Yet another sad story is story of Project: Revolution. An independent, dedicated team of folks who worked really hard to make a Starcraft 1 mod, but remastered on the Warcraft 3 engine (at the time) to get Starcraft 1 into 3-D. It died on the vine and folks eventually just slowly left and the project was abandoned, but it's yet another sad story in the Blizzard tale... 😞
You can always count on Bellular to present completely bleached "nobody is ever responsible for anything" type of corpo talk. Why blizzard failed? You heard all the names in this clip over and over again, including the decision making processes. All bellular provided was smoke screen and erasing the connection between them, presenting you with a soft spoken comfy little monument to what corporate speak is.
Imo Bobby is also just a symptom. The root of all the financial decisionmaking is them becoming a publically traded company. Your financial decisions are no longer your own and you no longer act upon what you think is best for your company or your customers but the shareholders. The goalpost changes from making money to making all the money. It goes way beyond financial discipline
Being public isn’t an issue per se. Whats good for the customers is good for the company and the shareholders. The problem is the current system’s timeline. Companies are always chasing a higher quarter instead of making good long term decisions. Imagine if you could only trade stock during a window every 6 months or annually - companies would almost instantly start thinking long term again, even if publicly traded.
laws around investor, shareholders and executives desperately need to change. the idea that an executive's primary legal responsibility is to always make more profit for shareholders and they can literally be sued for knowingly doing something that doesnt immediately funnel more returns to shareholders is just insane. even if you like capitalism and want it to succeed, the current corporate/investor paradigm is toxic, grotesquely top-heavy and unsustainable for society at large.
I disagree with that. If Valve were a public company, nobody would be telling them to change what they're doing, and even though Ubisoft are a public company the shareholders are telling them to change what they're doing because what they're doing is bad for customers and therefore they're losing customers.
@@highestsettings Sweet sweet summer child. That's not how going public works. Because without fail everything change the moment you go public, it happen time and time again. And if you were bad private you can be worse publically traded.
how the hell does a soap man get free reign over an industry hes never worked in before? its as far removed as you can get yet nobody was double checking his work?
@@markfreeman4727 It all works out because nowadays you don't need companies to actually produce anything of value. Look at all the tech giants running massive losses forever and still staying alive by sheer force of investment because they maybe could eventually become a monopoly and get their own personal license to print money. You only need to be able to hoodwink investors, and seeing as influential investors tend to be coked out of their mind venture capitalists, people like Kotick can get them all hot and bothered because he is part of their caste. The contemporary economy seems to work entirely via CEOs pump-and-dump'ing stocks for themselves and their close friends, and then jumping off with a golden parachute. The money they earn is essentially not derived from profits anymore, but stems from the investments of small investors who get rekt through insider trading, pumped up stock values by downsizing, buy-backs and fudging the numbers, and on top of that creative tax dodges.
@@markfreeman4727 i'd say that the fresh outside perspective would have been desirable for a CFO rather, the lack of bias and familiarity meant that he wouldn't lean towards anything that he couldn't be persuaded with they need to quantify the value of project proposals and give him numbers and graphs on the other hand, if they hired a CFO who was into tabletops and DnD, he would have been more partial towards RPGs that his eyes would light up even and completely ignore the part where you tell him that it would take 8 years to make the game, and he himself would probably even try to push one of his random DnD campaigns
Game making is, basically, ART. No differ than songs, cookings, novels, movies, paintings, and sculptures. Finance people, Stock Market people, should just be there to watch over and guide the expenditure of the art Producer. What Kotick did, is like turning a beloved mom-and-pops famous deli into a MacDonald-ish slop. And he doesn't even like to eat at that deli, or, actually, any kind of deli.
@@TheRogueWolf what? Finance has funded and spread art from the beginning. Rich fat cat types have been the ones sponsoring and buying from craftsmen and artistd since the beginning of time. Outside of charity, when you give money to people you expect something worth what you put in. Otherwise you wouldn't care about how good/bad blizzard is, you'd just keep paying them because it funds their devs and artists. It's the same for investors, just they put money in before the project comes out.
@@Runescape12345 The difference between then and now is that usually the "finance" historically was in the form of a transaction of some kind. The wealthy would commission an artist to do a piece, or provide funding for an artist that they liked to simply make art without having to worry about money (a patron). There was no investment into the art as a business venture with the goal of making a profit outside of specific instances (most often theatre productions and the like). The rich were largely customers like you and I are today. With the publicly traded companies of today, investors care about short term profits first and second, and the quality of the product comes third or later. Investors are risk-averse and their stock value must go up every quarter. Art is all about taking risks and pipe dreams - because it's based on passion and not numbers. Game devs largely don't want to make mtx skins; they want to make games that they'd want to play. But the money is in the mtx, so the company says mtx or else.
Ill never forgive them for the way they dropped Heroes of the Storm, the "love letter to all their franchise", the best moba ever designed and more importantly the game that had a very and growing playerbase. And they killed it just because it didn't magically overtook LoL out of nowhere.
the game still has a community to this day and to be fair with what blizzard did become, it's better for the game to no longer have any important update or they gonna throw micro transaction bs in some way and ruin what remain of the game.
I used to play every single Blizzard game. Even the once that didnt have my interest at first. Starcraft 1 and even 2 are both amazing. I feel for you as a Warcraft and Diablo fan.
@@svsv1191 The sad thing is Blizz is to lazy to even add more skins. There are subfactions of the Protoss that still have not been added despite the assets already being in game.
Actually had a personal experience with "hijacking their platform for a political message" My wife and I were in attendance for the Overwatch WC group stage games back in 2016 and were treated pretty unfairly by the staff and it left an extremely sour taste in our mouth (could be wrong but it was the year when taiwan sent the APAC pro team Flashwolves to the event and it was hosted at the Santa Monica Hanger). We were the only TW supporters in the joint alongside with 5 others and we went extremely early for front row seats since it was the first sporting event for my wife (who is taiwanese) and 2 of my personal friends are on the team. Like any sensible national team supporters we brought with us the national flag and during the TW games we were flying it to show our support, again, like any sensible national team supporters. Throughout the event we were approached by the camera crew multiple times to stop waving the flag or showing any signs (that they provided material and marker for on site for everyone to make their own signs) featuring the national flag. We refused as we really didn’t do anything wrong by the event rules or dangerous by any means, we were even tame compared to supporters of other national teams. Things quickly got weird as time goes on. During the TW matches the camera crew began to actively avoid filming us or showing us on the live feed (*the 7 ONLY TW supporters sitting in the front row during their teams game)* and every time they HAD to show crowd reaction they either cut away extremely quickly or just straight up shoot the other way when the TW team were making plays. They repeatedly threatened kick us out and at one point attempted to take our flags in between games. We were forced at the end to hide everything from view from the staff members for the latter half of the event bc we wanted to keep that flag which we had the whole team autographed on. That flag still hangs on my wall to this day and it was a reminder of an extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant experience with blizzard. For people who may be curious or wanted to verify my story, try finding the VODs of the event. Overwatch WC group stage 2016 (again could be wrong abt the year). Team USA and team GB were on the same group, i believe Korea was as well. I was the chubby guy in the front row in the green Lucio tee. I used to be a huge blizzard fan, even applied to their music team couple of times bc they seemed to me like the dream game studio. Not any more.
That's hella rough, and absolutely vile. I'm sorry you guys went through that garbage, and I hope ya'll are faring better nowadays. I hated Blizzard before, now I hate 'em even more. On the upside, with how horribly the CCP is fumbling China, to the point that even the elderly are protesting, I have my suspicions that Taiwan will be just fine. For all their grandstanding, they can't even manage their own people in times of peace. Nevermind the fact that apparently quite a few of their nukes are full of water, and corruption has crippled even their military to an extent... Plus the fact that the US and a lot of allied powers, India included, have beef with the PRC outright... *_A Chinese-Taiwanese War would be as much of a fatal mistake as the Russo-Ukrainian War has been for the Kremlin._* _(Forgive me for all the editing, gotta word things carefully here.)_ Habitual Linecrosser *(a relatively high-ranking Army Officer)* calls them "West Taiwan" for a reason, my guy. Besides, while the CCP say they'll be invading Taiwan by 2027, it's questionable if they'll even last that long to begin with, given how they have their hands full as it is just putting out each new sociopolitical dumpster fire that crops out every other day, like the Mooncake Scandal...or IBM and many other US-based corporations pulling out of China, causing a partial brain drain over to India...
At least they've been wearing biodegradeable clothes which have now rotted and revealed the decaying flesh underneath. They could have been wearing forever chemicals :)
The Blizzard story is the story of countless corporations: people in suits simply just don't qualify as human anymore, and they've lost all their insight on what actually matters to people who aren't in suits. If it involves the human experience and not hard numbers, they simply don't grasp what to do, and that leads to unending PR gaffes, misjudgments of their audience, and countless products that failed to get off the ground.
