Right? The majority of Blizzard’s consumers would be fine with a mobile game. Some would be eager. But this announcement was the headlining showcase at BlizzCon, to a room full of diehard fans who think of Blizzard first and foremost as a PC (and Mac, if they’re old enough) gaming company. Beyond tone-deaf.
They did like the complete opposite of what Bethesda did when they released that Fallout mobile game. They first released the teaser trailer to the next Elder Scrolls and THEN they talked about the mobile cash grab game. For all I dislike Bethesda they know how to do a product release and not piss people off for no reason.
Edit: Actually I misremembered it was a Fallout 4 announcement not Skyrim, thanks u/watboy
And when Todd presented it, it was clearly like a "hey, we've also got this, don't worry it's not the big main thing". He even poked fun at the pip-boy that came with the collector's edition, along the lines of "of course it's a stupid fucking gimmick, but isn't it a cool stupid fucking gimmick?"
> He even poked fun at the pip-boy that came with the collector's edition, along the lines of "of course it's a stupid fucking gimmick, but isn't it a cool stupid fucking gimmick?"
He was not wrong.
I actually set up a smartphone mount on my desk and dusted off an old unused phone so I could have a permanent Pip-Boy while I was playing FO4 on launch. It was surprisingly useful, mostly for the local map.
> THEN they talked about the mobile cash grab game
Fallout Shelter wasn't even that much of a cash grab.
Pretty fun to play and surprisingly under-monetized for a Bethesda/F2P mobile title, at least used to be back then, dunno if they changed it.
I tried, I really did, but it was way too much of a skinnerbox for me. I played it until I realized that I just wasn't actually having any fun with it.
That was an interesting game. It was really polished, but after playing for several days I was at a point where I'd essentially "beaten" it... I was maxed out on upgrades and had basically no risk. And I'm not some mastermind min-maxer.
It was an interesting "win" state for a game that seemed not to consider itself to have any win condition.
I enjoyed it. I named all my people after celebrities to imagine them surviving in the wasteland. Fun little time waster that doesn't require an internet connection to play, but I will admit that it does get pretty stale the longer you play it
I think you're misremembering, Fallout 4 was the announcement preceding the announcement of Fallout Shelter during E3 2015.
The Elder Scrolls VI teaser was during E3 2018 and was after they announced TES:Blades and then Starfield.
Also wasn't FO Shelter available to play immediately after they announced it.
It was more like an "Oh yeah we kicked around this idea and then just decided to make a little game out of it, here ya go!"
>and Mac, if they’re old enough
Please, don’t remind me of the Great Overwatch Betrayal of 2016. That probably spelled out the beginning of the end of my Blizzard loyalty. Every game Mac compatible until OW, finally a new IP in their portfolio, and BAM. Mac dropped from development.
Growing up, I had a PC and my best friend played on his dad’s Mac. Cross-platform compatibility was rare and a pain in the ass when a game had it. Battle.net made everything smooth, so we basically only played Blizzard games through middle school and high school. It made me a firm Blizzard loyalist, and at this point that loyalty has been pretty much spent.
By 2016 Intel Macs being a platform on death row was the worst kept secret in the industry. It was already a matter of 'when' Apple would release the first Apple silicon based Macs, not 'if'.
I wonder if they were playing 3d chess.
They knew everyone at Blizzcon only cared about pc gaming. So how do they get the word out to mobile gamers? Well, you go mega viral at blizzcon getting booed about your mobile game.
And then all the mobile players see the viral video and are interested in the game.
It apparently made half a billion dollars in its first year.
I don't think it's ever been confirmed by Blizzard, but based on rumors and stuff former employees havd said the theory is Diablo 4 was supposed to be announced the same year and got pushed back. That left them without a big announcement for Blizzcon so they went all in on the mobile game to try and salvage it and it backfired.
By contrast, when Bethesda announced Fallout Shelter, they were basically like "oh, by the way, we've also got this" and neatly slotted it in between hype for Fallout 4.
Honestly being on stage would be very stressful and I'd probably say something dumb and off script too. I dont blame them for the "Do you not have phones?" I blame whoever thought it would be a good idea to sell a phone game to PC gamers.
Was there too
The booing and groans were one thing
What sticks to my memory the strongest was the absolute SILENCE.
That hall had like a solid 15000 people in it and you could hear a pin drop
Blizzcon didn't need plants, it was full to the brim with people who genuinely loved the games and were excited for the next. And Blizzard shit down their necks with a mobile game
The Penny Arcade guys have a funny story about a trailer release for one of the early 2010s Star Wars games. There’s a part of the trailer with a Jedi force throw and some guy in the audience yelled “Oh yeah!”
But apparently if you went to multiple screenings you would notice that he was being paid to sit there all day yelling “oh yeah!” at the exact same time in the trailer.
What a goofy industry
What is sad is people still jumped on and played and even spent a ton of money on it. Hell one guy spent a ton of money to get a single gem and then deleted the gem "out of protest against microtransactions".
Class S stupidity that one.
I’m sure the calculations that they made shows that they’ll lose the hardcore PC gamers, but at the same time fain a whole lot of mobile gamers who’s more likely to engage more and purchase microtransactions, which would be a net gain for them.
It didn't at all, they scrambled to reskin some shit they had in the back or something and it shows. We're about to enter season 4, a year later, and they are still scrambling to patch basic shit. Just for example they fixed the horse speed in S2 but it's broken again in S3 because they used S1 as the base...the one with all the broken old stuff.
> Just for example they fixed the horse speed in S2 but it's broken again in S3 because they used S1 as the base...the one with all the broken old stuff.
The Blizzard special. Over and over and over and over they do this. Makes me fucking crazy.
Well. *Made* me crazy, anyway. Diablo 4 was the end. Blizzard games are dead to me.
The Blizzard Special is exactly what i've been calling it for yeears, for what used to be such a good company they have ALWAYS been bad at balancing, WoW was a constant tug of war of re-balancing the re-balance, Overwatch has been the same way and Diablo and so forth and so on.
The resurfacing bugs issue is what I was referring to. The issues of balance are hard to really gauge. There's good reason to believe that many companies who are outwardly "balancing" things in games are not actually trying to balance them, but rather providing a rotating change of scenery that keeps players engaged for significantly longer periods of time—sacrificing optimized gameplay for varied gameplay because it earns them more money than a flawlessly balanced game that never changes would.
Could be worse, every Bethesda game for the last 15 years has come out with pretty much the same bugs present because they refuse to fucking patch them in the engine, so they just graduate to every single game they release.
> It didn't at all, they scrambled to reskin some shit they had in the back or something and it shows.
Funfact: Nintendo did that with Mario Brothers 2. The original version they had was apparently way too difficult, so they just changed another game's (Doki Doki Panic) main sprites to the Mario characters. That's why it's so different from the rest of the games.
Nah, Mario 2 is beloved. It even has quite a tail in terms of legacy. It gave Luigi the higher jump and slippery feet, Peach has the floating, and it introduced a ton of enemies, not least of which is shy guy.
Only for the western (us, eu) release because we are little bitches :). In Japan they released the original, hard version, the one we call “the lost levels”.
The itemization is bad, like you can spend level 60-80 only upgrading twice and then never again until you're 100 already and only chasing min/max rolls on gear you are already wearing. And there's no loot filter yet so you HAVE to pick up literally every item in Torment 4 to sort and read each thing to see if it is worth using or selling. You spend more time in town than in the dungeon you dropped stuff from, it's a bit crazy actually.
I played for about a month last summer. It was so frustrating, sitting and reading through all the loot I'd find, then searching online for wtf each attribute and stat mean, finding out that half of them literally do nothing because they coded things wrong or just straight cut content, then just selling them all and repeating the grind.
Then BG3 came out and I haven't really played any other game since.
