James Corden apparently hosted some kind of "all hands" meeting at Activision Blizzard, I sorta thought he had been launched into space for being an oddly patrician weirdo who gets banned from restaurants. The questions that emerged from it felt a little soft, perhaps even spherical.

There was a part near the end of the Polygon article that really stood out to us. It was the part where after the sale of the company to Microsoft goes through, which seemed like a foregone conclusion to me and it turns out that it basically was after a few errant spasms of governance, that Bobby Kotick bags almost three hundred million dollars. The way such numbers are typically brought into the human sphere is by dividing them by some conceivable thing. Rock Paper Shotgun, in its ancient days, used to describe the download of software in terms of Peggles - how many times Peggle could fit into the overall size. In this case, I'm fine not humanizing it. I'm fine leaving it sprawling and functionally nameless.

It really seems to me like his lax management exposed the company to incredible scrutiny, where monstrous, Boy's Club wickedness harmed people and then destroyed morale - placing acquisition of the organization within striking distance. It's all in the contract of course, but it's hard to imagine rewarding someone for that. And it's also difficult not to place such a number in the context of the economic destruction being experienced broadly, globally. Especially since they're still running off Infinity Ward's profound merging of a perfect multiplayer shooter with RPG progression, birthing a kind of cybernetic drug. That's got nothing to do with him. Sometimes I think I don't understand anything at all.

(CW)TB out.