Not really. its called corporatization. Basically after a certain size the upper management is seated too high above the ground level to understand the business. ALSO the corp ends up being run by executives pulled from its marketing team. ALSO the highest echelons of power are basically seats that the aristocrats trade to one another's offspring. ALSO becoming publicly traded means a company closes off the MAJORITY of its potential experiments and possible future plans and actions, it cuts all timelines out in favor of only being able to reach for the timeline that increases profits every quarter.
@@hugoclarke3284 I think what I said is very in line with his point, even if said with all the derision I feel towards Blizzard's leadership: there is a consistency among leadership, not specific leadership, but leadership itself, to misjudge the needs and wants of consumers, because many of these people simply do not come from a background of playing or making games and can't intuit how this market/community works.
@@WhoTookPlockrock No… no, this isn’t it at all. It’s the far-left, gender studies freaks who have taken over the game design and implementation processes and poured their demented DEI ideology into everything they touch. Period. This has nothing to do with pEoPLe in sUitS. Stop being so gullible.
Considering they wished to update Wc3 as well to their current, many times over retconned lore, Im not too sad. Wc3 was a good game, but it also had one of the best story campaigns of all time. (including TFT) Warcraft4 wouldnt have had that, even if it was a good game mechanically.
Well looking at reforge, it's better that it didn't happen. Now I still believe they blizz is secretly fixing reforge and when it's ready, they will announce it in a massive redemption arc . Also when they have enough money, wc4 is still possible.
@@Grivehn The best thing they could possibly do if WC4 were to happen is to completely ignore WoW. Start fresh right from WC3. Personally, I always wanted WC3 to be like the Alpha build of the game where you literally had a small handful of units, but the development went a different direction. Maybe in the future WC4 could be that, but I doubt we'll ever see it happen.
The trend I keep hearing through this video. Is the same one I have been seeing across all of the entertain and just business world at large. You always need MORE profits. Just having profits at all is not good enough. We made a million dollars before now we need to make 10 million or else we are considered FAILING. Then we need to make 100 million, then 500 million, then a billion, 10 billion... This methodology in business is obviously unsustainable. Eventually everyone has enough soap.
Welcome to the joys of investment capitalism. The investors aren't there just for profit. They require constant growth of said profit. And as we all know *nothing* grows forever. And so investors will just go fly off to the next growth thing until that too collapses. The fact that a majority of publishers and such have tied themselves to investor growth is what will eventually kill them because once you burn off the good will of customers to keep the lights on via investment once they leave you are left with nothing.
Because buying stocks isn't about looking the company and betting on its long term success. It's an expectation that it will be an opportunity to see it grow 5% and then sell the second it drops. Stock price is also how they secure loans, so a high stock price allows for larger loans.
You dont seem to understand that eventual collapse is part of the plan. Its part of the lifecycle of a corporation. It starts with one or more dudes who start a business and develop a product portfolio. This company is then evaluated and the founders can start selling shares to other people to get paid. If the business grows big enough the shareholders can then decide to take it public on the stock market. The shares are then bought by investment firms who will suck all the profit out of the company, downsize all the talent to cut costs, profiteer off the goodwill of the customers until that is gone, and then sell the empty husk of the business for scrap once they sucked out all the money they could. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone got paid. The product got made. And once the market was saturated, everyone moved on. Stagnation is not a good thing. The death of one company clears space for another one to pop up with new innovative ideas. Blizzard is dead. But there will be a new company that makes better games than Blizzard. Matter of time.
@@RocKM001 It's not all 'investors' that do that, its SHORT TERM investors. Look at Warren Buffett, he never buys a company to FLIP it, he buys it to hold it FOREVER and enjoy a steady dividend payment, most companies today don't even pay dividends anymore. What we need are laws to end all this short term flipping and pump and dump BS which is destroying the country.
They really think every single game is going to magically produce hype and build a fanbase immediately. They refuse to build anything up, it all has to be immediate results. It's like it's being run by toddlers. Their eyes are glued to their bank accounts and their attention spans are like a petulant child's. "nooo work on my thing it'll be soooo cool. It didn't work? I didn't like it anyway, scrap it"
It's because the people behind the AAA companies have nothing to do with games, and no interest. They simply don't know anything about the business, which is why they've basically run every big company's reputation into the ground.
No, the real tragedy here didn't start with Vivendi, or Blizzard. It started much, much, earlier... at Activision. The founding of Activision started when some greedy, selfish exec told four developers that they were no more important than the assembly line workers loading Atari cartridges in a box. The so-called Gang of Four built a company that dared to challenge corporate greed. And like everyone else, they lost.
Activision is a PLAGUE of a company, gheez when i was younger i had seen all the crap that Activision had done over the years, to titles and studios. Today, there is no purpose for having or being backed by a large corporation to create, build, staff and fund a new development game. These BIG publishers are done!
The difference between mike and bobby bout the monetization. Mike did it cause if they didnt, the cost would go up to keep the game running. Bobby would do it regardless of profit just to get more profit. More yachts
The problem with these companies is that they only chase billion dollar ideas and ignore or dismiss good multi-million dollar ideas. As a result, it's just a slow slide into irrelevancy.
theres not compromise you can't just make a healthy profit, you must make MORE money FOREVER which is impossible, but nobody notices the iceberg for some reason
@@JRileyD They thought it could have been one, that's his point. Mobile game, low dev time and art cost, microtransactions, huge addressable audience (own phone, like games).
Yep this is the core problem of most American managment, the un willingness to settle for a healthy reliable profit, only making the MOST is good enough, it's all this 80's Gordon Gecko brain poinsoning. Notable the richest man in the world Warren Buffet built his fortune on doing exactly the opposite which just goes to show how self-defeating this whole ideology is.
8:50 - "that doesnt make Armin bad, its just lack of understanding". I disagree, lack of understanding is exactly what makes him bad, because it leads to bad thinking and bad decisions for the players.
@@Nightstalker314OP is probably referring to when Blizzard was kowtowing to China by banning people expressing pro-Hong Kong sentiment a few years back.
@@Nightstalker314 Or direct statements on social media that are poltical, not to mention the blatantly obvious pandering of specific groups and ideologies instead of making a good product.
kotick just didnt understand creativity and like all professional execs wished games were like car tires, or bread, which you can mass produce and shift them every day with minor recipe changes or tread patterns. probably never understood why gamers complained about that.
Problem is that while Bobby was wrong in his approach, taking "business" part from the equation killed so many great studios or they got sold to something like EA. Bad business decisions will kill you, no matter the creativity of your team.
Kaplan knew. Too many cooks in the kitchen ruins the meal. Adding more people to a team especially a whole new team is just going to create more problems and issues and I'm sure Jeff didn't want that at all.
My thoughts exactly. He even mentioned it in the video then says Kaplan made the wrong choice for the players. I don't think it would have turned out any better with another development team. It would just slow down development in a different way.
When Jeff Kaplan, the face of OW left, I basically wrote it off. He was the most involved in the game from the start, and him leaving meant that he saw no future in the game. Turns out, he was correct.
No idea, but there was an issue on one level or another where after the launch of OW1 new content came at a crawl, from a major company with abundant resources. They absolutely failed to capitalise on and sustain it, and there's no question there. They also failed to develop the PvE that allegedly was a big part of what they were doing while not producing content. Was it a lack of people, a lack of focus, poor decision making, poor management? No idea. But the idea that they could have sustained the game while working on new things simultaneously with more resources is not at all unreasonable given how financially successful it was. Smaller teams managed it with fewer resources much more consistently and rapidly. If you want to say it's "blizzard polish" that prevents that, then maybe you do need more resources. If the idea is that only that small team could do that job well, then one might question why they failed such a large proportion of the time to do so. After all, extremely low productivity either means enormous inefficiencies or rejecting a lot of work internally, or just not doing the work.
Steve Jobs had a great take on this. What happens when the bean counters take over from the creative talent. So far, I don't think he has ever been wrong, in regards to, what happens post bean counter takeover.
Honestly, the more time goes on the more based I realize Steve Jobs was and also what he really did. Steve Jobs role was to be a bigger more unreasonable, unhinged and unrelenting piece of shit then the people who wanted water down the quality of the product for whatever reason and those people were everywhere and his task was impossible.
Ironically he were very much like them when it came to business. Hes worse than bobby. Their factories literally had iron bars, on the windows,so people couldn't jump out
@@GoalOrientedLifting Yah, the only difference is that he was a monster is the service of making an incredible high quality product and profit. Whereas most our business monsters are just trying get themselves rich and destroy the quality of the product to do so. It’s like. Look man the CEO bar is real low ain’t gona lie
@@brandonedlin2052 I signed out of pursuing luxury branded goods years ago. I realized that Gucci clothes are made in the same sweatshop factories as cheap Sinsay clothes. So if there's no diffrence, why bother paying 10 times more? 10 years ago an iPhone stood out from other smartphones. It offered on-par performance with half of the on-paper computing power. And its design was different from other phones. Today you can't even tell an iPhone from Xiaomi or Samsung at a first glance if there's no brand logo. Everything looks the same. "Default design" penetraded just about any venue of our lives. Phones, SUV cars, fashion, computers, TV's, anything.
