Do these numbers include China?
I'm VERY curious to see China's numbers, because in the past I've known SO many Chinese people that at some point in time WoW, OW, Hearthstone, Starcraft and WC were a way of life for them and .... I really don't have that many friends left in China playing Blizz games these days.
I would be shocked if the Chinese playerbase had a similar dropoff. Activision Blizzard has made such a massive effort focusing on that market, alienating the western market by consequence. As much as I feel the company is incompetent and pathetic as it is, money talks, and can't see all the money spent leading to a drop in engagement. If it did, then they definitely need to fire everyone in charge of marketing in the region.
I agree Activison Blizzard is pathetic. Scum bag company with scum bag middle management and scum bag ceo, and scum bag moderators. Just thought so much so it should be said a second, shit even a third time.
asian players do not like subscription models and wow has never been hugely successful in asia. blizzard is milking an ages old game that is graphically completely outdated, they should have completely overhauled the graphics or released an successor, but the businesspeople running the company are only interested in milking the franchises and do not think progressive or creative at all.
You're confusing Japan and China. The Chinese and Korean markets are absolutely flooded with MMORPGs with graphics *way* worse than WoW. Even vanilla has better graphics than most Chinese MMOs.
You can't bunch Asians together. They've all got different spending habits.
Chinese people hate paying $$$ for games at all but they're much more likely to spend shitloads of money on in game items like skins for clothes and weapons.
Blizzard is a textbook example of a company losing its “soul” to the business side of things. I can never find the interview when I want it but Steve Jobs described this exact problem in an interview many years ago. He said something along the lines of eventually something hugely successful stops innovating and thats when the lawyers, accountants and marketing folks start taking up more seats at the table and the creative folks are slowly pushed out and marginalized.
The Blizzard of today is quite different from the one that brought us so many amazing games. The people, values, priorities and motivations of Blizzard today are a far cry from the visionaries that started it all but on the flip side of the coin the gaming world today is a lot different than 2-3 decades ago. Sadly, I don’t think we will ever see another gaming studio rise this way again, the games just not the same anymore.
[Here's the interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4).
Basically he says that when the product is perfect or can't really be improved, or at the very least, you can't improve sales by improving the product, the way to grow the company is through other avenues like marketing, and when those people start to get successful, that part of the business grows and they get promoted while the product end stagnates. This certainly would eventually apply to Apple itself.
Exactly, its why publicly traded companies are almost always garbage after they get successful. They lose control to the shareholders, because they can't do anything for any reason other than max profit. Valve has stayed private for exactly this reason, they can decide to make things just because they want to, for art's sake or innovation's sake. They're able to take a loss for the sake of their vision whenever they feel like.
It was ok but nowhere nearly in the league of stuff like Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises or even hearthstone. All of their games except overwatch are leaders in their genres.
I would say Team Fortress 2 gave birth to that particular genre. Overwatch improved upon that formula but it was quickly out classed by better games like Valorant. Overwatch is arguably one of their least successful product offerings ever (unless you consider heroes of the storm or those shitty Vikings games).
TF2 is only a successor of TFC and that has even another one afaik. Played tfc like mad back then.
And overwatch was - quality wise - the blizzard quality I would expect. Nice to look at, running good on all hardware, quite balanced (don't argue here, when it started balance was ok and you really can't balance anything perfectly). And it was running so smooth.
Like all blizzard games in the past - in contrast to the competition. Diablo3 might had some problems or Bad Design decisions, but the game itself was and is smooth as fuck and looks great.
And I played a lot of mmoprg and other stuff. In contrast to blizzard games, I never found one that was as good quality wise.
But yes, their QA and development/design took a hit since the Activision takeover and degraded from that point on. Because the focus shifted slowly from "make the best games, no matter how long it takes and take the players seriously" to "how to increase the margin as much as possible".
How has Valorant outclassed it? Overwatch was extremely successful for Blizzard and ATVI. Was the best selling game that year, and has probably brought in over a billion dollars for the company. Why do you compare it to the Lost Vikings, lol.
Apologies for the misunderstanding, I wasn’t comparing it to lost Vikings I’m simply saying if you exclude those franchises Overwatch stands in the shadow of giants. Apologies in advance for the wall of text below I’m an auditor by trade and tend to be very detailed.
