It’s a new year, but we’ve still got some last vestiges of last year’s corporate ongoings to close out the events of 2018. Isn’t that nice? We sure hope so, since it was a bit of a shock when Activision Blizzard’s CFO, Spencer Neumann, was let go by the company. Neumann was basically immediately snapped up by Netflix to start working there in early 2019, which means that speculation includes his being surreptitiously poached from Activision Blizzard.
This is relevant to the fortunes of no small number of online games we cover here for several reasons, not the least of which being reports from employees about Blizzard becoming much more focused on cost, something that would overlap with the duties of the now-ousted chief financial officer, though Blizzard has said the move is “unrelated to the company’s financial reporting or disclosure controls and procedures.” It’s been a rough year for Activision Blizzard on both the critical side and the financial side as it lost over a quarter of its value in 2018, so this is something to watch closely in the following days for any further aftershocks.