I have to disagree quite a bit by the 8:55 mark. "Spreadsheet guys" are absolutely one of the largest problems not just in gaming, but the entire world. These robots in human flesh are completely apart from reality, think in a manner that is utterly inhuman, act in a manner that is completely alien and have neither idea nor *interest* in the consequences of their actions and plans. They live in a world of "good number go up," care nothing for how it is accomplished, and brand it as 'data driven' to be in line with the rest of their soulless existence.
Yeah, people like this treat people not as individuals with wants and needs, but as just what they call a full department: Human Resources. A resource to be expended and discarded once it has forgone its use.
honestly, i was a massive blizzard fanboy from 2000 (release of diablo 2) all the way to about 2010. the thing is that blizzard was sold in 2008 to activision. but to me it was incredibly noticeable that everything had changed in wow when cataclysm came out and then we got that horrid release of diablo 3 in 2012. and you can look at the numbers and see for yourself just how many of us abandoned ship after wotlk ended. it's not just that we "got old", but it was really an end of an era of great blizzard games. the fact that so many people still "hung in there" even today is really just a testament to how great the original product was despite activision trying to squeeze it for everything it worse at the expense of both its longevity and its player base. you can look at games like heroes of the storm, hearthstone, overwatch, and even diablo 4 and see the potential those games had yet here we are and very few people are left feeling excited about those games. its just corporate greed that has sucked the soul out of their products and now its microsofts turn to squeeze the last drops out of these franchise if there's anything left.
Yup, this was me. Left by mid Cata. Came back for Diablo III as I waited so many years and wanted to see how it turned out. Left a while after RoS came out. Never played or cared about a single Blizz game ever, ever again. All looked like pure corporate slop.
@@Ohdeerhere SC2 was my first red flag when they insisted on splitting the game into 3. It was the most obvious way to squeeze out value and prolong the game pre live service. They were already attempting to shove needless always online crap as well to test the waters. D3 came and it confirmed that the Blizz I loved was no more.
Mid Cata was also my jumping off point for a long time. I did come back and play a bit of D3 but that didn't hold my interest long. Only thing I've played from Blizzard since is Diablo 4 and that felt like a wasted purchase even though I bought it on sale. Still plagued with lag and other weird issues you'd have thought they could have had fixed long before a year after its release.
After the takeover by Activision, it was all about just cranking out quantity of content and titles or whatever it was, instead of quality, to the potential of perhaps i always wanted a Starcraft MMORPG, which never happened. Blizzard is in name only, nothing exist from the past.
Whomever made the decision to take or make Blizzard a publicly traded company is the one who ultimately killed the company. Name one AAA studio that is tradeable on an exchange which still holds the high regard of gamers and fans? ... thought so.
I’ve never seen a game triple dipping on monetization as successfully as WoW was back in its Hay day. It got you to pay full price for the game and expansions, then pay a monthly subscription, and on top of that Micro transactions. Given how successful WoW was at milking its audience, that makes it all so confusing how they could simply allow the developers to ruin the game via bad design decision. They cooked the golden goose.
Idk, I don't remember the additional mtx back in WotLK, but then again I stopped playing WoW mid Cata as Blizzard started to really stink like the rotting corpse by that time
This is precisely HOW they cooked the golden goose, the customer are your golden eggs, you break into their savings too often, you build resentments and irritation that induces apathy if not bankruptcy. It's like if you stripmine a mountain you own too efficiently, sure you get more money, but if you then need to clean it up and become out of work with too much unused hardware you cannot sell, you've screwed yourself.
Every decision can cause friction. I feel it in my own work. The frictionfrom other teams diminishes my own outlook on things and causes a worse sentiment if the company and products. Put that in the creative works and i can't imagine how bad it would feel. Add forced12h shifts and terrible nonsense deadlines and oof.
It was inevitable. The great thing about Vanilla, TBC and WotLK was that almost everybody knew the lore, since the story follows their Warcraft games. Personally, it was amazing to go through Dark Portal for the first time and it was also amazing to see all the heroes we used to control in those games (although many of them went insane and became bosses in dungeons/raids). It´s kinda sad, they didn´t continue with the RTS in order to expand the lore and prepare players for future events. It was just abandoned. W3 Reforged was the finishing blow.
@@Morpheus-pt3wq why expand the lore through games when you can have someone write a novel for your franchise and milk that additional income stream for free?
I still can't forgive Blizzard for deleting my copy of Overwatch 1 from existence to force me into Overwatch 2. If they didn't want to provide any more additional content for the first game, fine, I get that, but don't simply destroy it by overwriting it with it's own sequel. Imagine if installations of Starcraft 2 simply removed Starcraft 1 and further that all copies of Starcraft 1 simply stopped working entirely.
It's such a simple reason there's no way you don't understand it. It's the same reason valve removed csgo: they don't want to maintain 2 games, they don't want to separate the community into 2, they don't want to increase queue times
Agreed. I blindly preordered overwatch 2 for the PVE and to get into the OW2 beta, only to find out the game is free to play and no pve. I already owned overwatch. Literally paid $40 for an expansion and they deleted my game. They won't ever get another dollar from me.
@@zilliq-qz5uw I don't care what THEY want. They stole the game I bought back from me. That's inexcusable. Also, CSGO is still available. It's a "beta optin" setting that allows both games to exist on your PC, fully playable, simultaneously. Like I said, I don't expect them to keep updating the old game. They can just leave it be. I just want to still have access to it. As for "dividing the base", that's up to us, the players. WE decide if the "player base" gets divided, not them. But, once again, would you argue that for Starcraft 1 and 2?
@@Dark_Jaguar sc2 is a brand new game compared to sc1, with completely revamped races, new campaign, new engine. It's 2 different games. Also 12 years elapsed between brood war and wings of liberty. Csgo to cs2 as well as ow1 to ow2 are mere engine upgrade, the gameplay didn't change except from 6v6 to 5v5 and subticks/smokes.
@@zilliq-qz5uw Yes, the gameplay changed, and so the past should be PRESERVED, forever! I lost my old game, and they demanded I pay to get all the characters "back" in the new game, which offered fewer gameplay modes than the first at launch. They should have kept the original around. It would cost them nothing to just toss in a LAN play mode and call it a day. It BARELY would cost them anything to just keep hosting the multiplayer matches. Stop defending them. You don't get anything out of it. Be more selfish.
Heroes being shut down really killed Blizzard for me, they focused so much on the esport aspect of it they ignored the great game they had. And then killed it because it didnt make infinite money
Core blizzard is dead and has been for a long time and will never return and Microsoft isn’t going to make it better ,this obsession with live service , loot boxes , always online and corporate greed has killed blizzards ability to make legit real games , and it’s killing the industry as a whole I just look at Mike Ms new production and his studios are literally doing the same shit that people are sick of and these new studios were supposed to not do.
Lets not forget Kotick covered up years of sexual harassment and also threatened to kill an assistant. An Activision employee committed suicide after a photo of her privates was circulated at a company party. The dude is an absolute cyst of a human being and painting him as "just a businessman who liked money is disingenuous."
This should matter least to everyone. A me also bunch of nothing. Now we have a f3m4le filled mess of a dev team who have turned wow into the most soy filled alphabet army pile of crap. Bring back the boys club please.
I hate Blizzard as much as the next guy for what they have done to my favourite franchises, but I don't believe any of these rumours at all. They welcomed DEI into their workplace and had a massive influx of young female employees, straight out of radical left wing universities. It naturally follows that an avalanche of unsubstantiated accusations about SA and grape follows straight after that, with zero prosecutions of course (because the criminal standard of evidence is never met). Then, all of the people accused are fired without recourse or due process (e.g. the McCree voice actor), leaving behind a workforce of incompetent diversity hires who hate video games, hate Blizzard's franchises, and hate their core audience. Now all Blizzard can do is spit garbage out every year.
People spending money on garbage products is why we're where we are. We can blame Bobby all we want but the people consuming his shit are the real problem. There's no supply without demand.
Not true, actually. It's a tendency people have to reach that conclusion, but the reason there have been tons of great games is precisely that the development industry is extremely broad and diverse. Blizzard might not make those games, but you still get your Disco Elysium, your Baldur's Gate 3, your Outer Wilds, whatever it is you liked and enjoyed. You might not get a game you might love from a Blizzard IP but that is never guaranteed. Yes the incentive structure at large publicly traded companies is to make the most money for the least cost. But they aren't the whole market. And you can't stop people throwing away money, so there's no point worrying about microtransactions unless they are explicitly predatory in the underlying psychology. And that's a matter for legislation and regulation, not consumers. If all you want is more warcraft, then, well, doubtless Blizzard will make that. If that IP is all you want, then you'll get it. If you wanted specific games that they might have made and didn't, that's never guaranteed. And if you want to support a particular genre, you do that by supporting the genre, not a company.
