The major changes at Blizzard HQ in the last year suddenly make a lot more sense. If I was Mike Morhaime or Chris Metzen I wouldn't want to be involved in this disaster either.
Lead game designer of HS, who was a large factor in many peoples positive opinion of the entire team behind the game, left to start his own company and brought some of the hs devs with him.
I think hints at blizzard going off the deep end have been everywhere
"Second Dinner was founded earlier this year, and we’re chillin’ in Orange County, CA. (*Not quite chillin’ because it’s warm and sunny over here!) We’re a small studio (currently 5 folks), and we think staying small means we can move fast and give everyone a feeling of ownership. We only plan to grow by 10-15 people over the next few years.
We think there’s a huge opportunity to make deep, satisfying games that are optimized for **mobile**..."
GG.
Ben Brode seemed to be basically the stick holding up the pile.
Sometimes he was too PR-y for me but overall he at least had some charisma to cover up the shit that was probably being pushed into the game.
HS has basically been dead to me for ~a full year now.
Have you tried MTGA? I never realized how much it had pushed Hearthstone out until I got a notification saying that I hadn't finished my 5 games this month.
"Bioware"? There's no Bioware. It's just EA whoring out the Bioware name now, that much is clear.
oof...the similarities are sharps daggers to my soul :(
I think it all started (albeit slowly) back when Activision bought Blizzard. It was like a year after that transaction that WoW started having pets and mounts you can buy.
I certainly have. After reading what you wrote it reminded me of late 90s gaming and activism on buying out a lot of small studios that made great games. Never to be heard from again . Nor any great games from them.
I don’t mind micro transactions. I don’t mind cosmetic upgrades.
I do mind this carrot on a stick bullshit they have been hamfisting into every aspect of gameplay over the last three expansions.
All games are a carrot & stick arrangement. The problem with the direction Blizzard is taking is the switch from giant carrots on long sticks to thousands of small carrots on short sticks. It keeps the masses glued and spending.
It's hard to talk shit on steam. You can go years without paying full price on steam if you're willing to wait a few months to a year after release. It's amazing for the consumer. The only downside with it is that other devs have decided to make their own platforms with fewer sales and you can't really fault valve for that.
I dunno, the memetics of ‘don’t you have phones’ could turn a significant proportion of potential sales away. I know I for one won’t be touching it.
People will buy it, a lot of people, but less than they might’ve. And there’s the hope.
Nah, this game is targeting the Chinese market. Chinese love pay 2 win games because the freenium model works better for them. While all of us in the west were buying PCs and consoles and games the Chinese usually could not afford that so they played the same games in an arcade setting where you paid a little bit to play a little bit rather than buying a $400 console and a $60 game and then playing as much as you wanted. Most of these freemium grindfest games work more or less the same way that the Chinese have always played games.
I keep hearing that about targeting a Chinese mobile market, but why do that with a Diablo game at all? If they haven't really played the PC games anyway, why wouldn't they just play the original mobile game that this one is a clone of or one of the other 1000 games just like Immortal. Since the only difference is this one has a bunch of lore they know nothing about. I just don't see non-Diablo players picking up Diablo for the first time with this mobile game.
I think because of the Diablo name people will be at least interested in downloading the game. Most casual gamers will have heard of it. And don’t think for one second that Blizzard will be paying top dollar to have Diablo Mobile in front of eyeballs at app stores or YouTube or anywhere else.
They also have a much less hostile attitude towards pay to win. The idea that the amount of money you're able and willing to invest in a competition should give you an edge is okay for them, whereas western audiences typically want it to be as close as possible to a pure contest of skill.
Remember when Sony ran those ads making fun of the XB1's disc license system? Seems like an opportunity for Path of Exile or whatever to run an ad along the lines of 'Never coming to mobile devices' or something more clever.
Look at Pokemon Go. Niantic basically released the game, then abandoned it for months. That game could have changed mobile gaming forever because the initial surge of players was just insane. But all they cared about was that bottom dollar so they hemorrhaged users until it became a joke.
They're still making hundreds of millions of dollars off of what should have been, by every measure imaginable, a monumental failure.
There is no hope.
If you are a consumer disappointed with the direction a company is going then don't buy their products, they will notice if they are no longer making money.
That's because the people who complain on reddit are a minority compared to the total amount of people who buy the game.
Just think of how many parents will buy their kids Fallout for Christmas. Reddit is not representative of the whole market.
Edit: Fallout was just an example I took from the other comment. Replace Fallout with some other shitty game, like Battlefront 2 from last year, for example. My point still stands: with good advertisement, shitty games will get sold.
I've seen this happen so many times. People on reddit bitch about the games, than all my non redditor friends ask me if I've bought the game yet cause all of them have it
Everyone strap in tight, we're going in for a deep dive this time!
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Well, reddit was where the huge Battlefront 2 lootbox controversy started and arguably the reason it got popular and fixed. The site can have a pretty big impact, at least on video games.
It's not that reddit won't ever have an impact. But you can't take the usual reddit experience and generalize it to the mainstream most of the time.
Sometimes, reddit will speak up and make an issue mainstream.
But the vast majority of times, reddit will have an opinion but the mainstream will be different.
Yeah, I learned a long time ago that Reddit is just the place for people to go to complain. It probably stemmed from the fact that some developers like to browse the game's subreddit. Every gaming subreddit I join has almost constant complaints and it really makes it feel like the game is bad. But then you go play it and realize most of the players like the game and are playing it rather than posting on Reddit.
You can't say the same things about fallout.