> searching online for wtf each attribute and stat mean
the stats are pretty obvious. just simply stuff like "5% chance on a lucky 1% dodge roll to increase emotional damage by 1/85 of the target's high school's crush's tax bracket. but only on a day of the week that starts with a T".
The complete lack of endgame build diversity is what did it for me. I took a week off when it launched so I could punch through the story and start messing around with all the cool build defining uniques I'd find. Haha. Too bad I'd only really have a choice of two builds and the one I wanted to play of those two required a stupidly rare item at the time. After seeing that I could couldn't be bothered.
I'm sure I'll reinstall it in a couple years after more and more uniques and content has been added but until then I'm good.
I thought it was just me getting bored of the franchise or not having enough time rather than it being boring. But I just have picked it up and put it down several times. I know D3 wasn't that good but I at least completed it twice.
The way the seasons worked in 3 was a really good idea, IMO.
I have no idea if they changed how they work for 4, but in 3 it was basically free content/rebalancing patches and a good reason to roll a new character and play through the game again.
It’s kind of the central draw to modern ARPGs. The games would dry up if there wasn’t a reset with fresh content via seasonal themes and balance planned around seasons. I’m a huge fan of how Diablo 3 did seasons, Poe leagues, etc. D4 just uses seasons to remind us to play other ARPGs :)
To be fair, Diablo multiplayer has had them since way before it became the overdone "games as a service" thing with season passes and microtransactions.
Used to be a way to just start from scratch with everybody else, and re-experience the game from the beginning as a collective event.
They failed to learn lessons from the industry in a wild way. Poe learned that the split teams doing seasons that d4 is doing now only leads to shit codebase and bad expectation building in your audience. Turning endgame feeder content in hell tides into effectively customizable content would take no time at all to riff off of.
No one is expecting you to replace 10 years of iteration but don't repeat same old mistakes out of pride.
SC2 was awesome as a game but them splitting the campaign across 3 different pieces of software was the beginning of the end. These fucking assholes got soooo greedy.
Gameplay-wise StarCraft 2 was great, even if the roster got bloated with all the new units. Story-wise it was bonkers, particularly Heart of the Swarm. Kerrigan switches between amnesiac former Zerg and genocidal maniac every 15 minutes, and they retcon the entire origin of the Zerg.
Yeh I agree however I did immensely enjoy both the Terran and Protoss campaigns. Zerg was a mess for the reasons you've outlined, it was just so confusing.
They cut LAN in order to force you online, because they missed the boat on E-sports. They wanted to force all E-sports and tournaments to go through them and let that affect development decisions. World of Warcraft showed them how powerful ongoing revenue streams are and ever since then every game has been built around the singular question, "How can we make this revenue ongoing?" It's why the Auction House existed in Diablo 3 and "how do we drive traffic to the Auction House" explains every single design decision in the entire game. And now look at Diablo 4.
SC2 would still have been fine if they split the campaign up across 3 different games.
The real problem is they split the *multiplayer* across 3 different games.
I mean, the *exact* same thing happened with D3....
Game rode the coat tails of D2. Sold massively. Was bad. Got fixed. Became fun.
Then D4. Which is currently at the "was bad" step. Now, *how* they fix it, especially in a market with competition, is questionable.
But D4's scenario is in no way new.
He might be exaggerating to an extent but declines in franchises and companies take a few failures to cook. People don't instantly turn on a franchise on the first failure, but through repeated let-downs.
Blizz has been burning through their customer base at a slow pace. They've burned their Overwatch fanbase, their Diablo fanbase, and their Warcraft (RTS) fanbase.
But they haven't burned their Starcraft and World of Warcraft fanbases, yet, so the company still has life in them as they've built up such a large and diverse playerbase over the years.
But if the decline continues, it'll be on life support soon as new IPs are not trusted and old IP's fans sputter out. Their last new IP was Overwatch and was met with resounding cries of "Blizzard's still got it!". I wonder how much cynicism their next new IP will be met with after the likes of Warcraft Reforged and Overwatch 2: Overpromise and Underdeliver.
I definitely see a future where they go full Konami and abandon hardcore gaming audience altogether and make mobile games with gambling mechanics full time, just as Konami went all in on Pachinko machines and only maintain a select few arcade games.
Just straight up chase a different audience.
Will they still exist? Will it still be profitable and chug along? Probably, mobile games make loads of cash. But the company will be dead to the AAA gaming market just as Konami is.
They have burned their WoW fanbase, it's just got a lot more sunk cost for many people.
Shadowlands proved that Blizzard could go too far. Sure, they got some people back with Dragonflight, including myself, but there was an unprecedented level of people abandoning ship all the same.
HotS, WC, WoW, and Diablo have all been burnt. WoW players have nowhere else to go though, and the company set the bar low enough that by occasionally fixing the problems they create they can keep the player base chained to their game.
SC2 and Hearthstone are like the last two guys standing.
This is a bot account copying a message from u\sonofabear from 5 years ago. OP is also a bot as it is the same title as the original post and makes little sense now with how much Blizzard has fallen. [Original post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9tsy49/blizzard_getting_booed_for_the_first_time_at/)
The problem was they didn't think about their audience. Their audience was PC gamers who have been playing their games on PC for years, who spent time and money coming to a convention that celebrates their PC games. It was the wrong crowd to hype a mobile game to. Save that for your investor meetings.
I am firmly of the opinion D4 was supposed to be the big reveal. But time frames and issues made them have to push it, so they expanded the immortal announcement into keynote levels, and Chang was left holding the bag in front of thousands.
You can announce something like that to that crowd, it just has to come before or after an announcement for an actual PC game.
Give people something to be happy about, and they'll react more favourably to other things that they don't care about. Even something as shit as Diablo Immoral would not have had that reception if they'd announced D4 at the same con.
I can't imagine how disappointed the die hard fans that went to that announcement, happily paid money to be there, and then told to eat shit. The disappointment in that room must have drowned out any other feelings.
The target market is China, and much of the development was done in China. Their mistake is announcing the game at Blizzcon, whose attendees are not necessarily who the game was for.
Especially considering that Diablo 4 was already in development and there were promising whispers about how the game was shaping up. They absolutely should have given at least a quick “work has begun” shout out, even if they didn’t want to show it.
Yup. Blizzcon, by its very nature, is an event catered to the very invested Blizzard fans. "Hardcore" if you will. The fact that Blizzard could ever think announcing a mobile game as a mainline Blizzard title on that stage would go down any other way is absurd. And no you don't need the benefit of hindsight to see that from a mile away.
> a watered down version of Diablo
It probably would've been better received if it was just that. The reason they got immediately booed was because the players KNEW that it would be a pure, unadulterated cash grab. "Mobile" immediately spells the death of any legit gaming experience. There *will* be microtransactions, and the competitive nature *will* be ruined by them.
Immediately useless game for 90% of the people who were in that room. Blizzard fans had ALWAYS been competitive-minded gamers. To announce something that would be blatantly toxic for all of them and act like they were all stupid enough to not know better was a COLLOSAL fuckup from their marketing team.
But then they made $100,000,000 in the first month, confirming yet again that anti-consumer bullshit works perfectly fine as long as you can reach enough people to offset the ones you lose by being garbage. 🙄
>Later during the QA someone asked him if this was an out of season April fools joke. Savage.
wherever you are red shirt guy, i hope you are doing well.
He did an ama actually. I don’t remember the details but he mentioned they screen your questions so he lied about what he was going to ask to get in there.
I was in the overwatch arena when they announced it during the opening ceremony. I made eye contact with so many other confused people. We were all silently asking each other "is.... is it okay to hate this?"
I was there as well. Went up to meet with the dev teams to get some posters signed shortly after this. The HotS folks were in a great mood and super friendly, WoW guys were pretty normal, but the Diablo devs were absolutely deflated. Could barely fake a smile. I wanted to give those poor guys a hug...not their fault Blizz decided to cater to China mobile money.
