question is said to have criticised the plaintiff’s work in such a way that his merit-based base salary increase for that year was the lowest he received during his tenure at the company.
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The suit also claims that a woman in the plaintiff’s department made false and defamatory remarks about him to human resources and his manager, while complaining about her own merit-based salary increase being lower than expected. The plaintiff filed his own complaint with HR in response, accusing Activision Blizzard of failing to protect him from “discriminatory and defamatory accusations” and calling for “checks and balances” while insisting “that a larger issue might be brewing”. He says this complaint was ignored.
In summary, the plaintiff is asking for damages to make up for loss of earnings, negative impact to career advancement, damage to his reputation, emotional distress and wrongful termination, as well as legal costs.
On paper, much of this has me grasping for the smallest of violins. Whatever Kotick has said or not said, it doesn’t feel like white guys are an especially endangered species at Activision, or indeed anywhere else. According to the company’s most recentDiversity, Equity and Inclusion Look-Back report, 73% of the company’s workforce were male as of 2022, and 61% of their US workforce were white. If there’s a broader campaign against white guys at the House of COD, they’re keeping it fairly quiet.
I feel more sympathetic about the accusations of ageism, which is a problem that affects a variety of industries in complex ways. Ina video last year, one ofFallout’s original designers Timothy Cain called it “the last publicly acceptable discrimination” in game development (if you like that video, Jeremy Peel alsointerviewed Cain about his Fallout and Outer Worlds daysa little while ago). According toa CompTIA survey from 2023, only 17% of tech workers and 14% of software developers and engineers in the USA are over 55. In 2019, the videogame union worker Kate Edwards launcheda “50 over 50” initiativeto address a purported industry-wide bias toward younger hires. I’d be interested to read an overall age breakdown for last year’smass industry layoffs.