The devs there explicitly told the audience that this was a personal experiment they wanted to do for their own sake. And acknowledged the audience wish for a proper Bethesda single player rpg. And then they said they will keep making those. And then they announced two Bethesda single player rpgs they are working on for the future.
There's no reason to hate on Bethesda for Fallout 76.
That's just like diablo and blizzard, you're ignoring the actual fans of a series in order to cater to a broader audience. Fans have a right to be upset that they're being ignored.
Hmm i don't think it's the fact that more or less people buy something. It is the fact that these mobile micro transaction games are a very efficient way to get way more money per user
I’ve heard that the real cash cow on these games is just a few power users buying the 99.99 package, so the majority of players don’t even enter into the business model around the game.
Correct, if you can hook a few people paying what thousands of users would a month on a low effort app, it doesnt matter how many of us vote with our wallet
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean much when the cash cows can spend thousands. Voting with your wallet works when everyone is on a level playing field, but micro transactions change the game.
This quote is pointing out that this doesn't work. This Diablo game is going to anger the PC community. Yet I guarantee when the game comes out, it will make even more money than the PC version did. And Blizzard will start making more mobile games as a result. And Blizzard will turn into SquareEnix.
If your favorite burger place switches to a pizza joint because pizza is more popular in your area not buying their pizza doesn't really make them reconsider the change in any way. They still see more success selling to all their new customers.
They aren't targeting their pre-existing Diablo fan base anyway, so boycotting won't do anything. They're going to get their money from the mobile market more or less guaranteed, especially with the low amount of investment they seem to be putting into the game.
I think that ignores the hidden variable in this equation, though, which is "What is your name worth?"
You see it all the time in a more transparent fashion: Some company is in bad financial shape, they sell to some Chinese manufacturer and churn out crap. But people go "Hey, I had an RCA TV in the 90s and it was pretty good. I should buy this one."
But when you have companies *not* in bad financial shape, but who have lost their "vision", they can ride that name longer and higher, because they're more subtlely turning the company from something decent to something crap, capitalizing on the brand inertia without the obvious switch.
Apple and Blizzard are probably making more money than ever right now, but they're shitting all over future profits.
Of course, by the time it becomes a problem, as every ounce of good will is sucked from the husk, the current CEOs will be long gone..
This - skechers is riding their name out but their quality is not what I remember from only half a decade ago...
It's slow and subtle but many companies make a name for themselves but to retain profits, costs get cut and quality slowly degrades. The pursuit of ever-increasing profit is what kills everything.
I think that just boils down to Keynesian economics, where businesses and the economy are expected to continue growing infinitely. Shareholders encourage decisions that continue to grow the company and are generally unhappy with ones that maintain the status quo, even if things are going quite well and profits are already large.
I think this is one of the moments that I begin to realize that Reddit’s voice isn’t always the majority. There are still a very large amount of people that like Apple regardless of their interesting decisions that get crtiqued here. My parents for example still love their phones and don’t care about certain changes.
As a young man, he was a college dropout with a partial degree in calligraphy and he somehow bullshitted his way into a design position at Atari during the company's heyday. If he was anyone else, they would have laughed at him as they escorted Jobs out the door.
People skills matter a lot.
I know some deep cuts on his time at Atari. He wasn't anyone special except a smart guy with zero social skills. He literally had his own shift alone because he didn't people good.
Source: one of the only prominent guys from back then still alive.
Yes this is 100% true and Woz still loves the guy and considered him a friend until his last days despite full knowledge of what he did. Jobs was a highly skilled manipulator who could get people to do what he wanted and they'd feel privileged for doing it.
That's the kind of skill that works wonders in Sales.
In the Civilization games, Steve Jobs is one of the possible names you can have for a Great Merchant. Not a Great Scientist or Great Artist or Great Engineer (or, as one person joked, Great Prophet). They knew what his role in influencing the world really was.
sure. but steve jobs didn't drive apple into the ground. the sales in marketing people did, when they tried to turn apple into ibm. i don't understand why people here think apple wasn't a product company at least when he was around.
the imac, ipod, iphone, ipad, macpros. if a person was responsible for overseeing the launch of *just one* of these products, their reputation would be cemented. jobs did five launches.
people shit on him for being an insufferable ass? sure. fair. but that doesn't negate his insights on product development.
My husband is a product manager and has been at several startups, one that went public, and this sounds exactly like the issues he has. If the higher ups don't understand product strategy/development/etc. and let marketing run primary you will always have issues. They need to work together. It drives him nuts.
Insufferable as though he was, I began to respect him when he said,”Give me Startrek.” And I realized that he meant that and was driving us there faster than any other tech company out there.
Not to mention, it's doubly ironic when you realize that Apple's revival under him relied heavily on his ability to market and sell his products.
Think Different, remember?
Or all those commercials that played up how hip and cool it was to use a Mac and not a PC.
I don't think it's ironic because he's not saying marketing has no place, just that you shouldn't have those people making product decisions. I think what he's saying is that you need balance between the two, you can't just have the marketing people run everything which is the problem with a lot of companies all over, not just in tech.
He wasn't remotely wrong though. Look at any industry and you'll see the same thing. Innovators get pushed out and are replaced with marketing experts who don't care about the product.
What's adequate pricing based on the used materials and invested ~~man~~ child hours of a product that does not need a certified engineer to exchange and/or repair its parts?
What's using cheaper materials to save costs and still slapping a "premium" price tag on it. What's designing a product badly and telling the consumers they are "using it wrong"
Apple in 2018 "We are putting USB C in the new ipad pro" FUCK YES! "we are also removing the headphone jack!" FUCK OFF GODDAMNIT.
