Shareholders call on Activision Blizzard CEO to resign after employee walkout

The embattled boss of video game company Activision Blizzard is facing a shareholder rebellion one day after employees staged a walkout to protest the company's response to sexual misconduct allegations at the firm. "In contrast to past company statements, CEO Bobby Kotick was aware of many incidents of sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination at Activision Blizzard, but failed either to ensure that the executives and managers responsible were terminated or to recognize and address the systematic nature of the company's hostile workplace culture," a group of shareholders, led by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) Investment Group and holding a total of 4.8m shares, wrote in a letter shared on Wednesday with the Washington Post. In addition to demanding Kotick's resignation, the shareholders called for the board's two longest-serving directors, Brian Kelly and Robert Morgado, to retire by the end of the year. The letter follows a report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday that claimed Kotick had been aware of some of the sexual misconduct behavior at the company for years. That report came on the same day that 110 employees walked out of the company's Blizzard Entertainment headquarters in Irvine, California, after Kotick had described the Journal report as misleading in a video message distributed to employees.