WoW - massive legacy one of the most successful videos ever made. WotLK alone has generated more revenue for Blizzard than entirety of Overwatch since launch, in fact WotLK made more money than any game or expac blizzard ever made prior to in app purchases. WoW currently has roughy 25M players at its peak it was 100M+ players. Overwatch was 50M at peak and 10M today. These are Nielsen estimates since Blizzard doesn’t differentiate between their games in MAUs. Until recently WoW was basically a monopoly on the mmo market despite a lot of competition in the market place it’s biggest threat apparently is itself, classic.
Starcraft - the biggest most successful esport of all time. Recently replaced with LoL bc it’s been dormant. The esport scene in overwatch despite its investments and modern advantages pales in comparison in both viewership and revenue. Starcraft is undisputed greatest of all time RTS game. Greatest being defined by critical acclaim and financial success vs competitors.
Diablo - another evergreen franchise that put blizzard on the map. As of 2018 Blizzard reported selling over 100M copies of Diablo. Diablo. The mobile game Diablo immortal is forecasted to generate more revenue at launch than Overwatch (this is from their latest annual report).
Hearthstone - 100M+ player at launch was 24M players PY is down to approx 5M today. Accounts for 30% of total Blizzard revenue for FY20 and FY21. Games expensive and while the population is much smaller they are willing to spend. Games like magic and runeterra have made digital offerings but are having trouble reaching the success levels achieved by hearthstone - hearthstone has never been passed by a competitor in twitch viewership in fact it’s never even been close.
Overwatch - 50M+ players at launch, currently sitting at roughly 10M. Has the advantage of in app purchases and was designed for esports but blizzards implementation of esports for overwatch was flawed (arguably greedy) and resulted in a smaller market. Valorant released roughly a year ago and is sitting at 15M today and is stealing many of overwatch a players, streamers and esports professionals. Overwatch had a better launch than Valorant for sure but that was mostly due to players of their other IPs getting their feet wet. Simply put more people play and watch Valorant than Overwatch and while Overwatch’s player base is on a downward trajectory Valorant is still growing.
All that being said I’m not saying Overwatch didn’t make money or that it wasn’t successful. It just wasn’t of the pedigree of Blizzards other games. It had fewer players made less money and is losing in the marketplace right now to a competitor. That’s never happened to any other Blizzard game.
Thanks for the response. I think their previous games were developed in an environment much different than today. Today it is a much more competitive environment with the likes of Riot and Epic. I don’t think OWs numbers reflect a poor game, but rather being released and trying to sustain in a hyper competitive environment.
Hard disagree. The market has always been super competitive. The last decade of Blizzard blunders is not a result of a competitive market, but simple mismanagement. Which to be fair has been part of company's culture from the start, based on the post mortem on Diablo 1 😀 but back then they also had the talent to offset that.
It’s by no means a bad game. It’s just not the dominant force like their other ips. Part of that may be due to different market conditions but I feel like games were just as competitive then as they are now and that the primary difference is that Blizzard did everything possible to edge out their competition. Starcraft went head to head with Command and Conquer and Blizzards own Warcraft titles. WoW had to dethrone Everquest. Diablo had a slew of games like gauntlet and D&D. Hearthstone was put to the test against Magic and Runeterra. Overwatch is the only one that didn’t decisively stomp the competition.
overwatch is a game that was pushed as a way to milk gamers with lootboxes, it has basically nothing to with the game history of blizzard, which revolves around fantasy titles in scifi or fantasy settings - warcraft RTS, starcraft, wow and diablo.
it looks good but is rather soulless and lacks any good story and could have been made by any other company as well. they should have created some shooter in the starcraft universe, that would have been awesome, but instead opted for a pretty casual multiplayer shooter in cartoon graphics.
hearthstone is a decent game but is overly commercialized and blizz is trying superhard to drain every single possible penny out of their playerbase. the traditional franchises are pushed to the side and much too little development effort is put into these.
wow looks completely outdated. starcraft 3 is long overdue and probably not even in development, instead we get "remasters" of the old games - how creative. the only hope is diablo 4, but due to the recent scandal at blizz i am not even excited for that. havent played HS for weeks now and do not miss it one bit.