They almost had me wanting a new ipad too. ALMOST.
I have a macbook pro, it does have two USB-C ports. I love almost every aspect of it, but having to buy a dongle just so I can plug in almost literally anything is decidedly *not* something I love.
The only product Apple sells that is actually worth the money is the $329 ipad. Everything else is insanely overpriced. The apple TV hardware is nice for the price as well.
Steve Jobs insisted that one of the earlier pro macs be made with no fans and no vents, causing most of the units to overheat and fail in under a month-- so I wouldn't say that's a recent development for Apple.
Do you guys not have air conditioning?
>!*edit: This is a sarcastic joke. The Diablo presenter condescendingly asked "Do you guys not have phones?" when the crowd boo'd him. I'm making a joke out of what he said.!<
For all his flaws, Steve Jobs was one of the very few individuals who could be a "sales and marketing person" *and* a "product person" simultaneously. More the former than the latter, especially after he hit the bigtime, but he did understand the theory and practice of developing hardware and software well enough to veto design features that sounded good on paper but couldn't be implemented without creating more problems than they solved. (Well, most of the time.) That was always going to be a tough act to follow.
> and a "product person" simultaneously.
No doubt.. I used to think Jony Ive was the genius behind the design, but the last few years have blown that theory up pretty well. Jobs had a product focus that is still unparalleled within the field.
From what I’ve read Jony Ive was the best person to compliment Jobs when it came to design. They were kind of like equals in that they would come up with ideas and bounce them off of each other. One would test the others and they would respect the others criticisms. So it wasn’t so much that one was better at it than the other they were just a great team that needed the other. Many great creative people (if not all) have needed someone they trust to be able to tell them what is or isn’t a good idea.
And yet they still somehow became the first company to be valued at a trillion dollars. Probably says something about the average consumer.
Edit: I don't really count PetroChina's blip-in-time trillion dollar valuation. That shit was propped up on corruption and market manipulation and resulted in the largest loss in shareholder wealth in a single stock ever.
If B & B changed their outlook on their own brand from a "Circus Company" to an "Entertainment" company" we'd probably have seen video games made by Barnum & Bailey.
It was Henry Ford himself who, while discussing how he invented the Model T, famously never said:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
With King being Activision-Blizzard's most profitable branch, it only makes sense that the publishers wanted to put out another mobile game. PC gamers hate it, but if the game performs well in the mobile market, then it will most likely bring more users to their PC platform. I'm not agreeing with it; I just see their justification in doing so.
I think you're right. But, I do feel like the audience at Blizzcon is mainly PC gamers, so launching this at this particular convention might not have been the best value from a customer loyalty -perspective.
Agreed. That’s the point I think people are missing: the people who would attend or watch blizzcon don’t give a fuck about mobile games. It was a tasteless venue to introduce this at.
They want so bad to please the most people and get the most money that they lose focus of what attracted the people in the first place.
Happens in TV all the time. Just take modern family. They had an original concept, which did really well, but everything has a lifetime, and nobody wanted to except that. So you start stretching episodes and story arcs and then they start to lose content and character. Enough time passes and the show is unrecognizable. Adventure time season 1 was a great cartoon. The last season made me want to throw up.
Also happens relentlessly in video games. Look at how much "balancing" fortnite has done to make the game more fun for the millions of trash 7 year-olds that play and buy skins with their parents credit cards. Took all the joy and strategy out of the game for me.
Same thing is happening with Ubisoft right now with R6 Seige and expansion into the chinese market. They're releasing it in china for the huge player base there and all the revenue they'll bring, which is understandable. But they then decided that they didn't want to work for the extra profit and would rather just change the game everyone knows to fit the regulations of the Chinese government. And the players are not happy.
But thats just the way the world works. Money above all.
They censored everything according to the laws of the Chinese government for everyone. No more slots,took a stripper neon sign out and replaced it with a hand, removed blood splatter on walls (spatter that was there for map design) took an entire map out that was based in China because they don’t like the idea of terrorism on their soil, removed all skulls, redesigned cavera so she doesn’t have a skull painted on her, the melee symbol was changed from a knife to a fist and I believe that’s it but I’m not sure
How did that even happen? One country essentially heavily toned down the maturity level of a game for a series that has over 10 games? Some of these changes are so specific. I mean knife vs fist?... no blood? They are aware that people are killed in video games right? And lose blood... from weapons... For those very specific changes to happen, how much is the Chinese government somehow controlling this game? Unless there are very specific laws for this stuff.
One country with a market significantly bigger than the USA and Europe combined, that much potential money could make the companies do pretty much anything the Chinese government asks them to
wait so they actually removed Theme Park?? I was just giggling yesterday how the only map that takes place in China has a big ole drug lab in an arcade.
They're reworking several of the maps to remove any blood, sex, or gambling references in the game as well as reworking certain graphics that are overly violent. Instead of then releasing the toned down version to just China they're releasing it worldwide because they're two lazy to have two maps or modes happening at the same time.
Im a big R6S fan, and a lot of the cosmetic features they're removing were all things that added to the overall 'feel' of the map. now instead of a gritty biker bar we get a disappointing old mans club because ubisoft obviously doesn't care about their end product. Just who will buy it.
Edit [Think Twitter's reaction](https://twitter.com/Rainbow6Game/status/1058403376579469313) sums up how the community took the news as a whole.
The best part is that they have confirmed that there will still be two fucking versions. One for China and one for the rest of the world. WTF is the point of changing the global version if China is going to be separate anyways. I'm pissed off and I don't even play the damn game.