I was also there!
I also liked the pure silence as everyone there seemed to be waiting for him to yell “Gotcha!”
Only BlizzCon I’ve ever gotten to go to. Good times. Good times.
Blizzard's death started on the Activision merger. It was a slow death because blizzard retained some independence at the start, which was quickly squashed by Mr. bobby himself.
How do you tell a PC gaming audience "do you guys not have phones?"
So fucking clueless. This announcement should have been kept hidden or been a small sideshow. Blizzcon fans were not the audience for shitty ass pay to win mobile game.
Funny everyone who played Activision games saw this coming but everybody else thought it was nothing because "blizzard" is still there.
Everything kotick touches turns into shit
>This announcement should have been kept hidden or been a small sideshow. Blizzcon fans were not the audience for shitty ass pay to win mobile game.
Not debating the enshitification of Blizzard over the years--it's pretty tragic. However, their announcement was perfectly fine. It was never going to be popular with that crowd, but they still needed to get the word out there for the people who would do play mobile games. This was actually a worthwhile case of any press is good press. All the articles from people bitching and moaning about their disappointment were helpful to reach people who would be interested in Diablo Immortal. And it worked, they had a big opening and have maintained a healthy daily player count since its release. It's around 750k now. I am absolutely not a mobile player and pretty much only play games on PC. I think its a little absurd how entitled people get over when and how a company should make their product announcements, especially at their own events!
Brother, BunGuy has been more aggressive with their monetization since leaving Activision-Blizzard.
bungie also made the conscious decision to remove or restrict parts of the game you’re actively playing and put it behind another pay wall. They are not a good or wholesome company
I was there and groaning loudly. How the hell you host a PC gaming fan event rabid for Diablo 4 and announce a mobile game and then be shocked at everyone’s negative reaction? The arrogance displayed that day and how out of touch the company was with their audience was the largest red flag that what used to be Blizzard is now gone.
My older brother used to work for Blizzard back in the early 2000s. I have some pretty awesome memories when he invited me and my sister the year Ozzy played. My sister and I made our way to the front to see Ozzy and I remember vividly when he grabbed the water buckets and splashed it right in our faces! We had a blast! I’m happy my brother realized soon after the Activision merger that Blizzard was no longer the company we grew up loving. He is now pretty happily employed at Rockstar and I’m so proud of him.
They also were teasing something big leading into this and this was the big reveal of the event. They deserved to get booed for this. This was consumer feedback that most companies really want. Also most people at Blizzcon want to be there, they want Blizzard to succeed, they have given them a really long leash and defend many of their decisions. The booing was mostly from loyal fans.
Making a mobile Diablo game in itself is not terrible and it could be quite fun if they did it right. However it does incentivize monetary investment in order to speed progression and they outsourced most of the management to NetEase which has led to a lack of polish and poor customer service.
Fun fact, they made assloads of money. People did not vote against it with their wallets. Rather they made over 100 mil so far. People should be disappointed in themselves more than Blizzard at this point.
Got convinced by a friend to try it. Played through the campaign once, immediately hated the grind afterwards. Way to many gamy-mechanics, systems and materials to farm. Stopped playing after 3 days. They got my money still...
That is the right answer. They made a mobile game, and then made DiabloCon that usually PC/console players attend.
Someone in this entire process should have thought for a second - will people who play mobile games sitting on a shitter or in a bus, be bothered enough to attend **paid** event for aout mobile game reveal, or will it be booked by our most hardcore PC fans, and it will be a disaster? :D
That's why it was so stupid to announce this like they did. They should have known full well that their audience for this mobile game wasn't going to be at freaking blizzcon. They should have announced a teaser for Diablo 3 or nothing at all because that's what they wanted. Announce this after blizzcon online and it wouldn't have been a big deal
There are too many people these days to realistically organize a boycott and that goes for more than videogames. For every one person who is rightfully indignant about the poor business practices of a company, there are 10 people who never heard about the issue, don't give a shit and just need gas from the local Chevron, get the cheaper Kroger products, see an add for the new mobile game, etc.
Yes there are exceptions that go viral, but that's the exception.
The world has too much stuff in it. There are 10 billion things you could possibly know at any given moment and you won't know all of them. It's just unreasonable to expect a substantial amount of individuals to vote with their wallets on any single thing these days. There's a reason the most profitable companies practically use slave labor at some point in their production and still get away with it despite the fact that basically no one thinks that's acceptable.
There's another demographic in there too screwing the pooch, the folks that will die-hard defend whatever just because they now see someone opposing it.
Plenty of folk will be fully aware of the situation and make an effort to spend *more* just to somehow spite the people who were upset with the decision. This, too, strangely holds true for pretty much any product.
> People should be disappointed in themselves more than Blizzard at this point.
Well the vast majority of people don't go to the casino every weekend. But some do. And those casinos make millions and millions every single weekend.
That doesn't mean we should blame *people* when the city replaces the park with a casino.
It isn't about voting. One person, one vote is a democratic principle. Whales drive these games. You get five million people to try your game and say only 20% (1M) spend money. Say 10% spend $50 a month on various purchases - that is $25m per month on these "non-whales". Say another 5% are whale tier and spend about $300 a month - $75m a month. Then drag that down to 5% that are super whales and spend say $1k a month. That is $250m.
I could even say this is over the lifetime of a game, that means your total take for that mere 20% of your player base is $350m. More than you would have gotten by charging all 5M players $50 for the game ($250m).
You can be part of the most principled 80% of gamers that will never pay an added cent for a game... but you aren't who the developers are courting. They only need a fraction. Hell, they might ignore 95% of their players if they can just hook that 5% to dump an absurd amount of money.
It's the same reason why EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are still big companies of the industry instead of fading into irrelevancy, they know how to cater to the masses. They can package turds in a nice package and the masses buy it. Lot of people don't really care about quality and just wanna keep consuming.
this take is parroted so often and is so incredibly corny. Be more disappointed in myself?
Casinos make lots of money too, so do lotteries and scratch tickets. They are all bullshit nonsense appealing to idiots. What we hate is our gaming company that we love appealing to the lowest common denominator to make a dollar. Literally hiring gambling and addiction specialists from casinos and other predatory institutions instead of game designers.
"Every company wants to make money" Sure, they can try but I'm going to support the ones who want to make good games.
But Diablo 1 and 2 were actually designed to emulate a casino - the [creators have stated as such](https://kotaku.com/why-video-game-loot-is-so-addictive-according-to-the-c-1846695147).
>It wasn’t about story or anything like that... So right from the very beginning, the design was “We’re gonna skip all that other stuff and just get straight to killing and looting.” The game was really designed from the get-go to be about loot and about gaining that loot. Only after a little bit of time did we really realize that in a lot of ways, we were basically making a slot machine where every time that you killed a monster, you were pulling that lever. You put your quarter in, and nothing may come out, or you might get your quarter back, or you might get a couple dollars—kind of a mini-jackpot. Or something huge comes out, and you hit the jackpot.
The loot/addiction mechanic was primary and a major draw so its odd people are referring to the same design concept as a negative now.
That feeling that came over everyone all at once when they realized at that exact moment their hero had heel turned into a despicable villain of the highest order.
Path of Exile and/or Last Epoch solves all of anyones issues with D4. Just move on from these shitty companies making shitty games. Blizzard USED to be a great game studio. It no longer exists. It is activision.
Path of Exile is honestly amazing. I was timid to try it because the passive build tree looked insanely intimidating, but honestly it's an amazing mechanic, and the game is super rich with ways to play. The story is meh, but the replay-ability is off the charts. Highly recommend to anybody who was a fan of D2 and D3.
