PlayStation Boss Criticises Activision's Response to Sexual Harassment Scandal
In a letter to employees, Jim Ryan, the head of PlayStation, criticized the way Activision Blizzard responded to the sexual harassment scandal.
- Jim Ryan, who oversees the PlayStation brand at Sony, sent an email to his employees;
- In it, he criticizes Activision Blizzard's response to incidents of bullying and sexual harassment within the company;
- However, Ryan did not reveal if Sony intends to take any action on the matter.
Yesterday, we wrote about the next chapter in the scandal regarding mobbing and sexual harassment cases at Activision Blizzard. Now the head of Sony's PlayStation division, Jim Ryan, has spoken out, criticising the US publisher's response to the crisis in an email sent to his staff. Bloomberg managed to get a hold of the content of this message.
As you may remember, according to the Wall Street Journal, CEO Bobby Kotick was said to have silenced cases of sexual harassment in his company. In the email Ryan informs that following the revelations, Sony contacted Activision Blizzard to ask how the publisher intends to address the issues and what plans it has to prevent similar situations in the future. The response received was reportedly not satisfactory.
We don't know if Sony will take any other measures on the matter - Jim Ryan did not address that issue. He only assured that it is a priority for the company to make both developers and gamers feel respected and safe.
The situation is interesting because Sony has a marketing cooperation agreement with Activision Blizzard, which concerns the Call of Duty series. As a result, PlayStation consoles receive exclusive content in subsequent installments of the series - in the case of CoD: Vanguard, these are additional skins, and in previous installments these were often also game modes.
After the publication of Wall Street Journal's article, some Activision employees organized a protest, demanding that Bobby Kotick leave the company. A similar demand was made by the investment group SOC, but it controls only 0.6% of the company's stock, so it was no surprise when the board of directors responded by saying that the current CEO can still count on its full confidence.
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