The headline is kind of confusing but it’s a slightly confusing story. So both the Activision Blizzard and the Blizzard Entertainment chief financial officers are gone from the company. In the case of one of the CFOs, Spencer Neumann, he was fired from the company and he was picked up by Netflix, as reported by Marketwatch.
The article notes that Neumann had a previous stint at Disney back before 2017 before being hired on as the CFO for Activision Blizzard.
PlayStation LifeStyle suspects that Neumann may have been fired for looking into becoming the CFO for Netflix. The site also reports that Blizzard Entertainment’s CFO, Amrita Ahuja, has also departed from the company but under far more auspicious circumstances, as she was not fired like her cohort.
Ahuja has taken up a job as a chief financial officer for the payment merchant, Square. And no, this has nothing to do with the Japanese software publisher, Square Enix.
There’s really no real reasons given for why there’s a massive shift in the CFOs at Activision and Blizzard, but MarketWatch points out that the shares of Activision have fallen by 26% over the last 12 months while the shares of Netflix have risen by 31% over the same time period.
There’s no further explanations on what all of this foot-shuffling is about or what it will actually mean for the companies and the products they produce. I tend to doubt these decisions will also have much of a trickle-down effect on gamers, but I get the feeling this is a small side-story to a much larger event coming down the pipeline that’s taking place in the industry. Losing both your chief financial officers within the span of just days is no laughing matter and obviously something is going down. The only thing that comes to mind is a leaking wooden boat with rodents packing up the cheese to jump ship. In the meantime we can just sit back and wait to see how this all unfolds.