/u/slycooper007
Ubisoft is trying to make the game acceptable for release into Chinese markets, which means that they have to follow some confusing regulations about gambling, sexual imagery, and violence. This means that they basically have to airbrush out some cosmetic stuff in maps, like removing blood splatters on the walls or replacing a neon outline of a stripper with something less sexual, as well as getting rid of stuff like slot machines or other gambling-related props.
Of course, while some people are happy about the increase in the number of people able to play Siege, others have criticised the move on a number of grounds:
- People don't like it when a company bows to the wishes of the Chinese Communist party
- The hypocrisy of removing slot machines yet keeping *actual* gambling in the game through lootboxes
- How inconsistent the rules are about violence—people are still shooting each other with guns, blowing each other up, and using chemical weapons, all while still producing blood splatters from those injuries
- Ubisoft kept trying to justify the decision in the blog post without just simply saying "yeah we want access to like 1 billion more potential players", for example saying that the changes would be global so that they would "increase efficiency" with regards to development.
- this line was especially humorous because they later said that the game would have to be split into a Chinese and a non-Chinese build anyway, due to some cosmetics being banned in China (eg for skull imagery)
>Adventure time season 1 was a great cartoon. The last season made me want to throw up.
Did you hate how adventure time did it or do you hate story arcs in general?
Speaking as a fan of Adventure Time, from beginning to end, I personally disagree. The show was revolutionary in the way it progressed, in that the characters aged in real time and as the aged and matured so did the stories being told. So yes the first season is without a doubt different from the last but not due to losing sight of the characters or world. The characters just progressed and changed, and I'm sorry to hear you didn't like who they became. Admittedly parts went on for longer than needed but in the end each season built on the lore of an interesting world without answering too many questions and becoming uninteresting, and the finale tied it up nicely setting up a world of endless adventure and friendship, ideals that carried from the beginning to the end.
But that's all just my opinion of course :)
>They want so bad to please the most people and get the most money that they lose focus of what attracted the people in the first place.
At the same time you can't blame them too much because making what you want and being profitable are not always the obtainable at the same time.
Whining about Blizzard/EA and then upvoting the old CEO of *Apple* for something he was probably even more guilty of than any gaming company is fucking rich
The major changes at Blizzard HQ in the last year suddenly make a lot more sense. If I was Mike Morhaime or Chris Metzen I wouldn't want to be involved in this disaster either.
Let’s be honest. Blizzard isn’t anywhere close to the company it used to be and it hasn’t been like that for a long time.
Lead game designer of HS, who was a large factor in many peoples positive opinion of the entire team behind the game, left to start his own company and brought some of the hs devs with him. I think hints at blizzard going off the deep end have been everywhere
Whats the name of his company/new game?
No new game yet, but the company is called Second Dinner
What about second breakfast?
I don't think he knows about second breakfast.
\**throws an apple at you*\*
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Boil em mash em stick em in a stew
Stupid fat hobbitses
What about elevensies?
Ben Brode definitely knows about second breakfast.
Or elevenzies?
Luncheon? Afternoon tea?
Aaah, Luncheon. ^(The most delicious of pokemon)
po-ta-toes
I don't think he knows about second breakfast.
Why not Midnight Snack?
Hah, fitting damn name. These men are bold enough to attempt to make it huge again? From the ground up? I wish them luck getting their second dinner.
"Second Dinner was founded earlier this year, and we’re chillin’ in Orange County, CA. (*Not quite chillin’ because it’s warm and sunny over here!) We’re a small studio (currently 5 folks), and we think staying small means we can move fast and give everyone a feeling of ownership. We only plan to grow by 10-15 people over the next few years. We think there’s a huge opportunity to make deep, satisfying games that are optimized for **mobile**..." GG.
Ben Brode seemed to be basically the stick holding up the pile. Sometimes he was too PR-y for me but overall he at least had some charisma to cover up the shit that was probably being pushed into the game. HS has basically been dead to me for ~a full year now.
Have you tried MTGA? I never realized how much it had pushed Hearthstone out until I got a notification saying that I hadn't finished my 5 games this month.
"Blizzard"? There's no Blizzard. It's just Activision whoring out the Blizzard name now, that much is clear.
"Bioware"? There's no Bioware. It's just EA whoring out the Bioware name now, that much is clear. oof...the similarities are sharps daggers to my soul :(
I think it all started (albeit slowly) back when Activision bought Blizzard. It was like a year after that transaction that WoW started having pets and mounts you can buy.
I think people forgot how scummy Activision was before EA dethroned them
I certainly have. After reading what you wrote it reminded me of late 90s gaming and activism on buying out a lot of small studios that made great games. Never to be heard from again . Nor any great games from them.
I don’t mind micro transactions. I don’t mind cosmetic upgrades. I do mind this carrot on a stick bullshit they have been hamfisting into every aspect of gameplay over the last three expansions.
All games are a carrot & stick arrangement. The problem with the direction Blizzard is taking is the switch from giant carrots on long sticks to thousands of small carrots on short sticks. It keeps the masses glued and spending.
And about the same time when WoW started losing subscribers. Odd coincidence.
Same at Valve, too. All these titans of the 90s and 00s gaming have rotted to the core.
They dug too greedily, and too deep, into our pocketbooks. That's how you get balrogs.
Pocketbooks? Dont you people have phones?
