Less than a month after it was reported that Activision had told Blizzard to cut costs, it is paying its new chief financial officer a signing bonus worth $15 million (distributed as $3.75 million in cash and $11.3 million in restricted stock tied to performance targets, according to Bloomberg). That’s on top of a $900,000 salary.
The lucky recipient is Dennis Durkin, who previously served as Activision-Blizzard’s CFO for five years until May 2017. Durkin replaces Spencer Neumann, who is taking the same job at Netflix – his contract at Activision barred him from speaking to other potential employers, so he was fired as soon as the news became public.
Maybe, at the highest echelons of the corporate world, these kinds of inducements are actually necessary to attract and retain top talent. But they do stick in the craw a little when, according to reports from Kotaku and Eurogamer, Activision told the Blizzard side of its business to cut costs, release more games, and was even paying employees to leave in a voluntary severance scheme.