Blizzard Employees Share Salaries, Revealing Major Pay Disparities

Employees at Blizzard Entertainment began anonymously sharing salaries and pay raises in a spreadsheet Friday, revealing major disparities in compensation both internally and when compared with competitors.

Blizzard conducted an internal survey in 2019 that revealed many Blizzard workers were unsatisfied with their compensation, according to a report by Bloomberg. Blizzard then promised employees it would perform a study to ensure fair pay, implementing the results last month.

Employees were generally unhappy with the changes, Bloomberg reported, leading one to create the spreadsheet and encourage coworkers to contribute to it. Most of the raises shown in the spreadsheet are reportedly below 10%, which employees said fell significantly short of what they expected from Blizzard following the study.

Blizzard has previously come under fire for its compensation of executives, especially CEO Bobby Kotick. Bloomberg reports Kotick received compensation worth $40 million at the end of 2019, while newly installed CFO Dennis Durkin received $15 million in a bonus and accompanying stock awards. Even Activision Blizzard's shareholders have criticized Kotick's compensation as disproportionately large.

Meanwhile, many employees claimed to struggle to make ends meet in internal messages reviewed by Bloomberg. Video game testers and customer-service representatives tend to struggle in particular. One Blizzard employee told Bloomberg they received a raise of less than 50 cents an hour as a result of the study, and make less money now than they did a decade earlier at the company because they work fewer overtime hours.

Bloomberg's report is filled with similar stories. One employee told coworkers they had skipped meals to pay rent; another said they would only eat oatmeal and skipped team lunches because they couldn't afford to buy food at the company cafeteria; a third said they and their partner gave up on having children because they would be unable to afford it.

Blizzard Entertainment enjoys a degree of autonomy from parent company Activision Blizzard, but pushes to cut costs resulted in hundreds of layoffs in 2019 despite the company setting a new record for profit in 2018. Kotick himself called the results the best in the company's history on an earnings call that took place the same day it laid off 800 employees.

"Our goal has always been to ensure we compensate our employees fairly and competitively," an Activision Blizzard spokeswoman told Bloomberg. "We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees.

"Our overall salary investment is consistent with prior years," the spokeswoman added.

UPDATE 8/7/20 12:57 p.m. ET: This article has been corrected to reflect the number of employees that described themselves as unhappy with their compensation in Blizzard's internal survey, and to accurately reflect compensation for testers and customer service representatives.