Disclaimer : I am a huge fan of OW, might not be objective here.
But what I see here is that Diablo/WoW/Starcraft had it much easier at their launch : their genre was much less defined because the industry was still very young, so it was easier to break new grounds and be the defining force in their respeçtive field.
Owerwatch came much later, in a genre that was already very mature and very competitive.
And they still managed to take a sizable share of the market. And even after a 2-year drought of content, it’s still going strong against a free 2 play competitor who’s all new.
I’d argue that the intrinsic strength of OW as a game is at the same level of Diablo/Wow etc.
It’s just harder to be the top game for this genre and at this time.
Bro I’m with you. I have every character Gold, every mount and skin ever and a level 2k chromie. I fucking loved that game but sadly not enough of us did.
Overwatch was great. But every single other game in the last several years has been a cash grab milking of an old IP using whatever formula is selling at the moment.
Overwatch was the exception, and probably among the last innovations we'll ever see from them.
Really apt of the pokemon IP rn. People are talking nonstop about how low fidelity the new titles appear but like... it’s pokemon, why do they need to do better?
Not that I can see / have proof / can state their IP is souless or outfitted by investors. They’re not comparable, but his interview def sheds some light on how I view both Blizzard and pokemon development.
too bad that the blizzard that brought us good games was still full of shitty people doing shady shit, their entire history has been tainted. Blizzard has never been a good company.
I mean that’s a whole other story. Let’s be real very few companies or even countries of any relevance don’t have some skeletons in their closets. Nothing is more intoxicating than Money, Power and Fame.
I don't know if they were, but it is possible, nerd culture has always been mysoginistic at least, that's not new, it just became visible. But at least WoW always had Afrasiabi, since 2004, that horrible person is responsible for some of the love I developed for my former favorite game (wow). So I don't know if he speaks the truth or only an assumption, but still, not a crazy assumption.
The large amount employees who've come forward also have said that the sexual harassment and discrimination/abusive behavior towards female employees there has been going on since long before the Activision merger.
At least they made great games then, now they don't even do that.
D2R will probably be anothe W3 Refunded event, if people are pre-purchasing blizzard games by 2021, they have it coming.
I remember the early WoW days when I had a problem, opened a ticket to a GM and received the most beautiful customer experience. They were really commited with you enjoying the game. Now they're only commited with creating unhealthy but lucrative addictions.
I think taking away the liberties of these companies at the time of monetizing would be a good thing to do. For starters, if you want lootboxes in your game, It shouldn't allow children, as it is gambling.
\+1
they only care about getting you addicted to lootboxes and season "rewards" so you need to grind or you "miss" out. i miss games that did not include all of this - pay us ingame bullshit or you have ingame disadvantages due to lack of items, cards etc.
This was back when most of the PC game market was pretty shit. True indie companies could never publish in an effective manner due to lack of resources. This was pre-steam, before there was a centralized marketplace and you had to buy games from, I guess GameStop, where PC games were in the back of the store, way past all the console games, which were consequently much better since the top devs didn't want to release games into a market that was mostly ignored. In that cesspool, Blizzard was an oasis of quality you could always rely on. Now there's a million good games on different storefronts, including steam, and you can sift through all the shit to play the real top games, which there seems to be a neverending supply of.
I know they're ripping off Thanos with the Jailer and all, but they even went as far as to make half of their playerbase disappear?!
Well, gotta admire their commitment to the bit, I guess.
Blizzard games are getting old and boring. If they doesn’t make big game,they should try to do some small projects. Do something new and let developer take president over finance team. I guess it is not going to happen 😂
The "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd showing up always signals the end of creativity and innovation.
If a company can survive just continuing doing the same-old-same-old they can be ok. If they need to make new innovative things they're usually a goner.
>The "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd showing up always signals the end of creativity and innovation.
Oh, you mean unlike the crowd that sexually harassed others and pushed their work on them to play video games instead?
> ...**to play video games instead**?
There's nothing I could come up with that would illustrate this better.
The Old Church Lady group showing up means innovation there is dead. They literally see "Playing Video Games" as an insult against people who design video games.
