I'm glad you tied this back to ESG ratings because that's the crux of the reason why ABK are selling. They pretty much destroyed their rating due to the harassment allegations and workplace culture being exposed, and that impacts their ability to get investors in the future, or look like a safe company to provide loans to if you're a bank, etc.
Never mind that ESG ratings themselves are pretty controversial (IMO). Fact is they exist and ABK having its issues pop up tanked theirs for the foreseeable future. It's like having a bad credit score; if it's REALLY bad then the only way out is probably filing for bankruptcy.
Selling to MS is basically ABK filing for bankruptcy. As ridiculous as that sounds. Because this has nothing to do with their actual market performance (which is very strong in terms of revenue and profit).
Yet I think you fell on the fallacy that ATVI must be sold because they'd never recover their ESG score. They don't.
All they need to do is get rid of the executives that were in power during the problematic occurrences, namely their CEO and all the ones below him that were directly related to those workplaces.
That shit happened under Kotick so he needs to go and ATVI needs to find a replacement.
That's what it means to be a higher-up in a company. You get a bigger paycheck because your decisions have more impact and you
bear more responsibility.
But what Kotick & his friends are trying to do is running away from this responsibility and trying to get an early retirement as billionaires.
This sale attempt is just where the escalation (of laughably tiny steps) from that board of directors has led them to. All of this is happening for them to gain as much money as they possibly can, no matter how much they hurt their employees and the market itself.
Let's just get a reminder of how Kotick & friends have arrived to this point:
1) Do nothing about it, until they were sued by the state of California
2) Hire Bush's former Homeland Security Advisor and get her to send an internal e-mail dismissing the lawsuit and the occurrences.
She lasts a whole 4 months.
3) Change character names from WoW that were related to the people mentioned in the lawsuit (lol)
4) After they get publicly shamed by their own investment group and they get formally accused of shedding documents, they change the name of some Overwatch characters (lol^2)
5) They start hiring "inclusion and diversity officers" from Disney.
6) Kotick gets subpoena'd.
7) Their Chief Legal Officer and other executives start leaving the company
8) They hire a woman, Jen Oneal, to "co-lead" Blizzard with Ybarra. 3 months later she resigns and turns out they were offering a lower pay than her co-lead. They couldn't even get their diversity hire right.
9) Both Sony and Microsoft publicly shun Activision's doing.
Phil Spencer threatens to stop doing business with Activision (a whole 2 months before announcing the acquisition and saying how great Activision is).
10) >1000 employees sign a petition for the removal of Boby Kotick
11) ATVI announces the creation of a "Workplace Responsibility Committee" (lol)
12) Microsoft announces the acquisition
If Kotick & the board were tangentially honorable to their positions, this wouldn't have gone beyond step 1.
How we got to step 12 (and many other steps in between) is simply the product of years of running away from their responsibility and stepping down to save the company. They're not interested in saving the company. They don't care the least about the games or the IP, least of all their employees.
On ATVI's side, this sale is only happening for the executives to come out richer from the crisis they enabled.
Why do I need to make excuse for them?
Why are you constantly doing it, then?
Exactly. And don’t forget when you’ve finished with all of that you can spend hundreds of hours with friends blowing down buildings in Crackdown 3.
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