Kotick is an amoral asshole. He is also a moron. He is a moron because he believes management skills and an arrogant attitude are all one needs to build a successful game company. Don't think Kotick is any different from that French vulture who has been picking on Interplay's carcass for nearly a decade now. He may have attained more during his career as a professional douchebag (more wealth, that is - the only thing his kind covet), but that is only because he was more successful in applying his innate douchebaggery to the practical business of running a game corporation. Nonetheless, they are of the same stock, Kotick and Caen. Homo douchebagicus, as empirically discovered and classified by psychologists long before the first video game console was ever built.
It is greedy hyenas like Kotick that caused the video game crash of 1983; ambitious fools, clueless about video games and gaming culture, but armed with business degrees and narcissist personality disorders, who flocked to the industry en masse with the intention of building a successful business model by treating their employees like dirt and flooding the market with overpriced shovelware. The industry crashed and burned then, and it will crash and burn again. Kotick may have turned Activision into a powerhouse in the short term, by relentlessly exploiting its assets much like a lamprey sucks away the lifeblood of some hapless fish, but the business model he so prides himself on building (to near-universal praise and adulation from proverbially inane gaming media) is simply not sustainable. Psychopaths may be good at giving keynote speeches, but as we have seen over and over again, they aren't very good at administration. It's a pity that a lot of good game development studios will need to be snuffed out of existence before that lesson is hammered in yet again.
