I dont disagree. But right now everyone of these companies are trying to take the moral high ground. Jimbo wants his team to know that this stuff is not tolerated. Ok fine, but what are you gonna do about it? You are still enabling kotick and Activision. They are still in business with them.
This "enabling" train of thought is dumb and fundamentally logically inconsistent.
Everything and everyone can be enabling an individual's bad behaviour as long as you choose to look at it through a particular (slanted) lens.
I mean, by this same silly logic, you and I
SlimySnake
are enabling these shitty Activision execs by merely talking about it on a web forum and not taking action.
You can go as far as you like with this, but in the end, it's fundamentally and practically meaningless.
At some point, the arseholes perpetrating the bad behaviour need to take responsibility for their own shitty actions.
Their employer should hold them accountable, but they shouldn't take responsibility for the bad behaviour unless they are failing to hold the perpetrating individuals accountable.
In a similar way, MS and Sony shouldn't take any responsibility for the bad behaviour, nor even for enabling it because they absolutely have no recourse to hold the individuals accountable because said individuals aren't employees of MS or Sony. If they want to hold the employers accountable they need to be absolutely sure they employers are failing to hold the individuals accountable, but even then I'd argue that's not the role of MS or Sony, that's on government and regulators.
I dont know. This feels different compared to people asking Netflix to deplatform Chappelle for some trans jokes. A girl committed suicide after being raped. Another settled. Dozens were fired over sexual harrassment allegations. So it's a real thing that hurt people. Not just their feelings.
Not wanting to minimise the real damage that this behaviour causes to real people, the fact is it doesn't matter to question of whether its 3rd party companies' job to hold the employers of harassers accountable.
It's the job of government regulators and law enforcement to protect employees from these types of behaviours.
We don't want companies, especially large powerful companies within industries acting as virtue vigilantes. We don't tolerate it for individuals and so we shouldn't either for corporations either.
Maybe they shouldnt even talk about it since the govt is already investigating Kotick and if hes guilty, he should get his comeuppance.
Making public statements to decry the apparent poor response of a company towards serious allegations serves a public good. It sets a cultural bar across an industry that this type of behaviour isn't tolerated and so employees within companies who have certain predilections towards such behaviours but haven't yet acted on them, would think twice before going ahead to do so.