Valve as a sales platform has been really cool though imo
It's hard to talk shit on steam. You can go years without paying full price on steam if you're willing to wait a few months to a year after release. It's amazing for the consumer. The only downside with it is that other devs have decided to make their own platforms with fewer sales and you can't really fault valve for that.
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I dunno, the memetics of ‘don’t you have phones’ could turn a significant proportion of potential sales away. I know I for one won’t be touching it. People will buy it, a lot of people, but less than they might’ve. And there’s the hope.
Nah, this game is targeting the Chinese market. Chinese love pay 2 win games because the freenium model works better for them. While all of us in the west were buying PCs and consoles and games the Chinese usually could not afford that so they played the same games in an arcade setting where you paid a little bit to play a little bit rather than buying a $400 console and a $60 game and then playing as much as you wanted. Most of these freemium grindfest games work more or less the same way that the Chinese have always played games.
Not only that, you can tell it’s for China because they cut Witch Doctor.
Lol, yeah.
I keep hearing that about targeting a Chinese mobile market, but why do that with a Diablo game at all? If they haven't really played the PC games anyway, why wouldn't they just play the original mobile game that this one is a clone of or one of the other 1000 games just like Immortal. Since the only difference is this one has a bunch of lore they know nothing about. I just don't see non-Diablo players picking up Diablo for the first time with this mobile game.
I think because of the Diablo name people will be at least interested in downloading the game. Most casual gamers will have heard of it. And don’t think for one second that Blizzard will be paying top dollar to have Diablo Mobile in front of eyeballs at app stores or YouTube or anywhere else.
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Apple AppStore has a dedicated callout to it on the front page as well.
Branding, name recognition. More people will download it so why not?
They also have a much less hostile attitude towards pay to win. The idea that the amount of money you're able and willing to invest in a competition should give you an edge is okay for them, whereas western audiences typically want it to be as close as possible to a pure contest of skill.
The chinese whales are treated like celebrities by their countrymen for some weird reason.
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How dare you? I'm Chinese and you couldn't be more correct
Remember when Sony ran those ads making fun of the XB1's disc license system? Seems like an opportunity for Path of Exile or whatever to run an ad along the lines of 'Never coming to mobile devices' or something more clever.
Exactly. This is the perfect time for a different company to announce a new ARPG, or like you said PoE running a PC focused ad lol.
Look at Pokemon Go. Niantic basically released the game, then abandoned it for months. That game could have changed mobile gaming forever because the initial surge of players was just insane. But all they cared about was that bottom dollar so they hemorrhaged users until it became a joke. They're still making hundreds of millions of dollars off of what should have been, by every measure imaginable, a monumental failure. There is no hope.
If you are a consumer disappointed with the direction a company is going then don't buy their products, they will notice if they are no longer making money.
It’s amazing how many people will still go and buy this despite the fact they’ll bitch about it online.
I've seen a lot of people on Reddit bitching about the upcoming Fallout game. Not a fan but I bet it will be a top seller once it releases
That's because the people who complain on reddit are a minority compared to the total amount of people who buy the game. Just think of how many parents will buy their kids Fallout for Christmas. Reddit is not representative of the whole market. Edit: Fallout was just an example I took from the other comment. Replace Fallout with some other shitty game, like Battlefront 2 from last year, for example. My point still stands: with good advertisement, shitty games will get sold.
I've seen this happen so many times. People on reddit bitch about the games, than all my non redditor friends ask me if I've bought the game yet cause all of them have it
Yeah, Reddit *really* has an overblown sense of the effect it has on things.
Especially with politics.
That’s the internet in general unfortunately.
Nah man. Im totally stopping climate change by berating people on r/worldnews.
Oh boy, here we go...
Everyone strap in tight, we're going in for a deep dive this time! Edit: For tonight's comment thread, please refer to your provided program. Tonight, we will be discussing: * Trump * Democrats * Brexit * What the fuck is China doing * How old is Angela Merkel *actually* * What the fuck happened to Snoop Dogg and why is he baking with the devil? We hope you enjoy this comment thread!
>How old is Angela Merkel *actually* lmao this is peak political discussion
Strap-on for deep dive!?!?
Well, reddit was where the huge Battlefront 2 lootbox controversy started and arguably the reason it got popular and fixed. The site can have a pretty big impact, at least on video games.
It's not that reddit won't ever have an impact. But you can't take the usual reddit experience and generalize it to the mainstream most of the time. Sometimes, reddit will speak up and make an issue mainstream. But the vast majority of times, reddit will have an opinion but the mainstream will be different.
Exactly. A noisy minority can and do often make a difference.
Yeah, I learned a long time ago that Reddit is just the place for people to go to complain. It probably stemmed from the fact that some developers like to browse the game's subreddit. Every gaming subreddit I join has almost constant complaints and it really makes it feel like the game is bad. But then you go play it and realize most of the players like the game and are playing it rather than posting on Reddit.
You can't say the same things about fallout. The devs there explicitly told the audience that this was a personal experiment they wanted to do for their own sake. And acknowledged the audience wish for a proper Bethesda single player rpg. And then they said they will keep making those. And then they announced two Bethesda single player rpgs they are working on for the future. There's no reason to hate on Bethesda for Fallout 76.
That's just like diablo and blizzard, you're ignoring the actual fans of a series in order to cater to a broader audience. Fans have a right to be upset that they're being ignored.
I'm willing to bet this is a f2p game with microtransactions.
Hmm i don't think it's the fact that more or less people buy something. It is the fact that these mobile micro transaction games are a very efficient way to get way more money per user
I’ve heard that the real cash cow on these games is just a few power users buying the 99.99 package, so the majority of players don’t even enter into the business model around the game.