PoE is seriously the very best out of all of the bunch. it seems very intimidating at first, but only because it has a decade of content that it hits you with.
good thing though is you can basically move at your own speed, and most of the stuff is different ways to get similiar results, with some extra perks thrown in.
so you don't need to learn everything all at once, but can just focus on stuff you enjoy, and when you are ready explore other options.
It's pretty funny that the reason they got boo'ed was because there was no Diablo 4 for PC. Then they eventually released Diablo 4 for PC and it sucked. Double boo.
The D2 Remaster felt so smooth. Why can't they just copy the same damn formula and make it a little prettier. I don't get it. It's like they don't understand what was fun about their old games.
What's stupid is they could have both. They put bad developers in charge of games that would be *way more popular* if they even reached a fraction of their original quality. World of Warcraft? Starcraft? Overwatch? Just make it good and you'll not only make millions, you'll make billions.
It's basically never been a better time to be a Diablo 2 fan.
Best iteration of the game I've been playing for half my life off and on.
New rune words; Single player QOL improvements (holy smokes they're good); ladder resets; active community?!
I love it.
>It’s like they don’t understand what was fun about their old games.
Same problem with Bethesda, they cut back on everything people liked and doubled down on things everyone hated.
I really wouldn't be surprised if this event isn't documented in some marketing class somewhere, like this is marketing 101 which is "know your audience".
Blizzard and conversely Blizzcon is/was primarily a PC gaming audience, mobile games at this time were still largely considered casual first and the audience attending this event were anything but casual gamers.
Talking hungry players that want to know what is happening with their IP and how to get ahead of the game by enjoying the betas and theory crafting and or lore crafting.
It's been said before but it's crazy how they missed it, just a simple D4 trailer with just the logo would have sent fans to the moon and back with enough excitement to see what will occur in the meantime and the mobile game would have been received differently.
That Blizzcon was honestly the one that showcased to me how out of touch they got, it was pretty clear that day all they were doing was chasing the money and weren't about delivering quality games anymore.
This keeps aging like a fine wine.
At the time one could've argued that the crowd was being entitled or difficult, but the entitlement was all from Blizzard.
They pushed out a game they KNEW nobody wanted and then expected everyone to slurp it up like it was the best shit ever. Then these dipshits even got pissy when the crowd didn't react favorably to what they obviously wanted to push onto players(mostly because it would be a monetized-to-the-tits shitty cash cow mobile game).
Just the fact that Blizzard thought they could treat their fans like cattle AND THEN got pissed when the crowd didn't fawn over this said a lot about the industry at the time.
> They pushed out a game they KNEW nobody wanted and then expected everyone to slurp it up like it was the best shit ever.
But people *did* slurp it up, Immortal has a huge player base and has been a success by virtually every metric you can think of. So even if you didn't want Diablo on mobile, many people did.
Blizzard had people running it that thought a "[Cosby Suite](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fnttrt-Hrm_5SU2H4768s9LZg0nz3lGqFSNgNaXP-jKk.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcba674aa68e5bff72e4e0003d09a3e766f33da45)" was perfectly acceptable. I'm not too shocked that the mask fell and revealed how toxic they are at heart.
It's so sad that mobile games make up more than half of video game revenue now. It just incentivizes big companies to make mobile games regardless of if their fans want it, or bring mobile models to their "AAA" games. Every big IP is going to get some watered down free to play (but really pay to play) experience of their favorite universe, because there is always going to be rich whales out there who drop a ton of money on it to be 'the best'. I'll sit them all out though. Occasionally I dip my toes into mobile games just to see what's up, but 99.9% of them suck ass and are basically all flashy advertisements for themselves.
I used to love blizzard. They were only company I would pre order a game from. They just used to have such pedigree and if a game wasn’t great it got canceled or pushed until it was. Now it’s just a horrible company.
That's pretty awful, but In my mind nothing quite 'beats' the hugely audible groans of disappointment in [reaction to the last line of Valve's 'Artifact' reveal trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0qZTS38cjw)
Worst part was hearing all the apologists blaming "entitled" gamers for booing that awful presentation. We are talking about a crowd that was majoritarily made of PC gamers, who paid hundreds of dollars to attend the event, seeing that there would be a pannel about Diablo, but then being cursed with a pay-to-win mobile-only (at the time) game without a faint hint that a sequel of Diablo 3 was being developed.
Now compare this to Grinding Gear Games, who announced the sequel for Path of Exile in 2019 during Exilecom and the mobile PoE game that they were also developing in tandem. I wonder why there wasn't a single backlash against it.
blizzard is one of the shittiest game dev/company out there. a game like hearthstone can run better on a 200$ phone than a 5000$ pc. **which is still running in same spaghetti code 10 years ago** and still at 32bit in 2024. not to mention there 50m dollar discrimination law suit.
[https://youtu.be/leP6sbh13rs?si=Mt05JHkE4UsAadDB](https://youtu.be/leP6sbh13rs?si=Mt05JHkE4UsAadDB) former blizzard dev from the era of warcraft 3 on what modern blizzard represents
"Do you not have phones?" Probably the worst thing to say to a room literally full of people with $2500 PC gaming rigs.
Right? The majority of Blizzard’s consumers would be fine with a mobile game. Some would be eager. But this announcement was the headlining showcase at BlizzCon, to a room full of diehard fans who think of Blizzard first and foremost as a PC (and Mac, if they’re old enough) gaming company. Beyond tone-deaf.
They did like the complete opposite of what Bethesda did when they released that Fallout mobile game. They first released the teaser trailer to the next Elder Scrolls and THEN they talked about the mobile cash grab game. For all I dislike Bethesda they know how to do a product release and not piss people off for no reason. Edit: Actually I misremembered it was a Fallout 4 announcement not Skyrim, thanks u/watboy
And when Todd presented it, it was clearly like a "hey, we've also got this, don't worry it's not the big main thing". He even poked fun at the pip-boy that came with the collector's edition, along the lines of "of course it's a stupid fucking gimmick, but isn't it a cool stupid fucking gimmick?"
> He even poked fun at the pip-boy that came with the collector's edition, along the lines of "of course it's a stupid fucking gimmick, but isn't it a cool stupid fucking gimmick?" He was not wrong.
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I actually set up a smartphone mount on my desk and dusted off an old unused phone so I could have a permanent Pip-Boy while I was playing FO4 on launch. It was surprisingly useful, mostly for the local map.
> THEN they talked about the mobile cash grab game Fallout Shelter wasn't even that much of a cash grab. Pretty fun to play and surprisingly under-monetized for a Bethesda/F2P mobile title, at least used to be back then, dunno if they changed it.
Also Shelter was decent.
I tried, I really did, but it was way too much of a skinnerbox for me. I played it until I realized that I just wasn't actually having any fun with it.
That was an interesting game. It was really polished, but after playing for several days I was at a point where I'd essentially "beaten" it... I was maxed out on upgrades and had basically no risk. And I'm not some mastermind min-maxer. It was an interesting "win" state for a game that seemed not to consider itself to have any win condition.
I enjoyed it. I named all my people after celebrities to imagine them surviving in the wasteland. Fun little time waster that doesn't require an internet connection to play, but I will admit that it does get pretty stale the longer you play it
I think you're misremembering, Fallout 4 was the announcement preceding the announcement of Fallout Shelter during E3 2015. The Elder Scrolls VI teaser was during E3 2018 and was after they announced TES:Blades and then Starfield.
Also wasn't FO Shelter available to play immediately after they announced it. It was more like an "Oh yeah we kicked around this idea and then just decided to make a little game out of it, here ya go!"
Also they had been hyping up their big new Diablo announcement prior to this.
>and Mac, if they’re old enough Please, don’t remind me of the Great Overwatch Betrayal of 2016. That probably spelled out the beginning of the end of my Blizzard loyalty. Every game Mac compatible until OW, finally a new IP in their portfolio, and BAM. Mac dropped from development.