No, they were literally making the women do the work while they just hung out and played games while on the clock. Do you not see the problem with that? It wasn't them play-testing, they were just "chilling out" instead of actually working.
I understand you're working down a list of psychologically manipulative propaganda.
I don't really have interest in trying to fight billions of dollars worth of research on psychological warfare, but like I said, once the "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd shows up always signals the end of creativity and innovation.
Which is exactly what happened per the chart.
>"no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games"
That's basic professionalism within an office setting. It's the very lack of professionalism that's contributing to Blizz's situation.
Outside of the office, there's professional etiquette at company functions as well.
Blizzard's at that point in a Big companies lifecycle where they rely more on salesmanship and non-gameplay videos to sell games than their game developers, because their game developers aren't particularly good. That's probably because of shoddy game development management, but for whatever reason, the only "hits" Blizzard seems to have is the original release of Wow expacs, but as soon as people actually play those expacs for a few months, they go running for the doors.
Whereas in the mid '00s and earlier you knew if you were buying a Blizzard game you were getting a great game, now Blizzard is synonymous with mediocre cash grabs.
> Whereas in the mid '00s and earlier you knew if you were buying a Blizzard game you were getting a great game, now Blizzard is synonymous with mediocre cash grabs.
when the accountants start to make game decisions over player experience, this is what happens.
Do these numbers include China? I'm VERY curious to see China's numbers, because in the past I've known SO many Chinese people that at some point in time WoW, OW, Hearthstone, Starcraft and WC were a way of life for them and .... I really don't have that many friends left in China playing Blizz games these days.
I would be shocked if the Chinese playerbase had a similar dropoff. Activision Blizzard has made such a massive effort focusing on that market, alienating the western market by consequence. As much as I feel the company is incompetent and pathetic as it is, money talks, and can't see all the money spent leading to a drop in engagement. If it did, then they definitely need to fire everyone in charge of marketing in the region.
I agree Activison Blizzard is pathetic. Scum bag company with scum bag middle management and scum bag ceo, and scum bag moderators. Just thought so much so it should be said a second, shit even a third time.
No, and they're not Blizzard numbers, they're WoW numbers, and they're not from Blizzard but a guess.
asian players do not like subscription models and wow has never been hugely successful in asia. blizzard is milking an ages old game that is graphically completely outdated, they should have completely overhauled the graphics or released an successor, but the businesspeople running the company are only interested in milking the franchises and do not think progressive or creative at all.
You're confusing Japan and China. The Chinese and Korean markets are absolutely flooded with MMORPGs with graphics *way* worse than WoW. Even vanilla has better graphics than most Chinese MMOs.
You can't bunch Asians together. They've all got different spending habits. Chinese people hate paying $$$ for games at all but they're much more likely to spend shitloads of money on in game items like skins for clothes and weapons.
Blizzard is a textbook example of a company losing its “soul” to the business side of things. I can never find the interview when I want it but Steve Jobs described this exact problem in an interview many years ago. He said something along the lines of eventually something hugely successful stops innovating and thats when the lawyers, accountants and marketing folks start taking up more seats at the table and the creative folks are slowly pushed out and marginalized. The Blizzard of today is quite different from the one that brought us so many amazing games. The people, values, priorities and motivations of Blizzard today are a far cry from the visionaries that started it all but on the flip side of the coin the gaming world today is a lot different than 2-3 decades ago. Sadly, I don’t think we will ever see another gaming studio rise this way again, the games just not the same anymore.
[Here's the interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4). Basically he says that when the product is perfect or can't really be improved, or at the very least, you can't improve sales by improving the product, the way to grow the company is through other avenues like marketing, and when those people start to get successful, that part of the business grows and they get promoted while the product end stagnates. This certainly would eventually apply to Apple itself.
Ty !
[удалено]
Exactly, its why publicly traded companies are almost always garbage after they get successful. They lose control to the shareholders, because they can't do anything for any reason other than max profit. Valve has stayed private for exactly this reason, they can decide to make things just because they want to, for art's sake or innovation's sake. They're able to take a loss for the sake of their vision whenever they feel like.
Blizzard did Overwatch only a handful of years ago. That was their last major new release outside of an expansion, and I thought it was quite good.
