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Activision Blizzard CEO gives out personal number to employees amid pandemic

Bobby Kotick also confirms all games are on track

Activision Blizzard CEO gives out personal number to employees amid pandemic

Activision Blizzard CEO Robert "Bobby" Kotick has said that its games pipeline hasn't been impacted by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking to CNBC, the chief executive said that its staff have moved to remote working and that the development of its forthcoming projects are still on track. Activision Blizzard has reportedly been supporting staff to allow them to still work as well as they could if they were in an office environment.

Furthermore, Kotick has sent an email from his personal address to all Activision Blizzard staff with his phone number attached so that employees can reach out with concerns, with "a few hundred" workers contacting him so far. A limited number of Activision Blizzard staff have tested positive for coronavirus to date.

"On track"

"Most of the things that we have in production and development are on track for now," said Kotick. 

"I think we’ll have to really reassess that in a month and in three months. We’ve been doing things like encouraging our employees to upgrade their home broadband to the highest bandwidth service and we’re paying for that.

"We had equipment available for take home so everyone in the software development, art or animation functions, we made equipment available so they had the newest, most secure devices, but I think it’s still too early to know what the consequences on development will be for the next year or so."

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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.