Activision Blizzard Taps Google Exec as New President and COO

Daniel Alegre will oversee the Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment and King Digital Entertainment businesses.

Activision Blizzard has named longtime Google executive Daniel Alegre as its new president and COO, effective April 7. He will oversee the Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment and King Digital Entertainment businesses. Alegre will report directly to CEO Bobby Kotick.

"I was deeply impressed by Daniel’s entrepreneurial drive and broad and deep experience in driving global growth across a variety of businesses in a rapidly changing industry," Kotick said Wednesday in a statement. "Our greatest challenges are prioritizing the many opportunities we have and recruiting and retaining the talent needed to execute with focus and excellence. Daniel is a proven leader with a long track record of success doing both.”

Alegre, who is originally from Mexico, most recently served as president of global retail and shopping at Google, where he led initiatives to "embed ecommerce across all Google products." He has been with the tech giant for more than 16 years. Prior to his role as president of global retail and shopping, Alegre was president of Google's global and strategic partnerships function, which fostered relationships with the company's global partners. He also ran Google's Asia Pacific and Japan business and opened the company's first operations in China, Southeast Asia and India, as well as expanded its footprint in Japan, Australia and Korea. Prior to that, Alegre opened and ran the Latin America business for the company as vice president.

“Activision Blizzard is at an exciting point in its history,” said Alegre of his new role. “In addition to a deep library of owned and internationally beloved franchises, the company has tremendous talent that has built a culture committed to inspiration and creativity. More importantly, through thoughtful and creative games, it connects and engages over 400 million people around the world through epic entertainment. I look forward to helping players around the world connect through quality and immersive games.”

Activision Blizzard's current president and COO, Coddy Johnson, will continue on as a special advisor to Kotick.

Activision Blizzard is one of the world's largest game publishers, behind such AAA franchises as Call of Duty, Overwatch and World of Warcraft and mobile titles like Candy Crush.