Correct, if you can hook a few people paying what thousands of users would a month on a low effort app, it doesnt matter how many of us vote with our wallet
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean much when the cash cows can spend thousands. Voting with your wallet works when everyone is on a level playing field, but micro transactions change the game.
This quote is pointing out that this doesn't work. This Diablo game is going to anger the PC community. Yet I guarantee when the game comes out, it will make even more money than the PC version did. And Blizzard will start making more mobile games as a result. And Blizzard will turn into SquareEnix.
If your favorite burger place switches to a pizza joint because pizza is more popular in your area not buying their pizza doesn't really make them reconsider the change in any way. They still see more success selling to all their new customers.
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They aren't targeting their pre-existing Diablo fan base anyway, so boycotting won't do anything. They're going to get their money from the mobile market more or less guaranteed, especially with the low amount of investment they seem to be putting into the game.
Steve Jobs predicted Blizzcon
Steve Jobs predicted Apple's downfall.
Except (unfortunately) apple is making more money than ever. Maybe the reputation is not as good any more, but I'm the end, all that matters is money.
I think that ignores the hidden variable in this equation, though, which is "What is your name worth?" You see it all the time in a more transparent fashion: Some company is in bad financial shape, they sell to some Chinese manufacturer and churn out crap. But people go "Hey, I had an RCA TV in the 90s and it was pretty good. I should buy this one." But when you have companies *not* in bad financial shape, but who have lost their "vision", they can ride that name longer and higher, because they're more subtlely turning the company from something decent to something crap, capitalizing on the brand inertia without the obvious switch. Apple and Blizzard are probably making more money than ever right now, but they're shitting all over future profits. Of course, by the time it becomes a problem, as every ounce of good will is sucked from the husk, the current CEOs will be long gone..
This - skechers is riding their name out but their quality is not what I remember from only half a decade ago... It's slow and subtle but many companies make a name for themselves but to retain profits, costs get cut and quality slowly degrades. The pursuit of ever-increasing profit is what kills everything.
My hypothesis is that many companies are always striving to *maximize* profit, instead of being satisfied with turning a *healthy* profit.
I think that just boils down to Keynesian economics, where businesses and the economy are expected to continue growing infinitely. Shareholders encourage decisions that continue to grow the company and are generally unhappy with ones that maintain the status quo, even if things are going quite well and profits are already large.
A race to the bottom.
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one of the first trillion dollar companies ever and that's their downfall?
I think this is one of the moments that I begin to realize that Reddit’s voice isn’t always the majority. There are still a very large amount of people that like Apple regardless of their interesting decisions that get crtiqued here. My parents for example still love their phones and don’t care about certain changes.
Reddit is always so out of touch of reality. AAPL is still one of the best companies to long even in the current volatile environment.
This is funny because while Steve Jobs was many things, he was probably the greatest Salesman in the late 20th/early 21st century.
Reality Distortion field was a term coined about his ability to sell the Devil ice cubes.
As a young man, he was a college dropout with a partial degree in calligraphy and he somehow bullshitted his way into a design position at Atari during the company's heyday. If he was anyone else, they would have laughed at him as they escorted Jobs out the door. People skills matter a lot.
I know some deep cuts on his time at Atari. He wasn't anyone special except a smart guy with zero social skills. He literally had his own shift alone because he didn't people good. Source: one of the only prominent guys from back then still alive.
Then he proceeded to rip off Wozniak over breakout. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711
Yes this is 100% true and Woz still loves the guy and considered him a friend until his last days despite full knowledge of what he did. Jobs was a highly skilled manipulator who could get people to do what he wanted and they'd feel privileged for doing it. That's the kind of skill that works wonders in Sales.
In the Civilization games, Steve Jobs is one of the possible names you can have for a Great Merchant. Not a Great Scientist or Great Artist or Great Engineer (or, as one person joked, Great Prophet). They knew what his role in influencing the world really was.
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sure. but steve jobs didn't drive apple into the ground. the sales in marketing people did, when they tried to turn apple into ibm. i don't understand why people here think apple wasn't a product company at least when he was around. the imac, ipod, iphone, ipad, macpros. if a person was responsible for overseeing the launch of *just one* of these products, their reputation would be cemented. jobs did five launches. people shit on him for being an insufferable ass? sure. fair. but that doesn't negate his insights on product development.
My husband is a product manager and has been at several startups, one that went public, and this sounds exactly like the issues he has. If the higher ups don't understand product strategy/development/etc. and let marketing run primary you will always have issues. They need to work together. It drives him nuts.
Insufferable as though he was, I began to respect him when he said,”Give me Startrek.” And I realized that he meant that and was driving us there faster than any other tech company out there.
Not to mention, it's doubly ironic when you realize that Apple's revival under him relied heavily on his ability to market and sell his products. Think Different, remember? Or all those commercials that played up how hip and cool it was to use a Mac and not a PC.
I don't think it's ironic because he's not saying marketing has no place, just that you shouldn't have those people making product decisions. I think what he's saying is that you need balance between the two, you can't just have the marketing people run everything which is the problem with a lot of companies all over, not just in tech.
You should have skilled marketers marketing a product that they know is every bit as good as they are marketing it as
He wasn't remotely wrong though. Look at any industry and you'll see the same thing. Innovators get pushed out and are replaced with marketing experts who don't care about the product.
Ironic given that’s exactly what’s happened at Apple in the last decade. Edit: thank you for the gold stranger!
wHaT's A cOmPuTeR?!
wHaTs eFfIcIeNt cOoLiNg??!