@@simonkapadia7582 So why would Blizzard make a new Starcraft when they can make much more money selling 1 mount and 1 lvl 80 boost on wow for almost no development cost? If people rejected those things back then or now they would have to make new games instead of milking whales, that's a fact.
@@Kross415 because (potential) customer perception is essential for long-term success. Yes, the mounts might make more profit, but they do nothing for the reputation of the company. For a long time, Blizzard had a crazy number of customers who weren't just fans of specific products, but fans of the company itself. These customers would consume most, if not all, of what the company produced. It ensured that it was difficult for a product to not at least be somewhat profitable and it gave the company the freedom to explore new ideas and search for the next big thing. Even a product that failed to produce astronomical profits was a success if it pleased the consumers. Those loyal customers would proceed to line Blizzard's pockets via other channels once they moved on from that one specific product. Now, that loyalty is mostly gone and products have to earn a much larger part of their customer base. Those customers switch to products from different companies much more easily now. It makes the development of new products a riskier endeavour. Yet, without those new products, sustained success is damn near impossible. That's the problem with approaching business purely from a sales perspective: it fails to take secondary effects into account. In any case, wanting to profit from whales is fine (although, arguably, morally questionable), but you still want as many of those as possible. They're easier to attract when the developer inspires confidence in the future of the product, both in terms of longevity and quality. Public perception matters a lot in that regard.
So Kotick wasn't a bad leader for making a bunch of bad decisions, he was a bad leader because he didn't stop them from happening. Glad we cleared that up. He's also been Mr. Crabs since grade school.
Imagine: Gothic / ElderScrolls style massive semi-open world action rpg, were you play as a farmer->footman->knight->lord/paladin from Stormwind Starts in gnoll war, then troll war, then first war and finally second war You see basically the entire continent, meet some of the famous characters, take part in world-altering events Expansion style dlcs adding bonus content and new mechanics / ways to play
@@Nightstalker314 that would a mmorpg and I'm talking rpg, also having a life service mmo game as a preguel to another would create lore issues very fast. Not that any of it matters with current day blizzard
@@cathulionetharn5139 Okay, maybe started on the wrong foot with calling it "world of". but I'd agree it should be a session based game set in a restricted time period within the story of Warcraft 2.
The curse of every publicly traded company: your ACTUAL customers are the people your stockholders are looking to sell their stocks to with a profit. Your ACTUAL product is increased stock value.
"He was tired of fighting Bobby" I met Mike Morhaime at a small game dev backyard BYOB gathering in Israel, IIRC circa 2014 or 2016. To say he looked tired would be an understatement. And it's not to say that he simply looked physically tired, as if it was jet lag. He looked mentally exhausted. His soul drained. He was very passionate talking about Blizzard's past games (Lost Vikings, BlackThorne), lessons he learned, WoW business decisions (the Panda character that China's market really liked) and the such. But he looked like he was done. At that point I knew for certain what we all thought for those past years: Kotick had ruined Blizzard and it was only a question of time.
So it's Kotick fault that Titan failed? Kotick is no saint, but from this video that all went downhill from that. And since Titan took 7 years before falling apart, i want to know why Morhaime didn't do anything before that. If leaked concepts of the game are legit, i dunno what outcome they expected. It sound like a horrible idea.
@madzaisa Diablo 2 took 3 years, had no design document and was made on the fly as they went. Warcraft 2 took 2 years. Starcraft 1 also took 3 years. And Starcraft 2 took 7 years. Blizzard used to have a motto of releasing when something felt polished enough and refining them until they were. Titan WAS cancelled, though. And its assets repurposed into Overwatch which saw some success and rekindling of flares. But there were alot of changes made to Blizzard when Kotick took over and a lot of key staff left. Is Kotick responsible for Titan failing? Probably not. Most pin the blame on co-founder Pardo, which might explain why Morhaime didn't go in to personally axe it. Is Kotick responsible for Blizzard entering a downward spiral? Definitely seems so from all we know throughout the years since he took over. As for the concept? Sounds like an attempt to make a cross between city of heroes/villains and Team Fortress. Not that far fetched of a thing to make. But definitely complex and hard.
@@Foxstab That's exactly my point. Prototype fast, try the concept, develop fast if concept is working. Refine until quality is acceptable. Wasting 7 years on a sketchy prototype, with all the other great ideas, mentioned in this video? Why? A classic, most conservative RTS in times where RTS is more or less dead took 7 years to develop? People at Blizz complaining why it's selling worse that horse mount in WoW? I'm seeing a problem here. A massive problem. And Bobby wasn't even in the picture yet. Also, there is a thing about old Blizzard, where the pay in company wasn't that high compared to so other in industry. Main income for actual people working on games came from bonuses they received *only after* the game is released. So if Titan took 7 years of time from best Blizz talents, they, in return, received no decent pay for those years. I imagine it was an internal catastrophe.
@madzaisa Again, Starcraft 2 took 7 years. So it's not really that much of a matter. And had Titan succeeded as SC2 did and everyone got fat dividends no one would bat an eye.
@@Foxstab > Again, Starcraft 2 took 7 years. So it's not really that much of a matter. It's very much of a matter. It's very basic RTS game with minimal amount of new stuff, not much to work on and had best in the world team dedicated to RTS making it. 7 years is way way too much. > And had Titan succeeded Nothing we know about Titan itself or plans about how it's supposed to work, like it was supposed to "kill" Wow hints on its possible success. It's basically a Session-like game akin to WoT and similar with kind of social\sims MMO hub between sessions. While, this may work, no chances in hell this concept was going to overthrow WoW. Especially without pre-established setting.
Man, I need to compliment you on these thumbnails. They’re insanely capturing. Every time I scroll past a video of yours, I stop for the thumbnail not even knowing it’s this channel.
Welcome to the gig-economy, there's no long term strategy for anything anymore. And foreign field bureaucrats in C-suites only push papers back and forth that share price goes up for the next quarter.
@@foncon9642 are we've lost even more by the book and you'll find out the reason why Blizzard entertainment has been the last company to Port any of their games over to console. Tldr blizzard wanted to make a console 12 years of development and they fired everyone a part of that team.
Sounds like they had a massive leadership problem. The suits were running the show, and the game devs were not unified under developer leadership. The fact that there was someone in charge that didn't understand Blizz Con was about brand expansionism, and a means to cultivate gamer community and goodwill, is a massive red flag. Also, the fact that the horse cash shop item making more money didn't have anyone high enough in the hierarchy that could say, "cash shop items are short term gains, they may give us more money now, but it's the development of our IP's that keep us relevant and solvent", is again a massive mismanagement. There does not appear to be anyone in the company that seemed to realize a smaller game with a marginal budget and return is an excellent investment since that is exactly the kind of game that lead to World of Warcraft. Stop trying to impress investors with quarterly gains, and nurture your brand long term. That no one seemed to realize this easy fact just shows how badly they lacked real leadership.
Anyone striving to be in the position of a CEO for gaming companies MUST learn from this. If the CEO of Devolver or New Blood aren't reading this book, it's not a good omen.
having a business plan that expects profit every year, year on year, ultimately leads to customer exploitations and price gauging. The whole world is where it is now because of this, not only blizzard or gaming companies.
1990s-2008: Fuck yes, new Blizzard game is coming out. Another milestone in gaming history. 2008-2018: Well, they have their problems but their games are still rock-solid most of the time. 2018-present: 🤡🤡🤡
The real issue here is that Suit-people are a big issue everywhere in Gaming or IT generally. They are never connected to the product being produced. They have no place but created their own place at the very top of companies.
Activision had a Battlefield like game that was in the pipeline??? What a terrible shame it shut down. Imagine if it had been released and then Andrew Wilson turned around and told the Battlefield Developers Consortium to go make the best _'Call Of Duty like'_ game the industry had ever seen. Imagine how awesome it would be to have different publishers actually competing against each other to *MAKE BETTER GAMES* rather than the constant recycling of Call of Duty which at this stage, the horse has been beaten to death but the beatings kept coming till the bones eventually turned into bonemeal.... The franchise was originally made with love and passion. Now its made just to see how can go when it comes to getting you to empty your wallet.
You know what blows my mind? If they had just released even a fraction of the games in their graveyard they would be swimming in it - no money issues, no pressure from Bobby Nodick, nothing. What a fucking nightmare dude, all that potential and talent wasted.
And they wasted 7 years and 100 mil on a game, if leaks to believe, that have a very weird gameplay. Same story with Blizz Team One. They tried to make a game in genre that was dead by the time of SC2. If best in the world team that specialize in making RTS can't sell it, it clearly a time to move on, or trying to take a completely different approach rather that "classic" RTS.