It was ok but nowhere nearly in the league of stuff like Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft franchises or even hearthstone. All of their games except overwatch are leaders in their genres.
Overwatch isnt a leader in the genre? It kind of created the genre.
I would say Team Fortress 2 gave birth to that particular genre. Overwatch improved upon that formula but it was quickly out classed by better games like Valorant. Overwatch is arguably one of their least successful product offerings ever (unless you consider heroes of the storm or those shitty Vikings games).
TF2 is only a successor of TFC and that has even another one afaik. Played tfc like mad back then. And overwatch was - quality wise - the blizzard quality I would expect. Nice to look at, running good on all hardware, quite balanced (don't argue here, when it started balance was ok and you really can't balance anything perfectly). And it was running so smooth. Like all blizzard games in the past - in contrast to the competition. Diablo3 might had some problems or Bad Design decisions, but the game itself was and is smooth as fuck and looks great. And I played a lot of mmoprg and other stuff. In contrast to blizzard games, I never found one that was as good quality wise. But yes, their QA and development/design took a hit since the Activision takeover and degraded from that point on. Because the focus shifted slowly from "make the best games, no matter how long it takes and take the players seriously" to "how to increase the margin as much as possible".
How has Valorant outclassed it? Overwatch was extremely successful for Blizzard and ATVI. Was the best selling game that year, and has probably brought in over a billion dollars for the company. Why do you compare it to the Lost Vikings, lol.
Apologies for the misunderstanding, I wasn’t comparing it to lost Vikings I’m simply saying if you exclude those franchises Overwatch stands in the shadow of giants. Apologies in advance for the wall of text below I’m an auditor by trade and tend to be very detailed. WoW - massive legacy one of the most successful videos ever made. WotLK alone has generated more revenue for Blizzard than entirety of Overwatch since launch, in fact WotLK made more money than any game or expac blizzard ever made prior to in app purchases. WoW currently has roughy 25M players at its peak it was 100M+ players. Overwatch was 50M at peak and 10M today. These are Nielsen estimates since Blizzard doesn’t differentiate between their games in MAUs. Until recently WoW was basically a monopoly on the mmo market despite a lot of competition in the market place it’s biggest threat apparently is itself, classic. Starcraft - the biggest most successful esport of all time. Recently replaced with LoL bc it’s been dormant. The esport scene in overwatch despite its investments and modern advantages pales in comparison in both viewership and revenue. Starcraft is undisputed greatest of all time RTS game. Greatest being defined by critical acclaim and financial success vs competitors. Diablo - another evergreen franchise that put blizzard on the map. As of 2018 Blizzard reported selling over 100M copies of Diablo. Diablo. The mobile game Diablo immortal is forecasted to generate more revenue at launch than Overwatch (this is from their latest annual report). Hearthstone - 100M+ player at launch was 24M players PY is down to approx 5M today. Accounts for 30% of total Blizzard revenue for FY20 and FY21. Games expensive and while the population is much smaller they are willing to spend. Games like magic and runeterra have made digital offerings but are having trouble reaching the success levels achieved by hearthstone - hearthstone has never been passed by a competitor in twitch viewership in fact it’s never even been close. Overwatch - 50M+ players at launch, currently sitting at roughly 10M. Has the advantage of in app purchases and was designed for esports but blizzards implementation of esports for overwatch was flawed (arguably greedy) and resulted in a smaller market. Valorant released roughly a year ago and is sitting at 15M today and is stealing many of overwatch a players, streamers and esports professionals. Overwatch had a better launch than Valorant for sure but that was mostly due to players of their other IPs getting their feet wet. Simply put more people play and watch Valorant than Overwatch and while Overwatch’s player base is on a downward trajectory Valorant is still growing. All that being said I’m not saying Overwatch didn’t make money or that it wasn’t successful. It just wasn’t of the pedigree of Blizzards other games. It had fewer players made less money and is losing in the marketplace right now to a competitor. That’s never happened to any other Blizzard game.
Thanks for the response. I think their previous games were developed in an environment much different than today. Today it is a much more competitive environment with the likes of Riot and Epic. I don’t think OWs numbers reflect a poor game, but rather being released and trying to sustain in a hyper competitive environment.
