To me Kotick seems like a scapegoat/hate figure, he’ll (probably) go because he’s already made his billions and this is a nice off-ramp. As much as some gamers will try to frame this as a win, he’s not losing, lots of people would love to ‘lose’ like Kotick has. Whenever he leaves (if he does), he’ll sail off into the sunset or with his track record of results find some other organization that’d love to have him running the show.

It’s also not like he’s been single-handedly running Activision for 30+ years, there will be tiers of leadership running the show and the structure of the organization. After having paid tens of billions to buy it, MS aren’t going to tear down the well oiled and profitable machine, especially if they have their “hands-off” approach, and it’s not as though MS themselves are saints when it comes to how they handle staff. If anything MS would want to retain leadership for a while through any transition to make sure things keep running well, and if they do get ejected/leave the games industry has a reputation for good leadership elsewhere that MS can head-hunt to replace them.

There’s a lot of people that really want to paint this as some great drama where ‘good’ will win out, I think they need to temper their expectations, a lot.