It will never not be incredible how hard Blizzard has fumbled everything over and over. They went from everyone, even other developers, saying "Blizzard can do no wrong" to "Blizzard ONLY does wrong".
this is the equivalent of having nearly written lord of the rings and deciding to burn the only copy for no reason. And for some reason MULTIPLE companies are doing this and have been for years now, what is mentally going on with them that it seems like a good idea to just ruin everything. It all comes down to them thinking they know better than everyone else when they can't even have a surface level philosophical discussion. ''Things are going TOO well right now so let's shit on the fans and ruin our game/company for the sake of virtue signaling to nobody'' They ARE the villains all the old cartoons made movies about and they don't even see it. Why would you want to work in these places even if you were desperate? Is it worth slowly killing the industry you supposedly love for the sake of job security as long as you don't speak up and just keep churning out this stuff?
You have to imagine the following: Most of these companies sit in America, specifically even California. So many Game Devs with high hopes and dreams came there to fulfill their desire to make games their life. Now they're there, and the companies have turned them into slaves who get just enough money not to become homeless. They are afraid of losing their job because they are afraid that they won't get a better position in this industry. Ironically, if you want job security as a new Game Dev, you have to find a small studio that is hiring.
Most of those Ivy League executives just want a big package and an even greater career title. They are not good enough for mainstream industries like banking, insurance, energy, pharmaceutical & f&b so they went into video games 🎮 industry for these pay & titles. They don’t love video games at all.
What baffles me about Stormgate is that a crew of experienced RTS creators decided to try and revive the genre with the most generic setting and art style ever conceived. It's SO bland... Look at Starcraft 1... It has so much style... It's dark, violent, mysterious, it has a vibe.
15:18 I know this is a hot take but I would be happy knowing that we didn't get games from abusive devs. no matter how good a game is, it does not warrent the harassment and mistreatment of staff.
@@ryancasey9763 People die either way, art lasts for centuries. No one is going to remember their names either way, but everyone will remember banger games that were made.
The complexity of the story and how you can understand everyone's motivations makes this all the more believable. It also helps explain how Bobby stayed in control so long, he's not incompetent, and he's not unwilling to spend money to make more money. What he is though, is a business guy not a creative... but that's also what he's there for. This is of course not to excuse things like the ignored and covered up abuse issues. Those alone should have caused Bobby to be shown the curb (along with many more people).
And he *only* went into power, *after* Blizzard had probably biggest single failure in gaming history till that date (excluding hardware stuff like failed consoles) called Titan.
The moral of the story I took from this is that business and fun don't mix very well. Because of this, the most efficient way to earn money isn't actually the most efficient way, because the interests of the customers(gamers) don't necessarily align with those supplying the games. More games is nice yeah, but what we're looking for is fun, not games specifically. Whether it's old or new doesn't matter as long as it's fun. Killing off old games that are popular, but not as profitable, is better business, but the cost is your reputation and future sales, so it might actually be worse business.
weird how a game like baldurs gate 3 can just drop as one of the most polished, content-rich and beloved AAA games of all time and the devs can continue existing without dropping 10000 microtransactions afterwards. almost as if studios dont actually need to make every game a live service to succeed and AAA companies and publishers are just greedy to the point of self destruction
Its not only Blizzard. Its the whole AAA Industry minus a few. Lucky that we got a ton of smaller/midsize companies making amazing games and filling those spots. (Vote with your wallet!)
@@rhael42 I dont know, lately theres been loads of examples of garbage games that no one bought, and later on failed. Maybe voting with one's wallet...has a lot of power behind it?
What are you talking about? If basicially nobody buys into AAA games, and the stock falls hard, they change insta. It maybe is even happening right now, with Concord and Hayenas and Star Wars outlaws failing
Kotick being the #1 reason for Blizzard's decline has been no secret, but damn it's shameful to see just how much stuff had been ruined behind the scenes. Blizzard deserved so much better and so did we.
I don't understand why everyone say that. Even in this video it's clearly stated that it's Titan that killed Blizzard. At that point Bobby was just a vulture that feasts on a carcass. And it's his job to make money. Blizzard had all the tools to not let Bobby in and they failed massively.
Never forget that Jeff Kaplan promised that there would never be a charge for characters or maps in Overwatch. Then he left the company and the asset flip that was OW2 came out and now suddenly we have characters paywalled behind multiple battlepass limited time events.
@@TheSilverOrn true, although, after Mauga they walked that back: both Venture & Juno are free. Still, I don't know how they thought that was a good idea for a "sequel."
@@patrickcarter2829 They walked it back because Mauga was OP and pay2win, the idea of a seriously p2w character in the game that is completely above the rest of the tiers. Nothing sours users more than p2w in a previously balanced game, except a garbage expansion. OW2 has been hemorrhaging users and money, and they are adjusting because of this.
@@TheSilverOrn also true. Although, now, they're just releasing collab skin after collab skin, with nothing really groundbreaking in the pipeline; they still haven't brought back Archive events.
@@patrickcarter2829 Because its most cost effective to just make a bunch of skins, half of which are done by third party devs as contractors, and sell them. The people that cared about integrity of the game left after the whole "We can't do pve/story" debacle and the only ones left are the "brown mud w/corn" eating defense crew.
I was so excited for StarCraft Ghost back in the day, it looked legitimately great! After that prototype leaked, maybe it was for the best, but it still had a ton of potential and it had room for improvement if they ever had the chance to make a sequel, but alas, it was never meant to be. Also that Thrall God of War game fucking hurts...
Yah but was likely just a very outdate prototype w/o the typical fleshing we normally get plus from the Xbox mag issue back in 04, that was fine for that era anyways. I am just of the mindset that if I was still a Blizzard fan, I'd have taken anything at this point. Even something that was more 1 player action semi-open world but everything else was made more interesting. Ghost was really suppose to be about that asassination program which the Terrans made.
I would disagree with not calling soap man bad at his job and like many others signing up for a job and underperforming because they don't understand the demographic or even the nuances would indeed label them as bad at their job, if I was able to just bumble my way around my job and I fucked up assuming I could treat something such as ammonia like hand soap it would literally kill people making me pretty damn bad at what I do
Now cover the new guild bank debacle where they wiped out thousands (if not tens of thousands) of guild banks with cross-realm-guilds and outright refused to restore a single one.
Tbh that sounds like a feature not a bug. Blizzard hates their players having gold, because it means they can buy tokens to not pay an actual sub. Less gold = more $$$
Blizzard is train-wreck and has been ever since it became Activision-Blizzard. I quit WoW immidiately after the transition (in wotlk) due to a shift in customer-support. I went from having no issues with support at all to GM's straight up ignoring my tickets or closing the issue without ever contacting me (multiple times in a row). Hell no, I'm not gonna pay every month to get ignored by support. It was obvious that Activision plan was to run this show with quota and restricted ticket times. The path was clear, optimize profits and prioritize shareholders above gamers.
For real. I remember back in the day you could literally summon a GM who would appear in game very quickly indeed and were happy to perform all sorts of tasks that one would consider way outside of their customer service remit such as explain game mechanics, talk about the lore of an area or even settle loot disputes between players. That seems like a lifetime ago.
@@I_am_nobody999 It's a shame, cause Blizzard was not at all the same company. They valued players above all. They constantly gave to the community and the community gave back. That was Blizzard. Those were the golden days of gaming.
@@noklar8760 the golden days of gaming ..... now we dont get good game any more , only vanila wow and w3 were good game ..... lol nostalgia is strong in this one.
Honestly this makes me even more disillusioned to the industry in general. At every turn the "money" within this industry leads to companies with good intentions falling to ego and corruption. All the while the workers and consumers get shafted left and right. Bobby Kotick needed to go for sure. But it's blatantly obvious he was just a public facing blight, the roots of corruption that made him into what he is reach down to the very heart of this industry. And I don't see any way for us to remove them without uprooting the entire corporate structure along with it.
@@TheSuperappelflap Them being paid is the bare minimum a company should do for its employees. Personally I feel companies need to be held to higher fucking standards so we don't have so much god damn misery everywhere. Being paid for your work is the fucking starting point. This slow crawl back to pre labor rights level of fucking greed is sickening and bootlicking for corporations that could give 2 iotas of a fuck about you is just as fucking gross.
@@kartemp I don't see that, working in IT I get paid a comfortable living wage, there are opportunities everywhere, more training options and courses than I care to sign up for, if you get bored of wage labor and want to start out for yourself most places ive worked at are supportive, they want to build people up. Companies like blizzard that treat people badly and tank their own business are not the norm.
@@TheSuperappelflap I'm glad your subjective experience was a good one. But your experience is just that, subjective. In the past year there have been thousands of layoffs in this industry, the vast majority of which were workers. While CEOs and shareholders of those companies basically never take even a financial hit. All while they sit on 1000%+ compensation packages compared to those laid off workers. If you can't see the problem with that I'm not gonna waste any more of my time trying to convince you.
@@kartemp If you choose to work for multinational companies with mgmt that makes millions, thats your own choice. There are tens of thousands of smaller IT companies you can work for. Will the managers still make more than you? Sure. But not 1000% more. And if you are marginally useful you wont get laid off when the market turns around. By the way, the IT market isnt bad right now. Its still quite good. Those big companies are just laying people off to cut costs and increase profits while times are good. It will come around and bite them in the rear soon enough.