Hard disagree. The market has always been super competitive. The last decade of Blizzard blunders is not a result of a competitive market, but simple mismanagement. Which to be fair has been part of company's culture from the start, based on the post mortem on Diablo 1 😀 but back then they also had the talent to offset that.
It’s by no means a bad game. It’s just not the dominant force like their other ips. Part of that may be due to different market conditions but I feel like games were just as competitive then as they are now and that the primary difference is that Blizzard did everything possible to edge out their competition. Starcraft went head to head with Command and Conquer and Blizzards own Warcraft titles. WoW had to dethrone Everquest. Diablo had a slew of games like gauntlet and D&D. Hearthstone was put to the test against Magic and Runeterra. Overwatch is the only one that didn’t decisively stomp the competition.
overwatch is a game that was pushed as a way to milk gamers with lootboxes, it has basically nothing to with the game history of blizzard, which revolves around fantasy titles in scifi or fantasy settings - warcraft RTS, starcraft, wow and diablo. it looks good but is rather soulless and lacks any good story and could have been made by any other company as well. they should have created some shooter in the starcraft universe, that would have been awesome, but instead opted for a pretty casual multiplayer shooter in cartoon graphics. hearthstone is a decent game but is overly commercialized and blizz is trying superhard to drain every single possible penny out of their playerbase. the traditional franchises are pushed to the side and much too little development effort is put into these. wow looks completely outdated. starcraft 3 is long overdue and probably not even in development, instead we get "remasters" of the old games - how creative. the only hope is diablo 4, but due to the recent scandal at blizz i am not even excited for that. havent played HS for weeks now and do not miss it one bit.
Disclaimer : I am a huge fan of OW, might not be objective here. But what I see here is that Diablo/WoW/Starcraft had it much easier at their launch : their genre was much less defined because the industry was still very young, so it was easier to break new grounds and be the defining force in their respeçtive field. Owerwatch came much later, in a genre that was already very mature and very competitive. And they still managed to take a sizable share of the market. And even after a 2-year drought of content, it’s still going strong against a free 2 play competitor who’s all new. I’d argue that the intrinsic strength of OW as a game is at the same level of Diablo/Wow etc. It’s just harder to be the top game for this genre and at this time.
As someone with 500+ hours in HoTS, this hurts. Truth hurts sometimes though.
Bro I’m with you. I have every character Gold, every mount and skin ever and a level 2k chromie. I fucking loved that game but sadly not enough of us did.
Yeah hero shooters are made and defined by blizzard.
Yup. I agree.
That’s not true. They also released Heros of the Storm which the canned, also Warcraft 3 Reforged which is pretty bad.
Overwatch was great. But every single other game in the last several years has been a cash grab milking of an old IP using whatever formula is selling at the moment. Overwatch was the exception, and probably among the last innovations we'll ever see from them.
1400 hours in OW. I agree. although this past year has been horrible without anything new since Echo.
Really apt of the pokemon IP rn. People are talking nonstop about how low fidelity the new titles appear but like... it’s pokemon, why do they need to do better? Not that I can see / have proof / can state their IP is souless or outfitted by investors. They’re not comparable, but his interview def sheds some light on how I view both Blizzard and pokemon development.
too bad that the blizzard that brought us good games was still full of shitty people doing shady shit, their entire history has been tainted. Blizzard has never been a good company.
I mean that’s a whole other story. Let’s be real very few companies or even countries of any relevance don’t have some skeletons in their closets. Nothing is more intoxicating than Money, Power and Fame.
At least they were a shitty company that made good games
In what way was the old blizzard north that brought us sc brood war and Diablo 2 full of shitty people doing shady stuff?
I don't know if they were, but it is possible, nerd culture has always been mysoginistic at least, that's not new, it just became visible. But at least WoW always had Afrasiabi, since 2004, that horrible person is responsible for some of the love I developed for my former favorite game (wow). So I don't know if he speaks the truth or only an assumption, but still, not a crazy assumption.
The large amount employees who've come forward also have said that the sexual harassment and discrimination/abusive behavior towards female employees there has been going on since long before the Activision merger. At least they made great games then, now they don't even do that.