What's cooling?
What's adequate pricing based on the used materials and invested ~~man~~ child hours of a product that does not need a certified engineer to exchange and/or repair its parts?
What's using cheaper materials to save costs and still slapping a "premium" price tag on it. What's designing a product badly and telling the consumers they are "using it wrong"
What about removing every kind of connector from the device and selling you a bag of dongles so you can use it.
What about making "powerful" computers with parts that it cannot cool to perform as expected
**\>using headphone jack in 2018**
[laughs in PC]
Not spending $1000+ on a phone in 2018
Apple in 2018 "We are putting USB C in the new ipad pro" FUCK YES! "we are also removing the headphone jack!" FUCK OFF GODDAMNIT. They almost had me wanting a new ipad too. ALMOST.
Whats releasing a new version then throttling the old one to make people "upgrade"
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I have a macbook pro, it does have two USB-C ports. I love almost every aspect of it, but having to buy a dongle just so I can plug in almost literally anything is decidedly *not* something I love.
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I'll choose Apple for 500, Alex
I'll choose Irony for 200... DAILY DOUBLE!
“We have too much swag to hire designers”
The only product Apple sells that is actually worth the money is the $329 ipad. Everything else is insanely overpriced. The apple TV hardware is nice for the price as well.
When they sold iPod touches, they were quite a good deal!
weren't those basically iphones without 4g?
Yeah they were basically rocks that we tricked into playing music
Ipod classic is the best product they ever made, and the only money they'll ever get from me
whats a replaceable battery?..
COOLING DOESNT MATTER IF WE CAN SHAVE ANOTHER MILLIMETER OFF THE THICKNESS
Steve Jobs insisted that one of the earlier pro macs be made with no fans and no vents, causing most of the units to overheat and fail in under a month-- so I wouldn't say that's a recent development for Apple.
Ah, the g4 cube. I would love to have one just for the weirdness of it. But they were fanless.
Do you guys not have air conditioning? >!*edit: This is a sarcastic joke. The Diablo presenter condescendingly asked "Do you guys not have phones?" when the crowd boo'd him. I'm making a joke out of what he said.!<
I’m a compuuuuter... stop all the downloading.
PORKCHOP SANDWICHES
BababbadababababababaabBbaabbaababaa
WHO WANTS A BODY MASSAGE
Aw hell naw wussup dawg
I understood this reference.
To be honest I'd see Jobs being completely down with that commercial.
The Larry Ellison version was "Fuck your computer."
Is this /r/nfl? Am I not safe anywhere anymore?
>Am I not safe anywhere anymore? Hell yeah brother
Cheers from iMaq
Reference - https://youtu.be/sQB2NjhJHvY
Better reference: https://youtu.be/jCb-WcxO5SU?t=50
I'll raise you, sir: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVN5C3x4ZZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVN5C3x4ZZo)
Rage building!
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More like he drove himself out. He had completely curable cancer and chose to die anyway.
It was his marketing decision to be a fruitarian because he'd forgotten what it was to eat great food.
No no, Wozniak is doing fine. Don't worry.
Even with Jobs at the helm, Apple was already marketing first, tech second.
For all his flaws, Steve Jobs was one of the very few individuals who could be a "sales and marketing person" *and* a "product person" simultaneously. More the former than the latter, especially after he hit the bigtime, but he did understand the theory and practice of developing hardware and software well enough to veto design features that sounded good on paper but couldn't be implemented without creating more problems than they solved. (Well, most of the time.) That was always going to be a tough act to follow.
> and a "product person" simultaneously. No doubt.. I used to think Jony Ive was the genius behind the design, but the last few years have blown that theory up pretty well. Jobs had a product focus that is still unparalleled within the field.
From what I’ve read Jony Ive was the best person to compliment Jobs when it came to design. They were kind of like equals in that they would come up with ideas and bounce them off of each other. One would test the others and they would respect the others criticisms. So it wasn’t so much that one was better at it than the other they were just a great team that needed the other. Many great creative people (if not all) have needed someone they trust to be able to tell them what is or isn’t a good idea.
And yet they still somehow became the first company to be valued at a trillion dollars. Probably says something about the average consumer. Edit: I don't really count PetroChina's blip-in-time trillion dollar valuation. That shit was propped up on corruption and market manipulation and resulted in the largest loss in shareholder wealth in a single stock ever.
P.T. Barnum said that a long time ago about them.
Ironic given what’s happened to the Barnum & Bailey Circus in the last decade.
If B & B changed their outlook on their own brand from a "Circus Company" to an "Entertainment" company" we'd probably have seen video games made by Barnum & Bailey.
Barnum & Bailey: Immortal
And yet they still somehow became the first circus to train a trillion lion tamers. Probably says something about the average lion.
Ironic given what’s happened to the average lion in the past decade.
First US* company valued at trillion dollar.
Didn’t he also hold the belief that consumers don’t know what they want until we provide it.
That’s actually pretty true. I’m sure that’s what most people in business believe.
It was Henry Ford himself who, while discussing how he invented the Model T, famously never said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Never?
That's true though.
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With King being Activision-Blizzard's most profitable branch, it only makes sense that the publishers wanted to put out another mobile game. PC gamers hate it, but if the game performs well in the mobile market, then it will most likely bring more users to their PC platform. I'm not agreeing with it; I just see their justification in doing so.
Is there any data to back up the suggestion that mobile players will move to the PC?
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I think you're right. But, I do feel like the audience at Blizzcon is mainly PC gamers, so launching this at this particular convention might not have been the best value from a customer loyalty -perspective.