Thing is, it boils down to the question of profit, we all know, if they were to flesh out side projects at a loss, slowly grow their universe, theyd attract more custom and fanbase, also theyd give way to new streams of potential income through new innovation/experimentation. However, putting an idea like this through, is virtually impossible, as theres risk without garrunteed reward. But from what weve seen from studios as of late, e.g ubisoft, they are deaf to the real issues, or are just flat out in denial, riding their own salary trains until that ride runs out.
> Thing is, it boils down to the question of profit, we all know, if they were to flesh out side projects at a loss, slowly grow their universe, theyd attract more custom and fanbase, also theyd give way to new streams of potential income through new innovation/experimentation. The question is why they banked everything on Titan instead. After Titan failed there was no Blizzard anymore. They had the option to do exactly that you said, but choose otherwise. And now everyone happily blame Bobby "because old Blizz can do nothing wrong".
It's crazy that jeff kaplan refused money to get another Overwatch dev team. Imagine if we had a dev team focused on PVP and another on PVE. We were robbed, man.
Once you go public, you only go down. I truly believe that going publicly traded is NOT for all type of businesses. Shareholders usually have a quarterly view on the numbers. And usually dont give a crap about the company itself besides "does it make money or not". For some companies this is suitable and preferred, but companies where you have a production timeline of months to years, in my opinion is very damaging... We cannot force shareholders to care more, and its an age old thing that they want money NOW. I worked in companies where technological advancement has been hindered to maintain quarterly results and then they were surprised when suddenly our competition could get better overall EBITA cause their SG&A was much lower compared to ours... Really tragic.
The common denominator of this story is that people who dont play video games should not be put in charge of companies that make video games. Would you hire a man who does not use soap to run your soap business? Would you hire a man who doesnt watch tv to run your studio? Would you hire a man who doesnt use chairs as CEO of your chair factory? Make it make sense.
This is a problem across business in it's entirity. How many middle-managers come in fresh out of University with a degree they spent several years getting but zero experience on the job and end up being terrible? How many times is the person who has worked there for 10+ years overlooked for said fresh graduate? Constantly. It happened at a telecomms company I worked for a few years ago. We had someone in the upper management, lead of an entire department, who would have been perfect to take over when the CEO left - but the investors decided to bring someone in who was CEO of a paint company because he had been successful there. The company folded within 2 years. Business is almost always about luck and "falling upwards" - those with the talent very rarely get recognised.
@@scottcook2643 Yeah internal promotion is pretty much impossible these days at any level. Its much much easier to get a pay raise and more responsibility by switching jobs regularly. You can spend 5 years working at the same place doing the same job and if you are lucky getting a yearly raise that doesnt even cover inflation. When you change jobs you can get a big raise for the same job if you play your cards right. Just doing something for a while means you have proven experience and reliability which means you are worth more than whatever the company you started at initially offered you. But if you ask for a reasonable pay hike they will tell you no. And then get angry all their talented personnel are walking away and people are job hopping every year. When you get to a higher level than just being a rank and file employee these effects get even worse. Companies will pay recruitment firms massive sums to find someone external and then pay that guy a huge signing bonus and profit share and a golden parachute clause in the contract just to avoid promoting Jeff from accounting.
"The people who play video games" caused Titan. Can you really blame the investors for trying completely different approach after such a massive failure?
@@madzaisa But it wasn't a failure. Overwatch made that money back and then some. That's how IT projects go. You run into problems, you pivot, and as long as you end up with a good product that makes money in the end, it is a success.
Blizzard used to be about taking a good idea/design, then polishing the game play to a very high shine. These days, the focus of all that polish is on the monetization schemes.
you kinda forget that Jason is, in a world full of quick clicks and likes and clickbaits, an actual journalist. All this info is obviously shown with a lot of information backed up by actual sources. The fact you cant see that just because you prefer the slop that comes out from drama channels and media says a lot.
So, tell me, please, how Bobby and Zerza made Blizz waste 100 mills and 7 years of most talented people labor on Titan. Who, tf, forced Blizz to put all the eggs into one basket so hard that they were thrown to Bobby after a single massive failure?
The problem with Blizzard, and modern gaming in-general, is one of structural framework. When a company is publicly traded, the management (board, CEO, president, whatever that looks like for that company) is required, by law, to work towards maximizing profits for investors. Maximizing profits rarely runs parallel to maximizing enjoyment for consumers.
bobby is the kind of guy you could replace with a computer program that just says if (potentialProfit > 0) {act();}, he's the devil on the shoulders of everyone who opted to pay for what he had to sell and no angel was really present to counteract him
My favorite part of this comments section is the ignoring information provided by the video and the willful misinterpretation of information and statements, both in the service of justifying their perspective.
Heroes of the Storm still has a player base that most game studios could only dream of. Same for StarCraft 2. It is fucking mind numbing to see this company go "well it prints money, but not enough money" with the IP they have.
Alright, I can safely confirm from the end of the video that this was NOT a clickbait! I mean... Damn! We all suspected many of these things, but Kotick side was a real life plot twist. I'll be waiting for the second part!
Having worked at Activision Blizzard for 15 years, I can offer a deeper perspective on Bobby Kotick that goes beyond what the community may believe or understand. Kotick advocated multiple times for increasing the dev teams not only on Overwatch but also on World of Warcraft. In hindsight, the decision not to expand the Overwatch team led to several avoidable issues. For instance, the PvE element of the game could have been fully developed, and Overwatch 2 might have been far more ambitious in scope. In regards of World of Warcraft, the relative success of Dragonflight was largely due to the increase in the development team. This allowed Blizzard to accelerate content updates, introduce special events, manage multiple aspects of WoW Classic (like Season of Mastery and the hardcore mode), and set the foundation for the upcoming War Within expansion and the Worldsoul Saga. So, regardless of the motivations behind Kotick’s recommendations, ultimately they were sound and strategic, and would have benefited both projects in critical ways. Regarding the Blitzchung incident Blizzard’s leadership made the call independently, and it wasn’t directly due to pressure from China. Rather, the company felt it had been pulled into the political arena, something it had long tried to avoid.There was some level of internal outrage with some senior leaders being concerned that failing to act then could open the door for even more controversial situations. I recall one person expressing that if Blizzard did nothing, they might soon be faced with far more damaging causes being promoted, such as white supremacy, anti-Semitism, or religious extremism, where they would be forced to take a stand, and then be criticized for not doing the same in regards Blitzchung- and that was the driving force then. And liking it or not, until now at least, by having taken that stance, there were no other similar incidents.
@Solrac-Siul of all the issues in the world, having concerns about "white supremacy" must be the biggest indicator of a clueless and defunct company. I can fully understand that no one takes Blizzard seriously anymore and hasn't for almost two decades now.
It didn't matter how good dragonflight was or was not. By then, it was too late, after a string of really disappointing expansions and borrowed power as a game focus. By that point, nobody really even cared.
@@christophertaylor9100 I honestly do not think you have an idea of how many players dragonflight recovered or how many are now playing wow, because if you do or did, you would not say "nobody really cared". A lot of people cared, and a lot of people care as right now wow - over it's all versions - has more active accounts ( accounts with game time) than it ever had, and that means above the wrath numbers.
Blizz: Hey lets give you guys a new race! Players: I mean, there's better things you could make, but sure, why not? Blizz: Oh don't worry, this one comes with a ground-breaking twist! Players: Ok, intriguing, what is it? Blizz: LADIES WITH BEARDS! Players: .......................................
It's simple! They stopped making quality games for the "Fans"! These days they have been making games for themselves with little to no passion......Just Greed! Just look at the new DLC for Diablo IV. Jungle, Mephisto, Akarat, Zakarum and Corruption! All these things fit with the Paladin class that should have been in the base Diablo 4 game! No the Paladin doesn't fit! "We" wanted to create something new instead of giving "you the fans" what should have been! Stupid Devs! Total brain Rot! They might as well resign and retire from being a Dev!
One thing I do wonder is how Blizzard leadership changed over the years. We know many of the original people left over time and it may be that the more problematic and toxic elements stayed on, eventually leading to a massively dysfunctional leadership. It’s seems like the decline accelerated after Metzen’s initial retirement in 2016 which may have been him signaling that he saw the writing on the wall. Many longtime folks started leaving after that.
Let's be collectively honest for a moment: since Activision's take over of Blizzard, there's still been a hope for Blizz to make high-quality games. But as time passed by, Activision's corporate influence slowly ruined Blizzard figuratively and literally. Politics and activism aside, today's Blizzard is on verge of collapse, because of that type of meddling.
A ton of those crucial people who earned them their original reputation and fame are gone dude. It's just new people trying to imitate a heavily modified formula for $$ and not the original art.
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Yet another sad story is story of Project: Revolution. An independent, dedicated team of folks who worked really hard to make a Starcraft 1 mod, but remastered on the Warcraft 3 engine (at the time) to get Starcraft 1 into 3-D. It died on the vine and folks eventually just slowly left and the project was abandoned, but it's yet another sad story in the Blizzard tale... 😞
You can always count on Bellular to present completely bleached "nobody is ever responsible for anything" type of corpo talk.