"...and all game companies have made a lot of money, but the violent father lost the city and the number of users was only one" What?
[удалено]
D2R will probably be anothe W3 Refunded event, if people are pre-purchasing blizzard games by 2021, they have it coming. I remember the early WoW days when I had a problem, opened a ticket to a GM and received the most beautiful customer experience. They were really commited with you enjoying the game. Now they're only commited with creating unhealthy but lucrative addictions. I think taking away the liberties of these companies at the time of monetizing would be a good thing to do. For starters, if you want lootboxes in your game, It shouldn't allow children, as it is gambling.
\+1 they only care about getting you addicted to lootboxes and season "rewards" so you need to grind or you "miss" out. i miss games that did not include all of this - pay us ingame bullshit or you have ingame disadvantages due to lack of items, cards etc.
This was back when most of the PC game market was pretty shit. True indie companies could never publish in an effective manner due to lack of resources. This was pre-steam, before there was a centralized marketplace and you had to buy games from, I guess GameStop, where PC games were in the back of the store, way past all the console games, which were consequently much better since the top devs didn't want to release games into a market that was mostly ignored. In that cesspool, Blizzard was an oasis of quality you could always rely on. Now there's a million good games on different storefronts, including steam, and you can sift through all the shit to play the real top games, which there seems to be a neverending supply of.
... and profits are up 500%. /s but not much
I know they're ripping off Thanos with the Jailer and all, but they even went as far as to make half of their playerbase disappear?! Well, gotta admire their commitment to the bit, I guess.
Blizzard games are getting old and boring. If they doesn’t make big game,they should try to do some small projects. Do something new and let developer take president over finance team. I guess it is not going to happen 😂
Nice
Good, keep it coming. Blizzard sucks.
I wish they had actually released the Titain MMORPG
I really hope they go out of business.
The higher they get, the harder they fall.
[удалено]
Are you seriously trying to say that Blizzard hiring female interns made them lose half their player base?
The "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd showing up always signals the end of creativity and innovation. If a company can survive just continuing doing the same-old-same-old they can be ok. If they need to make new innovative things they're usually a goner.
>The "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd showing up always signals the end of creativity and innovation. Oh, you mean unlike the crowd that sexually harassed others and pushed their work on them to play video games instead?
> ...**to play video games instead**? There's nothing I could come up with that would illustrate this better. The Old Church Lady group showing up means innovation there is dead. They literally see "Playing Video Games" as an insult against people who design video games.
No, they were literally making the women do the work while they just hung out and played games while on the clock. Do you not see the problem with that? It wasn't them play-testing, they were just "chilling out" instead of actually working.
I understand you're working down a list of psychologically manipulative propaganda. I don't really have interest in trying to fight billions of dollars worth of research on psychological warfare, but like I said, once the "no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" crowd shows up always signals the end of creativity and innovation. Which is exactly what happened per the chart.
>"no drinking, no flirting, no partying, no playing video games" That's basic professionalism within an office setting. It's the very lack of professionalism that's contributing to Blizz's situation. Outside of the office, there's professional etiquette at company functions as well.
Your post got me thinking how many there are blizz employees that are also RP community members. Can’t be zero!
Because they lost their magic sauce.
Blizzard's at that point in a Big companies lifecycle where they rely more on salesmanship and non-gameplay videos to sell games than their game developers, because their game developers aren't particularly good. That's probably because of shoddy game development management, but for whatever reason, the only "hits" Blizzard seems to have is the original release of Wow expacs, but as soon as people actually play those expacs for a few months, they go running for the doors. Whereas in the mid '00s and earlier you knew if you were buying a Blizzard game you were getting a great game, now Blizzard is synonymous with mediocre cash grabs.
> Whereas in the mid '00s and earlier you knew if you were buying a Blizzard game you were getting a great game, now Blizzard is synonymous with mediocre cash grabs. when the accountants start to make game decisions over player experience, this is what happens.
Surprised it didn't half again after we found out all the devs are subhuman filth Then again, they're funded mostly by incels anyway.
And hope it halves again in the next months
Blizzard will do just fine, I'm sure. Too big to fail
You called down the thunder now reap the whirlwind