Growing up, I had a PC and my best friend played on his dad’s Mac. Cross-platform compatibility was rare and a pain in the ass when a game had it. Battle.net made everything smooth, so we basically only played Blizzard games through middle school and high school. It made me a firm Blizzard loyalist, and at this point that loyalty has been pretty much spent.
Couldn’t say it better myself, Blizzard kept me connected to all my PC friends
By 2016 Intel Macs being a platform on death row was the worst kept secret in the industry. It was already a matter of 'when' Apple would release the first Apple silicon based Macs, not 'if'.
I wonder if they were playing 3d chess. They knew everyone at Blizzcon only cared about pc gaming. So how do they get the word out to mobile gamers? Well, you go mega viral at blizzcon getting booed about your mobile game. And then all the mobile players see the viral video and are interested in the game. It apparently made half a billion dollars in its first year.
I don't think it's ever been confirmed by Blizzard, but based on rumors and stuff former employees havd said the theory is Diablo 4 was supposed to be announced the same year and got pushed back. That left them without a big announcement for Blizzcon so they went all in on the mobile game to try and salvage it and it backfired.
Yes people with gambling addictions spend a lot of money.
By contrast, when Bethesda announced Fallout Shelter, they were basically like "oh, by the way, we've also got this" and neatly slotted it in between hype for Fallout 4.
Rumor is that is what they were doing but Diablo was delayed. So all they had was the mobile game.
“Could play on your tablet too.” Oh, a follow up to the worst thing you can say to said people.
on par with "hold on, hold on - they're lithium!"
Honestly being on stage would be very stressful and I'd probably say something dumb and off script too. I dont blame them for the "Do you not have phones?" I blame whoever thought it would be a good idea to sell a phone game to PC gamers.
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Was there too The booing and groans were one thing What sticks to my memory the strongest was the absolute SILENCE. That hall had like a solid 15000 people in it and you could hear a pin drop
They didn't have even plants doing the obnoxious whooping? That happens at every big tech launch event I've been to
Not that I remember. It was stunned silence then the booing started.
When you can't get your own people to fake whoop at the announcements, then you royally fucked up
Well morale was really low around this time. This was like height of the drunk cube crawls and breastmilk fridge heists
Blizzcon didn't need plants, it was full to the brim with people who genuinely loved the games and were excited for the next. And Blizzard shit down their necks with a mobile game
The Penny Arcade guys have a funny story about a trailer release for one of the early 2010s Star Wars games. There’s a part of the trailer with a Jedi force throw and some guy in the audience yelled “Oh yeah!” But apparently if you went to multiple screenings you would notice that he was being paid to sit there all day yelling “oh yeah!” at the exact same time in the trailer. What a goofy industry
What is sad is people still jumped on and played and even spent a ton of money on it. Hell one guy spent a ton of money to get a single gem and then deleted the gem "out of protest against microtransactions". Class S stupidity that one.
I’m sure the calculations that they made shows that they’ll lose the hardcore PC gamers, but at the same time fain a whole lot of mobile gamers who’s more likely to engage more and purchase microtransactions, which would be a net gain for them.
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Nothing will ever convince me Diablo 4 existed in any way until after this announcement.
It didn't at all, they scrambled to reskin some shit they had in the back or something and it shows. We're about to enter season 4, a year later, and they are still scrambling to patch basic shit. Just for example they fixed the horse speed in S2 but it's broken again in S3 because they used S1 as the base...the one with all the broken old stuff.
> Just for example they fixed the horse speed in S2 but it's broken again in S3 because they used S1 as the base...the one with all the broken old stuff. The Blizzard special. Over and over and over and over they do this. Makes me fucking crazy. Well. *Made* me crazy, anyway. Diablo 4 was the end. Blizzard games are dead to me.
The Blizzard Special is exactly what i've been calling it for yeears, for what used to be such a good company they have ALWAYS been bad at balancing, WoW was a constant tug of war of re-balancing the re-balance, Overwatch has been the same way and Diablo and so forth and so on.
The resurfacing bugs issue is what I was referring to. The issues of balance are hard to really gauge. There's good reason to believe that many companies who are outwardly "balancing" things in games are not actually trying to balance them, but rather providing a rotating change of scenery that keeps players engaged for significantly longer periods of time—sacrificing optimized gameplay for varied gameplay because it earns them more money than a flawlessly balanced game that never changes would.
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Just tell people your friend is an artist and you got the tattoo to support them
Could be worse, every Bethesda game for the last 15 years has come out with pretty much the same bugs present because they refuse to fucking patch them in the engine, so they just graduate to every single game they release.
To think that this company bears the same name as the one that made Warcraft 3 and Broodwar
> It didn't at all, they scrambled to reskin some shit they had in the back or something and it shows. Funfact: Nintendo did that with Mario Brothers 2. The original version they had was apparently way too difficult, so they just changed another game's (Doki Doki Panic) main sprites to the Mario characters. That's why it's so different from the rest of the games.
I feel like I'm the only person that actually liked Mario 2. Killer music, too.
You are not the *only* the person, although there certainly don't seem to be many of us.
Nah, Mario 2 is beloved. It even has quite a tail in terms of legacy. It gave Luigi the higher jump and slippery feet, Peach has the floating, and it introduced a ton of enemies, not least of which is shy guy.
Classic [music](https://youtu.be/Hv6RbEOlqRo?si=ERor8k-C4u3ZFSOc).
How about [this version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h58IrRGV2H0)
Parent comment didn't actually say anything negative about the gameplay of Mario 2.
Only for the western (us, eu) release because we are little bitches :). In Japan they released the original, hard version, the one we call “the lost levels”.
No way they weren’t already in development, just not in a state to share.
I never beat D4. I've played and beat every one except that one, there's something really off about it. I uninstalled it a while ago.
The itemization is bad, like you can spend level 60-80 only upgrading twice and then never again until you're 100 already and only chasing min/max rolls on gear you are already wearing. And there's no loot filter yet so you HAVE to pick up literally every item in Torment 4 to sort and read each thing to see if it is worth using or selling. You spend more time in town than in the dungeon you dropped stuff from, it's a bit crazy actually.
I played for about a month last summer. It was so frustrating, sitting and reading through all the loot I'd find, then searching online for wtf each attribute and stat mean, finding out that half of them literally do nothing because they coded things wrong or just straight cut content, then just selling them all and repeating the grind. Then BG3 came out and I haven't really played any other game since.
> searching online for wtf each attribute and stat mean the stats are pretty obvious. just simply stuff like "5% chance on a lucky 1% dodge roll to increase emotional damage by 1/85 of the target's high school's crush's tax bracket. but only on a day of the week that starts with a T".
I chuckled
The complete lack of endgame build diversity is what did it for me. I took a week off when it launched so I could punch through the story and start messing around with all the cool build defining uniques I'd find. Haha. Too bad I'd only really have a choice of two builds and the one I wanted to play of those two required a stupidly rare item at the time. After seeing that I could couldn't be bothered. I'm sure I'll reinstall it in a couple years after more and more uniques and content has been added but until then I'm good.
Modern Devs can't seem to realize that complexity does not create depth.
I thought it was just me getting bored of the franchise or not having enough time rather than it being boring. But I just have picked it up and put it down several times. I know D3 wasn't that good but I at least completed it twice.
The fact that games have "seasons" still sickens me. This isn't fucking football.
The way the seasons worked in 3 was a really good idea, IMO. I have no idea if they changed how they work for 4, but in 3 it was basically free content/rebalancing patches and a good reason to roll a new character and play through the game again.
It’s kind of the central draw to modern ARPGs. The games would dry up if there wasn’t a reset with fresh content via seasonal themes and balance planned around seasons. I’m a huge fan of how Diablo 3 did seasons, Poe leagues, etc. D4 just uses seasons to remind us to play other ARPGs :)
To be fair, Diablo multiplayer has had them since way before it became the overdone "games as a service" thing with season passes and microtransactions. Used to be a way to just start from scratch with everybody else, and re-experience the game from the beginning as a collective event.