Why blizzard failed? You heard all the names in this clip over and over again, including the decision making processes. All bellular provided was smoke screen and erasing the connection between them, presenting you with a soft spoken comfy little monument to what corporate speak is.
What is the bs fluff peice about, world of warcraft lied about thier content.
at least you read it
stop promoting scams
Imo Bobby is also just a symptom. The root of all the financial decisionmaking is them becoming a publically traded company. Your financial decisions are no longer your own and you no longer act upon what you think is best for your company or your customers but the shareholders. The goalpost changes from making money to making all the money. It goes way beyond financial discipline
Being public isn’t an issue per se. Whats good for the customers is good for the company and the shareholders.
The problem is the current system’s timeline. Companies are always chasing a higher quarter instead of making good long term decisions.
Imagine if you could only trade stock during a window every 6 months or annually - companies would almost instantly start thinking long term again, even if publicly traded.
laws around investor, shareholders and executives desperately need to change. the idea that an executive's primary legal responsibility is to always make more profit for shareholders and they can literally be sued for knowingly doing something that doesnt immediately funnel more returns to shareholders is just insane.
even if you like capitalism and want it to succeed, the current corporate/investor paradigm is toxic, grotesquely top-heavy and unsustainable for society at large.
I disagree with that. If Valve were a public company, nobody would be telling them to change what they're doing, and even though Ubisoft are a public company the shareholders are telling them to change what they're doing because what they're doing is bad for customers and therefore they're losing customers.
@@highestsettings Sweet sweet summer child. That's not how going public works. Because without fail everything change the moment you go public, it happen time and time again. And if you were bad private you can be worse publically traded.
@@Deliveredmean42 I don't pay attention to people who say "sweet summer child".
_"It doesn't make him bad"_
A businessman who doesn't understand their industry is a bad businessman. They don't even try.
how the hell does a soap man get free reign over an industry hes never worked in before?
its as far removed as you can get yet nobody was double checking his work?
@@markfreeman4727 advisory board is a bunch of dogs that's how
It's called 'failing upwards'. Bobby is a master at it. The older he gets, the less he knows. Yet he has $650 million, so he thinks he's a genius...
@@markfreeman4727 It all works out because nowadays you don't need companies to actually produce anything of value. Look at all the tech giants running massive losses forever and still staying alive by sheer force of investment because they maybe could eventually become a monopoly and get their own personal license to print money. You only need to be able to hoodwink investors, and seeing as influential investors tend to be coked out of their mind venture capitalists, people like Kotick can get them all hot and bothered because he is part of their caste. The contemporary economy seems to work entirely via CEOs pump-and-dump'ing stocks for themselves and their close friends, and then jumping off with a golden parachute. The money they earn is essentially not derived from profits anymore, but stems from the investments of small investors who get rekt through insider trading, pumped up stock values by downsizing, buy-backs and fudging the numbers, and on top of that creative tax dodges.
@@markfreeman4727 i'd say that the fresh outside perspective would have been desirable for a CFO
rather, the lack of bias and familiarity meant that he wouldn't lean towards anything that he couldn't be persuaded with
they need to quantify the value of project proposals and give him numbers and graphs
on the other hand, if they hired a CFO who was into tabletops and DnD, he would have been more partial towards RPGs that his eyes would light up even and completely ignore the part where you tell him that it would take 8 years to make the game, and he himself would probably even try to push one of his random DnD campaigns
Game making is, basically, ART. No differ than songs, cookings, novels, movies, paintings, and sculptures. Finance people, Stock Market people, should just be there to watch over and guide the expenditure of the art Producer.
What Kotick did, is like turning a beloved mom-and-pops famous deli into a MacDonald-ish slop. And he doesn't even like to eat at that deli, or, actually, any kind of deli.
@@LockandLoad79 perfect metaphor
Art and finance are fundamentally incompatible. Finance wants a product, easily replicated, iterated, packaged, branded and sold.
@@TheRogueWolf what? Finance has funded and spread art from the beginning. Rich fat cat types have been the ones sponsoring and buying from craftsmen and artistd since the beginning of time. Outside of charity, when you give money to people you expect something worth what you put in. Otherwise you wouldn't care about how good/bad blizzard is, you'd just keep paying them because it funds their devs and artists. It's the same for investors, just they put money in before the project comes out.
@@Runescape12345 The difference between then and now is that usually the "finance" historically was in the form of a transaction of some kind. The wealthy would commission an artist to do a piece, or provide funding for an artist that they liked to simply make art without having to worry about money (a patron). There was no investment into the art as a business venture with the goal of making a profit outside of specific instances (most often theatre productions and the like). The rich were largely customers like you and I are today.
With the publicly traded companies of today, investors care about short term profits first and second, and the quality of the product comes third or later. Investors are risk-averse and their stock value must go up every quarter. Art is all about taking risks and pipe dreams - because it's based on passion and not numbers. Game devs largely don't want to make mtx skins; they want to make games that they'd want to play. But the money is in the mtx, so the company says mtx or else.
I mean those artists burned 100 mil of $ and 7 years of work of top-quality specialists in Blizzard. They had their chance and failed massively.
Whoever got blizzard publicly traded was the “Erebus” of that empire.
And who was the "Terror"?
@@ohchinchindaisuke1927 FACK EREBUS!!!!
@@IgN5P Erebus the mythical figure, not the boat.
Mythical?
GET UP.
My mind went straight to 40k Erebus. All my homies hate Erebus.
Ill never forgive them for the way they dropped Heroes of the Storm, the "love letter to all their franchise", the best moba ever designed and more importantly the game that had a very and growing playerbase.
And they killed it just because it didn't magically overtook LoL out of nowhere.
Seriously! Hots does away with most of the stuff I hate in other MOBAs. The one damn MOBA that even bothered and it got fucking ditched and ignored.
Thats true
the game still has a community to this day and to be fair with what blizzard did become, it's better for the game to no longer have any important update or they gonna throw micro transaction bs in some way and ruin what remain of the game.
dude people still play it, they havent killed the servers and u can just queue up and get a match in ranked/qm reasonably fast
@@catalyst1434 They will kill the servers soon, so best to make dedicated servers while there is still time.
As a Starcraft fan, it's so sad seeing how it is now.
I used to play every single Blizzard game. Even the once that didnt have my interest at first. Starcraft 1 and even 2 are both amazing. I feel for you as a Warcraft and Diablo fan.
StarCraft really opened my eyes to pc gaming
If they ad skins and free to play from day one rather than 60 dollar box copy they make way more money
@@svsv1191
The sad thing is Blizz is to lazy to even add more skins.
There are subfactions of the Protoss that still have not been added despite the assets already being in game.
@@guardianvalor962 Its such a joke they did nothing good, so many small things that people said could have made a huge huge difference
Actually had a personal experience with "hijacking their platform for a political message"
My wife and I were in attendance for the Overwatch WC group stage games back in 2016 and were treated pretty unfairly by the staff and it left an extremely sour taste in our mouth (could be wrong but it was the year when taiwan sent the APAC pro team Flashwolves to the event and it was hosted at the Santa Monica Hanger).
We were the only TW supporters in the joint alongside with 5 others and we went extremely early for front row seats since it was the first sporting event for my wife (who is taiwanese) and 2 of my personal friends are on the team. Like any sensible national team supporters we brought with us the national flag and during the TW games we were flying it to show our support, again, like any sensible national team supporters. Throughout the event we were approached by the camera crew multiple times to stop waving the flag or showing any signs (that they provided material and marker for on site for everyone to make their own signs) featuring the national flag. We refused as we really didn’t do anything wrong by the event rules or dangerous by any means, we were even tame compared to supporters of other national teams. Things quickly got weird as time goes on. During the TW matches the camera crew began to actively avoid filming us or showing us on the live feed (*the 7 ONLY TW supporters sitting in the front row during their teams game)* and every time they HAD to show crowd reaction they either cut away extremely quickly or just straight up shoot the other way when the TW team were making plays. They repeatedly threatened kick us out and at one point attempted to take our flags in between games. We were forced at the end to hide everything from view from the staff members for the latter half of the event bc we wanted to keep that flag which we had the whole team autographed on. That flag still hangs on my wall to this day and it was a reminder of an extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant experience with blizzard.
For people who may be curious or wanted to verify my story, try finding the VODs of the event. Overwatch WC group stage 2016 (again could be wrong abt the year). Team USA and team GB were on the same group, i believe Korea was as well. I was the chubby guy in the front row in the green Lucio tee.
I used to be a huge blizzard fan, even applied to their music team couple of times bc they seemed to me like the dream game studio. Not any more.
@@matthewchinyl damn! Gotta bow to their Chinese overlords huh
That's hella rough, and absolutely vile. I'm sorry you guys went through that garbage, and I hope ya'll are faring better nowadays.
I hated Blizzard before, now I hate 'em even more.