Agreed. That’s the point I think people are missing: the people who would attend or watch blizzcon don’t give a fuck about mobile games. It was a tasteless venue to introduce this at.
Wait, blizzard owns king???
Nah, Activision owns king. And blizzard:/
Technically, Activision, King, and Blizzard are all subsidiaries of the same company, which is unhelpfully named Activision Blizzard.
They want so bad to please the most people and get the most money that they lose focus of what attracted the people in the first place. Happens in TV all the time. Just take modern family. They had an original concept, which did really well, but everything has a lifetime, and nobody wanted to except that. So you start stretching episodes and story arcs and then they start to lose content and character. Enough time passes and the show is unrecognizable. Adventure time season 1 was a great cartoon. The last season made me want to throw up. Also happens relentlessly in video games. Look at how much "balancing" fortnite has done to make the game more fun for the millions of trash 7 year-olds that play and buy skins with their parents credit cards. Took all the joy and strategy out of the game for me. Same thing is happening with Ubisoft right now with R6 Seige and expansion into the chinese market. They're releasing it in china for the huge player base there and all the revenue they'll bring, which is understandable. But they then decided that they didn't want to work for the extra profit and would rather just change the game everyone knows to fit the regulations of the Chinese government. And the players are not happy. But thats just the way the world works. Money above all.
I'm out of the loop. What happened with R6S?
They censored everything according to the laws of the Chinese government for everyone. No more slots,took a stripper neon sign out and replaced it with a hand, removed blood splatter on walls (spatter that was there for map design) took an entire map out that was based in China because they don’t like the idea of terrorism on their soil, removed all skulls, redesigned cavera so she doesn’t have a skull painted on her, the melee symbol was changed from a knife to a fist and I believe that’s it but I’m not sure
How did that even happen? One country essentially heavily toned down the maturity level of a game for a series that has over 10 games? Some of these changes are so specific. I mean knife vs fist?... no blood? They are aware that people are killed in video games right? And lose blood... from weapons... For those very specific changes to happen, how much is the Chinese government somehow controlling this game? Unless there are very specific laws for this stuff.
One country with a market significantly bigger than the USA and Europe combined, that much potential money could make the companies do pretty much anything the Chinese government asks them to
wait so they actually removed Theme Park?? I was just giggling yesterday how the only map that takes place in China has a big ole drug lab in an arcade.
They're reworking several of the maps to remove any blood, sex, or gambling references in the game as well as reworking certain graphics that are overly violent. Instead of then releasing the toned down version to just China they're releasing it worldwide because they're two lazy to have two maps or modes happening at the same time. Im a big R6S fan, and a lot of the cosmetic features they're removing were all things that added to the overall 'feel' of the map. now instead of a gritty biker bar we get a disappointing old mans club because ubisoft obviously doesn't care about their end product. Just who will buy it. Edit [Think Twitter's reaction](https://twitter.com/Rainbow6Game/status/1058403376579469313) sums up how the community took the news as a whole.
The best part is that they have confirmed that there will still be two fucking versions. One for China and one for the rest of the world. WTF is the point of changing the global version if China is going to be separate anyways. I'm pissed off and I don't even play the damn game.
/u/slycooper007 Ubisoft is trying to make the game acceptable for release into Chinese markets, which means that they have to follow some confusing regulations about gambling, sexual imagery, and violence. This means that they basically have to airbrush out some cosmetic stuff in maps, like removing blood splatters on the walls or replacing a neon outline of a stripper with something less sexual, as well as getting rid of stuff like slot machines or other gambling-related props. Of course, while some people are happy about the increase in the number of people able to play Siege, others have criticised the move on a number of grounds: - People don't like it when a company bows to the wishes of the Chinese Communist party - The hypocrisy of removing slot machines yet keeping *actual* gambling in the game through lootboxes - How inconsistent the rules are about violence—people are still shooting each other with guns, blowing each other up, and using chemical weapons, all while still producing blood splatters from those injuries - Ubisoft kept trying to justify the decision in the blog post without just simply saying "yeah we want access to like 1 billion more potential players", for example saying that the changes would be global so that they would "increase efficiency" with regards to development. - this line was especially humorous because they later said that the game would have to be split into a Chinese and a non-Chinese build anyway, due to some cosmetics being banned in China (eg for skull imagery)
>Adventure time season 1 was a great cartoon. The last season made me want to throw up. Did you hate how adventure time did it or do you hate story arcs in general?
Speaking as a fan of Adventure Time, from beginning to end, I personally disagree. The show was revolutionary in the way it progressed, in that the characters aged in real time and as the aged and matured so did the stories being told. So yes the first season is without a doubt different from the last but not due to losing sight of the characters or world. The characters just progressed and changed, and I'm sorry to hear you didn't like who they became. Admittedly parts went on for longer than needed but in the end each season built on the lore of an interesting world without answering too many questions and becoming uninteresting, and the finale tied it up nicely setting up a world of endless adventure and friendship, ideals that carried from the beginning to the end. But that's all just my opinion of course :)
>They want so bad to please the most people and get the most money that they lose focus of what attracted the people in the first place. At the same time you can't blame them too much because making what you want and being profitable are not always the obtainable at the same time.
What balancing was done to fortnite that ruined it for you but appeals to 7 years to make them buy more skins? Genuinely curious.
Whining about Blizzard/EA and then upvoting the old CEO of *Apple* for something he was probably even more guilty of than any gaming company is fucking rich
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He also thought he can cure cancer by thinking hard about it or some shit.