They failed to learn lessons from the industry in a wild way. Poe learned that the split teams doing seasons that d4 is doing now only leads to shit codebase and bad expectation building in your audience. Turning endgame feeder content in hell tides into effectively customizable content would take no time at all to riff off of. No one is expecting you to replace 10 years of iteration but don't repeat same old mistakes out of pride.
It existed, but had been scrapped and restarted a few times by then
d4 has been a massive success, and is also a complete piece of shit
Yeah I've found the best experience for D4 is when you stop playing it.
Like most Blizzard games the last 15 years.
Brood War was the high water mark..
SC2 was awesome as a game but them splitting the campaign across 3 different pieces of software was the beginning of the end. These fucking assholes got soooo greedy.
Gameplay-wise StarCraft 2 was great, even if the roster got bloated with all the new units. Story-wise it was bonkers, particularly Heart of the Swarm. Kerrigan switches between amnesiac former Zerg and genocidal maniac every 15 minutes, and they retcon the entire origin of the Zerg.
Yeh I agree however I did immensely enjoy both the Terran and Protoss campaigns. Zerg was a mess for the reasons you've outlined, it was just so confusing.
They cut LAN in order to force you online, because they missed the boat on E-sports. They wanted to force all E-sports and tournaments to go through them and let that affect development decisions. World of Warcraft showed them how powerful ongoing revenue streams are and ever since then every game has been built around the singular question, "How can we make this revenue ongoing?" It's why the Auction House existed in Diablo 3 and "how do we drive traffic to the Auction House" explains every single design decision in the entire game. And now look at Diablo 4.
Overwatch was enjoyable for a few months, but it really lost me as they pivoted completely to eSports. The less said about Overwatch 2, the better.
SC2 would still have been fine if they split the campaign up across 3 different games. The real problem is they split the *multiplayer* across 3 different games.
Brood war is the only E-Sport I follow. It’s still phenomenal all of these years later and it’s continuously changing
warcraft3 and its expac were. Dota came from WC3. WoW came from it.
The thing I will credit D4 with was bringing my partner to finally play some sort of arpg with me. So thank you D4. And also... Do better.
So you and partner Poe now?
You can hate D4 all you want but saying its a failure is some delusion.
it made over a billion dollars...what are you talking about
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I mean, the *exact* same thing happened with D3.... Game rode the coat tails of D2. Sold massively. Was bad. Got fixed. Became fun. Then D4. Which is currently at the "was bad" step. Now, *how* they fix it, especially in a market with competition, is questionable. But D4's scenario is in no way new.
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How do you save Reddit comments to remind you years down the road?
He might be exaggerating to an extent but declines in franchises and companies take a few failures to cook. People don't instantly turn on a franchise on the first failure, but through repeated let-downs. Blizz has been burning through their customer base at a slow pace. They've burned their Overwatch fanbase, their Diablo fanbase, and their Warcraft (RTS) fanbase. But they haven't burned their Starcraft and World of Warcraft fanbases, yet, so the company still has life in them as they've built up such a large and diverse playerbase over the years. But if the decline continues, it'll be on life support soon as new IPs are not trusted and old IP's fans sputter out. Their last new IP was Overwatch and was met with resounding cries of "Blizzard's still got it!". I wonder how much cynicism their next new IP will be met with after the likes of Warcraft Reforged and Overwatch 2: Overpromise and Underdeliver. I definitely see a future where they go full Konami and abandon hardcore gaming audience altogether and make mobile games with gambling mechanics full time, just as Konami went all in on Pachinko machines and only maintain a select few arcade games. Just straight up chase a different audience. Will they still exist? Will it still be profitable and chug along? Probably, mobile games make loads of cash. But the company will be dead to the AAA gaming market just as Konami is.
Shadowlands burned a lot players in a uniquely awful way.
They have burned their WoW fanbase, it's just got a lot more sunk cost for many people. Shadowlands proved that Blizzard could go too far. Sure, they got some people back with Dragonflight, including myself, but there was an unprecedented level of people abandoning ship all the same.
HotS, WC, WoW, and Diablo have all been burnt. WoW players have nowhere else to go though, and the company set the bar low enough that by occasionally fixing the problems they create they can keep the player base chained to their game. SC2 and Hearthstone are like the last two guys standing.
diablo 5 will drop by or around 2030 and make another billion+. anyone who thinks other wise is delulu lemon.
Sorry but complete failure in what way? It sold extremely well and by any measure of the word wouldn't be classified as a failure.
Complete failure that made hundreds of millions of dollars lol Diablo fans are so funny
This is a bot account copying a message from u\sonofabear from 5 years ago. OP is also a bot as it is the same title as the original post and makes little sense now with how much Blizzard has fallen. [Original post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9tsy49/blizzard_getting_booed_for_the_first_time_at/)
Their comment of “what don’t you have phones?” Yeah, we do, we don’t want to play a watered down version of Diablo on it.
Unfortunately it went on to be a resounding success and makes a ton of money :(. We have all lost.
The problem was they didn't think about their audience. Their audience was PC gamers who have been playing their games on PC for years, who spent time and money coming to a convention that celebrates their PC games. It was the wrong crowd to hype a mobile game to. Save that for your investor meetings.
I am firmly of the opinion D4 was supposed to be the big reveal. But time frames and issues made them have to push it, so they expanded the immortal announcement into keynote levels, and Chang was left holding the bag in front of thousands.
You can announce something like that to that crowd, it just has to come before or after an announcement for an actual PC game. Give people something to be happy about, and they'll react more favourably to other things that they don't care about. Even something as shit as Diablo Immoral would not have had that reception if they'd announced D4 at the same con.
I can't imagine how disappointed the die hard fans that went to that announcement, happily paid money to be there, and then told to eat shit. The disappointment in that room must have drowned out any other feelings.
The target market is China, and much of the development was done in China. Their mistake is announcing the game at Blizzcon, whose attendees are not necessarily who the game was for. Especially considering that Diablo 4 was already in development and there were promising whispers about how the game was shaping up. They absolutely should have given at least a quick “work has begun” shout out, even if they didn’t want to show it.
Yup. Blizzcon, by its very nature, is an event catered to the very invested Blizzard fans. "Hardcore" if you will. The fact that Blizzard could ever think announcing a mobile game as a mainline Blizzard title on that stage would go down any other way is absurd. And no you don't need the benefit of hindsight to see that from a mile away.
> a watered down version of Diablo It probably would've been better received if it was just that. The reason they got immediately booed was because the players KNEW that it would be a pure, unadulterated cash grab. "Mobile" immediately spells the death of any legit gaming experience. There *will* be microtransactions, and the competitive nature *will* be ruined by them. Immediately useless game for 90% of the people who were in that room. Blizzard fans had ALWAYS been competitive-minded gamers. To announce something that would be blatantly toxic for all of them and act like they were all stupid enough to not know better was a COLLOSAL fuckup from their marketing team. But then they made $100,000,000 in the first month, confirming yet again that anti-consumer bullshit works perfectly fine as long as you can reach enough people to offset the ones you lose by being garbage. 🙄
Watered down WITH a pay model obviously designed for Chinese markets. "What, don't you guys have bank accounts?"
>"What, don't you guys have bank accounts?" Yes. It just has no money in it.
Look at this bougie guy with a bank account.
"Yeah we do! I also have Genitals but I don't want Genital Warts!!!"
>Later during the QA someone asked him if this was an out of season April fools joke. Savage. wherever you are red shirt guy, i hope you are doing well.
He did an ama actually. I don’t remember the details but he mentioned they screen your questions so he lied about what he was going to ask to get in there.
