Departing Blizzard boss says she was only offered pay parity with male co-studio head after resigning

Blizzard’s outgoing co-studio head Jen Oneal has claimed she was only offered equal pay with her male counterpart Mike Ybarra after giving her resignation.

After former president J. Allen Brack stepped down in August amid sexual harassment and discrimination revelations at Blizzard, Activision veteran Oneal and former Xbox exec Ybarra were appointed as the studio’s new co-leaders.

But earlier this month, Activision Blizzard confirmed Oneal would be leaving the company at the end of the year.

New details about Oneal’s departure were revealed in an explosive Wall Street Journal article published on Tuesday, which claimed that sexual misconduct and the mistreatment of women were company-wide issues well known to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.

In an email sent to a member of Activision’s legal team and viewed by the WSJ, former Vicarious Visions boss Oneal wrote that she had previously been a victim of sexual harassment while at Activision and that she was being paid less than her co-studio head. “I have been tokenized, marginalized, and discriminated against,” she said.

Since Tuesday’s report, IGN has received images of Blizzard messages sent via an internal Slack channel, in which Oneal claimed that she and Ybarra had carried over their previous compensation to their new roles, and that Activision had rejected multiple requests by the pair to reward them equally.

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“When Mike and I were placed in the same co-lead role, we went into the role with our previous compensation, which was not equivalent,” she wrote. “It remained that way for some time well after we made multiple rejected requests to change it to parity.

“While the company informed me before I tendered my resignation that they were working on a new proposal, we were made equivalent offers only after I tendered that resignation.”

It was also confirmed on Tuesday that Treyarch co-studio head Dan Bunting has left the Call of Duty: Black Ops developer following sexual harassment revelations.