Infinity Ward Lawsuit from 2020 Indicates Toxic Activision Blizzard Company Culture is the Rule, Not the Exception

In light of the recent lawsuit by the State of California against Activision Blizzard and our own reporting of the internal response there, a current Activision employee, who chose to remain anonymous, brought this lawsuit to our attention, and provided both the lawsuit and settlement agreement, though this is a matter of public record and was filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court. Due to the seemingly pervasive culture of toxicity being created by this company, we felt it was worth reporting on. 

In February of 2020, Kristina Adelmeyer and her law team from the Rager Law Firm reached a settlement with Call of Duty studio Infinity Ward and its parent company, Activision Blizzard. Adelmeyer sued Infinity Ward and  Activision Blizzard, along with Jason Greenberg and Matthew Bauer, for sex/gender discrimination, wrongful termination, and retaliatory behavior. The case was filed in the California State Superior Court for LA County, case no. 208TCV05581.

Adelmeyer’s story isn’t much different from those that have already been revealed in the State of California’s lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. In 2005, Adelmeyer started working for what was Neversoft at the time, as a motion capture technician. After just one year, she was promoted to motion capture lead. She received glowing performance reviews during her time in this position, earning raises for nine consecutive years. Despite this, she was never offered a promotion, though she had taken on many of the responsibilities of running the studio’s motion capture department. 

In 2014, Neversoft merged with Infinity Ward, making it a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard. After this merger, Adelmeyer was told that she had been capped out for both her title and her salary, though she would continue to receive excellent performance reviews while under the Infinity Ward banner. Four new director positions were created at Infinity Ward in 2017: animation director, lighting director, art director, and VFX director. All four were given to men, and during Adelmeyer’s 14-year tenure, a woman was never in a director position. 

This culture impacted other women on Adelmeyer’s staff as well. In June of 2018 she asked the director of HR Lucy Andonian, along with Greenberg, to offer promotions to two of her female staff members. Both had been motion capture technicians with the company for over a decade, but both requests were denied. In July of that same year, two new motion capture technicians were hired and given the same titles as the women whose promotions had been denied, despite one of these new hires only having a year of experience in the field. When Adelmeyer complained to Andonian that this was unfair to her female employees, the lawsuit states that Andonian rebuffed the concerns. After this complaint, the two female employees did receive promotions, but they weren’t backdated to June of 2018, and Adelmeyer was told there were no promotions available for her. 

After being excluded from meetings that she had normally been a part of, in September of 2018 Greenberg told Adelmeyer that the company was looking to hire a man named Matthew Bauer, but she was not given any information on what his role would be. In October 2018, Bauer joined Infinity Ward as its new motion capture director, and Adelmeyer’s boss. Prior to Bauer’s hiring, this position was not listed or made available to apply for, and Bauer eventually told Adelmeyer that the position had been created for him. 

According to the suit, despite Bauer “taking over” the department, Adelmeyer continued taking care of many of the responsibilities of running Infinity Ward’s motion capture team. On January 18, 2019, she filed a formal written complaint of gender discrimination to both HR and management. In full, the complaint read:

“Because these female leads and other internal employees have not been given an opportunity to move up to director roles,and the director roles are not listed on job sites, I am very concerned that there will never be a woman on the senior leadership team here at IW. Directors, leads, the narrative team, programmers, producers and designers are so predominantly male, the results of these discriminatory practices are clear. Female voices are few. By hiring exclusively male directors and failing to promote women from within, Infinity Ward is blatantly discriminating against women and treating men with favoritism, opportunity, and monetary compensation. This behavior is unfair, immoral, unethical, illegal, and it has to change. We all work very hard for this company and take pride in our work. I personally have shipped 7 Call of Duty titles as motion capture lead or as support to other studios. It is not fair to treat me or any other woman as not worthy of promotion or compensation for this work. Thank you.”

On January 22, 2019, Adelmeyer was told that Activision had hired an outside investigator to look into her complaint. In February or March of that year, the suit alleges that Bauer gave Adelmeyer a poor performance review. According to the lawsuit, he wrote: ““Kristina should work on solving issues as opposed accepting those issues. . . . Kristina should work on being able to adapt to changing decisions on stage. What and how we shoot on stage is a constantly moving target. Getting frustrated with last minute changes or additions on stage is futile. The frustration can actually permeates throughout the mocap and animation team members. . . . Kristina can become abrasive during high pressure moments on stage. It can become difficult to have an open dialogue that is needed in order to head towards resolution of problems.”

This is a stark contrast to the multiple years worth of positive performance evaluations that Adelmeyer received from her past supervisors at Neversoft and Infinity Ward. In May of 2019, Adelmeyer was told that the investigation into her claim had determined that her concerns were unsubstantiated, and the following September, she was terminated because of “too much overlap between he[r] position and the mocap director position.”

According to the lawsuit, Adelmeyer was “devastated.” She filed the lawsuit in February of 2020, seeking compensation for the damages done by her termination, the work environment she dealt with while employed with Infinity Ward, and the lawsuit’s ensuing fees, along with any penalties required by law. Activision Blizzard, Infinity Ward, Jason Greenberg, and Matthew Bauer, the defendants in the suit, reached a settlement with Adelmeyer– which the court retained jurisdiction of enforcement on–in February of 2021. The document for the court to retain jurisdiction to enforce was filed February 1, 2021. 

Between multiple series of layoffs, the California State lawsuit, and this case, it’s becoming more and more clear that the issue of toxicity in Activision Blizzard’s company culture is one that touches everything the company does. On Wednesday, July 28, Activision Blizzard employees are holding a walkout to protest company leadership’s response to the California State lawsuit. According to both Bloomberg and IGN, the company is offering paid time off to employees who participate.