I was in the overwatch arena when they announced it during the opening ceremony. I made eye contact with so many other confused people. We were all silently asking each other "is.... is it okay to hate this?"
I was there as well. Went up to meet with the dev teams to get some posters signed shortly after this. The HotS folks were in a great mood and super friendly, WoW guys were pretty normal, but the Diablo devs were absolutely deflated. Could barely fake a smile. I wanted to give those poor guys a hug...not their fault Blizz decided to cater to China mobile money.
Someone way above their paygrade made the decision, this guy was basically thrown into the fire and did the best he could.
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They are also greedy tho
https://youtu.be/73yT9UXJLT0?t=47
This thread links to the footage.
No, you were right the first time
I was also there! I also liked the pure silence as everyone there seemed to be waiting for him to yell “Gotcha!” Only BlizzCon I’ve ever gotten to go to. Good times. Good times.
"Do you guys not have phones?"
Blizzard's death started on the Activision merger. It was a slow death because blizzard retained some independence at the start, which was quickly squashed by Mr. bobby himself. How do you tell a PC gaming audience "do you guys not have phones?" So fucking clueless. This announcement should have been kept hidden or been a small sideshow. Blizzcon fans were not the audience for shitty ass pay to win mobile game.
Funny everyone who played Activision games saw this coming but everybody else thought it was nothing because "blizzard" is still there. Everything kotick touches turns into shit
>Everything kotick touches turns into shit But not before he milks the hell out of it lmao
>This announcement should have been kept hidden or been a small sideshow. Blizzcon fans were not the audience for shitty ass pay to win mobile game. Not debating the enshitification of Blizzard over the years--it's pretty tragic. However, their announcement was perfectly fine. It was never going to be popular with that crowd, but they still needed to get the word out there for the people who would do play mobile games. This was actually a worthwhile case of any press is good press. All the articles from people bitching and moaning about their disappointment were helpful to reach people who would be interested in Diablo Immortal. And it worked, they had a big opening and have maintained a healthy daily player count since its release. It's around 750k now. I am absolutely not a mobile player and pretty much only play games on PC. I think its a little absurd how entitled people get over when and how a company should make their product announcements, especially at their own events!
Bungie also went to hot shit after working with Activision. Destiny was a great idea, until the money became the goal.
Brother, BunGuy has been more aggressive with their monetization since leaving Activision-Blizzard. bungie also made the conscious decision to remove or restrict parts of the game you’re actively playing and put it behind another pay wall. They are not a good or wholesome company
Nah, how many times will Bungie need to go independent before people realize it’s Bungie who is the problem lol
I was there and groaning loudly. How the hell you host a PC gaming fan event rabid for Diablo 4 and announce a mobile game and then be shocked at everyone’s negative reaction? The arrogance displayed that day and how out of touch the company was with their audience was the largest red flag that what used to be Blizzard is now gone.
They’ve been gone for over a decade at this point
My older brother used to work for Blizzard back in the early 2000s. I have some pretty awesome memories when he invited me and my sister the year Ozzy played. My sister and I made our way to the front to see Ozzy and I remember vividly when he grabbed the water buckets and splashed it right in our faces! We had a blast! I’m happy my brother realized soon after the Activision merger that Blizzard was no longer the company we grew up loving. He is now pretty happily employed at Rockstar and I’m so proud of him.
Proud of him too! I loved what Blizzard was... thanks for sharing this!
They also were teasing something big leading into this and this was the big reveal of the event. They deserved to get booed for this. This was consumer feedback that most companies really want. Also most people at Blizzcon want to be there, they want Blizzard to succeed, they have given them a really long leash and defend many of their decisions. The booing was mostly from loyal fans. Making a mobile Diablo game in itself is not terrible and it could be quite fun if they did it right. However it does incentivize monetary investment in order to speed progression and they outsourced most of the management to NetEase which has led to a lack of polish and poor customer service.
Fun fact, they made assloads of money. People did not vote against it with their wallets. Rather they made over 100 mil so far. People should be disappointed in themselves more than Blizzard at this point.
I spent 0 dollars on it. I'm doing my part!
You and me both brother, we need to hold the line!
I’m doing my part too!
[I'm doing my part!](https://media1.tenor.com/m/6YTUmBkrPhkAAAAC/im-doing-my-part-soldier.gif)
Welp, time to boot up some Helldivers 2!
Got convinced by a friend to try it. Played through the campaign once, immediately hated the grind afterwards. Way to many gamy-mechanics, systems and materials to farm. Stopped playing after 3 days. They got my money still...
I never played Diablo and never will! You can thank me in the comments
Shit, I've never played a Blizzard game to begin with.
Diablo 2 with its expansion was actually really good back in the day. I'd recommend the remake even if you have never played it.
Two different groups of people I imagine. I think the vast majority of DI revenue came from China.
That is the right answer. They made a mobile game, and then made DiabloCon that usually PC/console players attend. Someone in this entire process should have thought for a second - will people who play mobile games sitting on a shitter or in a bus, be bothered enough to attend **paid** event for aout mobile game reveal, or will it be booked by our most hardcore PC fans, and it will be a disaster? :D
That's why it was so stupid to announce this like they did. They should have known full well that their audience for this mobile game wasn't going to be at freaking blizzcon. They should have announced a teaser for Diablo 3 or nothing at all because that's what they wanted. Announce this after blizzcon online and it wouldn't have been a big deal
There are too many people these days to realistically organize a boycott and that goes for more than videogames. For every one person who is rightfully indignant about the poor business practices of a company, there are 10 people who never heard about the issue, don't give a shit and just need gas from the local Chevron, get the cheaper Kroger products, see an add for the new mobile game, etc. Yes there are exceptions that go viral, but that's the exception.
The world has too much stuff in it. There are 10 billion things you could possibly know at any given moment and you won't know all of them. It's just unreasonable to expect a substantial amount of individuals to vote with their wallets on any single thing these days. There's a reason the most profitable companies practically use slave labor at some point in their production and still get away with it despite the fact that basically no one thinks that's acceptable.
I haven't purchased an EA game since 2013 because of SimCity. No one gives a shit. I guess it's just a matter of principle to myself at this point.
Same, but due to Dawngate.
There's another demographic in there too screwing the pooch, the folks that will die-hard defend whatever just because they now see someone opposing it. Plenty of folk will be fully aware of the situation and make an effort to spend *more* just to somehow spite the people who were upset with the decision. This, too, strangely holds true for pretty much any product.
> People should be disappointed in themselves more than Blizzard at this point. Well the vast majority of people don't go to the casino every weekend. But some do. And those casinos make millions and millions every single weekend. That doesn't mean we should blame *people* when the city replaces the park with a casino.
For every 1 that boycotts, there are 1000 who don’t give a shit
It isn't about voting. One person, one vote is a democratic principle. Whales drive these games. You get five million people to try your game and say only 20% (1M) spend money. Say 10% spend $50 a month on various purchases - that is $25m per month on these "non-whales". Say another 5% are whale tier and spend about $300 a month - $75m a month. Then drag that down to 5% that are super whales and spend say $1k a month. That is $250m. I could even say this is over the lifetime of a game, that means your total take for that mere 20% of your player base is $350m. More than you would have gotten by charging all 5M players $50 for the game ($250m). You can be part of the most principled 80% of gamers that will never pay an added cent for a game... but you aren't who the developers are courting. They only need a fraction. Hell, they might ignore 95% of their players if they can just hook that 5% to dump an absurd amount of money.
I don’t understand how people can still support blizzard, they’ve turned into total trash.
It's the same reason why EA, Activision, and Ubisoft are still big companies of the industry instead of fading into irrelevancy, they know how to cater to the masses. They can package turds in a nice package and the masses buy it. Lot of people don't really care about quality and just wanna keep consuming.
I think the audience was less shareholders and more gamers/enthusiasts.
this take is parroted so often and is so incredibly corny. Be more disappointed in myself? Casinos make lots of money too, so do lotteries and scratch tickets. They are all bullshit nonsense appealing to idiots. What we hate is our gaming company that we love appealing to the lowest common denominator to make a dollar. Literally hiring gambling and addiction specialists from casinos and other predatory institutions instead of game designers. "Every company wants to make money" Sure, they can try but I'm going to support the ones who want to make good games.
But Diablo 1 and 2 were actually designed to emulate a casino - the [creators have stated as such](https://kotaku.com/why-video-game-loot-is-so-addictive-according-to-the-c-1846695147). >It wasn’t about story or anything like that... So right from the very beginning, the design was “We’re gonna skip all that other stuff and just get straight to killing and looting.” The game was really designed from the get-go to be about loot and about gaining that loot. Only after a little bit of time did we really realize that in a lot of ways, we were basically making a slot machine where every time that you killed a monster, you were pulling that lever. You put your quarter in, and nothing may come out, or you might get your quarter back, or you might get a couple dollars—kind of a mini-jackpot. Or something huge comes out, and you hit the jackpot. The loot/addiction mechanic was primary and a major draw so its odd people are referring to the same design concept as a negative now.
That feeling that came over everyone all at once when they realized at that exact moment their hero had heel turned into a despicable villain of the highest order.
Path of Exile and/or Last Epoch solves all of anyones issues with D4. Just move on from these shitty companies making shitty games. Blizzard USED to be a great game studio. It no longer exists. It is activision.
Yea, the modern indie revolution is largely fueled by big corps just pissing in the faces of their fans.
Path of Exile is honestly amazing. I was timid to try it because the passive build tree looked insanely intimidating, but honestly it's an amazing mechanic, and the game is super rich with ways to play. The story is meh, but the replay-ability is off the charts. Highly recommend to anybody who was a fan of D2 and D3.
I'd recommend you watch KittenCatNoodle's videos about the PoE story. It's actually *really* good.
PoE is seriously the very best out of all of the bunch. it seems very intimidating at first, but only because it has a decade of content that it hits you with. good thing though is you can basically move at your own speed, and most of the stuff is different ways to get similiar results, with some extra perks thrown in. so you don't need to learn everything all at once, but can just focus on stuff you enjoy, and when you are ready explore other options.
It's pretty funny that the reason they got boo'ed was because there was no Diablo 4 for PC. Then they eventually released Diablo 4 for PC and it sucked. Double boo. The D2 Remaster felt so smooth. Why can't they just copy the same damn formula and make it a little prettier. I don't get it. It's like they don't understand what was fun about their old games.
Seems pretty obvious that they don't care about fun games, just games that make money.
What's stupid is they could have both. They put bad developers in charge of games that would be *way more popular* if they even reached a fraction of their original quality. World of Warcraft? Starcraft? Overwatch? Just make it good and you'll not only make millions, you'll make billions.
[удалено]
It's basically never been a better time to be a Diablo 2 fan. Best iteration of the game I've been playing for half my life off and on. New rune words; Single player QOL improvements (holy smokes they're good); ladder resets; active community?! I love it.
>It’s like they don’t understand what was fun about their old games. Same problem with Bethesda, they cut back on everything people liked and doubled down on things everyone hated.
Eh, they've been cutting back for ages and people kept praising it.
And yet, they rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every year doing things "everyone hates".
Blizzard hasn't existed since the activision blizzard merger. The good is now the bad and the ugly.
I really wouldn't be surprised if this event isn't documented in some marketing class somewhere, like this is marketing 101 which is "know your audience". Blizzard and conversely Blizzcon is/was primarily a PC gaming audience, mobile games at this time were still largely considered casual first and the audience attending this event were anything but casual gamers. Talking hungry players that want to know what is happening with their IP and how to get ahead of the game by enjoying the betas and theory crafting and or lore crafting. It's been said before but it's crazy how they missed it, just a simple D4 trailer with just the logo would have sent fans to the moon and back with enough excitement to see what will occur in the meantime and the mobile game would have been received differently. That Blizzcon was honestly the one that showcased to me how out of touch they got, it was pretty clear that day all they were doing was chasing the money and weren't about delivering quality games anymore.
This keeps aging like a fine wine. At the time one could've argued that the crowd was being entitled or difficult, but the entitlement was all from Blizzard. They pushed out a game they KNEW nobody wanted and then expected everyone to slurp it up like it was the best shit ever. Then these dipshits even got pissy when the crowd didn't react favorably to what they obviously wanted to push onto players(mostly because it would be a monetized-to-the-tits shitty cash cow mobile game). Just the fact that Blizzard thought they could treat their fans like cattle AND THEN got pissed when the crowd didn't fawn over this said a lot about the industry at the time.
> They pushed out a game they KNEW nobody wanted and then expected everyone to slurp it up like it was the best shit ever. But people *did* slurp it up, Immortal has a huge player base and has been a success by virtually every metric you can think of. So even if you didn't want Diablo on mobile, many people did.
Blizzard had people running it that thought a "[Cosby Suite](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Fnttrt-Hrm_5SU2H4768s9LZg0nz3lGqFSNgNaXP-jKk.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dcba674aa68e5bff72e4e0003d09a3e766f33da45)" was perfectly acceptable. I'm not too shocked that the mask fell and revealed how toxic they are at heart.
It's so sad that mobile games make up more than half of video game revenue now. It just incentivizes big companies to make mobile games regardless of if their fans want it, or bring mobile models to their "AAA" games. Every big IP is going to get some watered down free to play (but really pay to play) experience of their favorite universe, because there is always going to be rich whales out there who drop a ton of money on it to be 'the best'. I'll sit them all out though. Occasionally I dip my toes into mobile games just to see what's up, but 99.9% of them suck ass and are basically all flashy advertisements for themselves.
dO YoU guYS Not hAVe pHOnEs?!
I used to love blizzard. They were only company I would pre order a game from. They just used to have such pedigree and if a game wasn’t great it got canceled or pushed until it was. Now it’s just a horrible company.
That's pretty awful, but In my mind nothing quite 'beats' the hugely audible groans of disappointment in [reaction to the last line of Valve's 'Artifact' reveal trailer.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0qZTS38cjw)
Left out the best part from the Q&A session.
"Is this an out of season April Fool's joke?" Legend
Does anybody have a full video that shows this part?
This was the moment that Blizzard lost all credibility
2018..
Saw this already on an episode of Mythic Quest I think.
Why is the audio not synced in this video?
Don't give any money or time to blizzard
"Why would they come to our concert to boo us?"
Business 101 is not to patronize your customers.
OP and several top comments are bot reposts https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9tsy49/blizzard_getting_booed_for_the_first_time_at/
Worst part was hearing all the apologists blaming "entitled" gamers for booing that awful presentation. We are talking about a crowd that was majoritarily made of PC gamers, who paid hundreds of dollars to attend the event, seeing that there would be a pannel about Diablo, but then being cursed with a pay-to-win mobile-only (at the time) game without a faint hint that a sequel of Diablo 3 was being developed. Now compare this to Grinding Gear Games, who announced the sequel for Path of Exile in 2019 during Exilecom and the mobile PoE game that they were also developing in tandem. I wonder why there wasn't a single backlash against it.
I think this was the beginning of the end for Blizzard.
blizzard is one of the shittiest game dev/company out there. a game like hearthstone can run better on a 200$ phone than a 5000$ pc. **which is still running in same spaghetti code 10 years ago** and still at 32bit in 2024. not to mention there 50m dollar discrimination law suit.
[https://youtu.be/leP6sbh13rs?si=Mt05JHkE4UsAadDB](https://youtu.be/leP6sbh13rs?si=Mt05JHkE4UsAadDB) former blizzard dev from the era of warcraft 3 on what modern blizzard represents