On the upside, with how horribly the CCP is fumbling China, to the point that even the elderly are protesting, I have my suspicions that Taiwan will be just fine. For all their grandstanding, they can't even manage their own people in times of peace. Nevermind the fact that apparently quite a few of their nukes are full of water, and corruption has crippled even their military to an extent...
Plus the fact that the US and a lot of allied powers, India included, have beef with the PRC outright...
*_A Chinese-Taiwanese War would be as much of a fatal mistake as the Russo-Ukrainian War has been for the Kremlin._*
_(Forgive me for all the editing, gotta word things carefully here.)_
Habitual Linecrosser *(a relatively high-ranking Army Officer)* calls them "West Taiwan" for a reason, my guy.
Besides, while the CCP say they'll be invading Taiwan by 2027, it's questionable if they'll even last that long to begin with, given how they have their hands full as it is just putting out each new sociopolitical dumpster fire that crops out every other day, like the Mooncake Scandal...or IBM and many other US-based corporations pulling out of China, causing a partial brain drain over to India...
@@Astronopolis the ironic thing is, they dropped partnership with China ...
they did all this China CCP worshipping but it was all for nothing
@@matthewchinyl Souns like they didn’t want to anger their Chinese overlords. That is seriously disappointing to hear.
Did not murrican establishment banned Palestinian flags on college campuses by penalty of incarceration? 🤔
I mean blizzard died years ago. Whatever is there now is just dressed up in its corpse.
At least they've been wearing biodegradeable clothes which have now rotted and revealed the decaying flesh underneath. They could have been wearing forever chemicals :)
That is not how things work and just shows you haven't played Blizzard games in over a decade.
Like the Villain in Men in Black that wears that farmer.
@@Tiucaner That's not how eating human waste works and just shows how you haven't eaten human waste in over a decade.
@@Tiucanerdenial is a hell of a drug huh?
The Blizzard story is the story of countless corporations: people in suits simply just don't qualify as human anymore, and they've lost all their insight on what actually matters to people who aren't in suits. If it involves the human experience and not hard numbers, they simply don't grasp what to do, and that leads to unending PR gaffes, misjudgments of their audience, and countless products that failed to get off the ground.
Not really. its called corporatization. Basically after a certain size the upper management is seated too high above the ground level to understand the business. ALSO the corp ends up being run by executives pulled from its marketing team. ALSO the highest echelons of power are basically seats that the aristocrats trade to one another's offspring. ALSO becoming publicly traded means a company closes off the MAJORITY of its potential experiments and possible future plans and actions, it cuts all timelines out in favor of only being able to reach for the timeline that increases profits every quarter.
Pro Israel against Palestine:
As Bellular news keeps reiterating, it's not so black and white...
@@hugoclarke3284 I think what I said is very in line with his point, even if said with all the derision I feel towards Blizzard's leadership: there is a consistency among leadership, not specific leadership, but leadership itself, to misjudge the needs and wants of consumers, because many of these people simply do not come from a background of playing or making games and can't intuit how this market/community works.
@@WhoTookPlockrock No… no, this isn’t it at all. It’s the far-left, gender studies freaks who have taken over the game design and implementation processes and poured their demented DEI ideology into everything they touch.
Period.
This has nothing to do with pEoPLe in sUitS.
Stop being so gullible.
Breaks my heart that warcraft IV was on the table but didnt make the cut
Yea that game should’ve been a priority
Considering they wished to update Wc3 as well to their current, many times over retconned lore, Im not too sad. Wc3 was a good game, but it also had one of the best story campaigns of all time. (including TFT) Warcraft4 wouldnt have had that, even if it was a good game mechanically.
They looked at SC2 and decided an RTS wouldn't make enough money to be worth it
Well looking at reforge, it's better that it didn't happen. Now I still believe they blizz is secretly fixing reforge and when it's ready, they will announce it in a massive redemption arc . Also when they have enough money, wc4 is still possible.
@@Grivehn The best thing they could possibly do if WC4 were to happen is to completely ignore WoW. Start fresh right from WC3. Personally, I always wanted WC3 to be like the Alpha build of the game where you literally had a small handful of units, but the development went a different direction. Maybe in the future WC4 could be that, but I doubt we'll ever see it happen.
The trend I keep hearing through this video. Is the same one I have been seeing across all of the entertain and just business world at large.
You always need MORE profits. Just having profits at all is not good enough.
We made a million dollars before now we need to make 10 million or else we are considered FAILING. Then we need to make 100 million, then 500 million, then a billion, 10 billion...
This methodology in business is obviously unsustainable. Eventually everyone has enough soap.
Welcome to the joys of investment capitalism. The investors aren't there just for profit. They require constant growth of said profit.
And as we all know *nothing* grows forever. And so investors will just go fly off to the next growth thing until that too collapses. The fact that a majority of publishers and such have tied themselves to investor growth is what will eventually kill them because once you burn off the good will of customers to keep the lights on via investment once they leave you are left with nothing.
Because buying stocks isn't about looking the company and betting on its long term success. It's an expectation that it will be an opportunity to see it grow 5% and then sell the second it drops.
Stock price is also how they secure loans, so a high stock price allows for larger loans.
You dont seem to understand that eventual collapse is part of the plan. Its part of the lifecycle of a corporation. It starts with one or more dudes who start a business and develop a product portfolio. This company is then evaluated and the founders can start selling shares to other people to get paid. If the business grows big enough the shareholders can then decide to take it public on the stock market. The shares are then bought by investment firms who will suck all the profit out of the company, downsize all the talent to cut costs, profiteer off the goodwill of the customers until that is gone, and then sell the empty husk of the business for scrap once they sucked out all the money they could.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone got paid. The product got made. And once the market was saturated, everyone moved on. Stagnation is not a good thing. The death of one company clears space for another one to pop up with new innovative ideas.
Blizzard is dead. But there will be a new company that makes better games than Blizzard. Matter of time.
@@thrahxvaug6430 that’s the beauty of capitalism, everything is just goods or services to make profits
@@RocKM001 It's not all 'investors' that do that, its SHORT TERM investors. Look at Warren Buffett, he never buys a company to FLIP it, he buys it to hold it FOREVER and enjoy a steady dividend payment, most companies today don't even pay dividends anymore. What we need are laws to end all this short term flipping and pump and dump BS which is destroying the country.
They really think every single game is going to magically produce hype and build a fanbase immediately. They refuse to build anything up, it all has to be immediate results. It's like it's being run by toddlers. Their eyes are glued to their bank accounts and their attention spans are like a petulant child's. "nooo work on my thing it'll be soooo cool. It didn't work? I didn't like it anyway, scrap it"
It's because the people behind the AAA companies have nothing to do with games, and no interest. They simply don't know anything about the business, which is why they've basically run every big company's reputation into the ground.
No, the real tragedy here didn't start with Vivendi, or Blizzard. It started much, much, earlier... at Activision. The founding of Activision started when some greedy, selfish exec told four developers that they were no more important than the assembly line workers loading Atari cartridges in a box. The so-called Gang of Four built a company that dared to challenge corporate greed.
And like everyone else, they lost.
Activision is a PLAGUE of a company, gheez when i was younger i had seen all the crap that Activision had done over the years, to titles and studios. Today, there is no purpose for having or being backed by a large corporation to create, build, staff and fund a new development game. These BIG publishers are done!
Because they didn not make their company employee owned, that is the only way to stop from becoming the very same monster your fighting.
Valve won against corporate greed.
@@rainchopper898Eh... More like they've got so much money coming in that corporate greed doesn't really matter any more.
The difference between mike and bobby bout the monetization. Mike did it cause if they didnt, the cost would go up to keep the game running. Bobby would do it regardless of profit just to get more profit. More yachts
The problem with these companies is that they only chase billion dollar ideas and ignore or dismiss good multi-million dollar ideas. As a result, it's just a slow slide into irrelevancy.
theres not compromise
you can't just make a healthy profit, you must make MORE money FOREVER which is impossible, but nobody notices the iceberg for some reason
...arc light rumble was a billion dollar idea..? Lmfao
@@JRileyD They thought it could have been one, that's his point. Mobile game, low dev time and art cost, microtransactions, huge addressable audience (own phone, like games).
Yep this is the core problem of most American managment, the un willingness to settle for a healthy reliable profit, only making the MOST is good enough, it's all this 80's Gordon Gecko brain poinsoning. Notable the richest man in the world Warren Buffet built his fortune on doing exactly the opposite which just goes to show how self-defeating this whole ideology is.
They forced competitive scene into every game and just kept throwing money at them to grow, instead of letting it grow naturally from playerbase.
8:50 - "that doesnt make Armin bad, its just lack of understanding". I disagree, lack of understanding is exactly what makes him bad, because it leads to bad thinking and bad decisions for the players.
The irony of Blizzard banning someone for "hijacking" their platform to spread a political message is just, ahhhhhhh.....chefs kiss.
Why?
Haven't been paying attention to them for many years, so I don't know
@@Spacemongerr People will conflate the vaguest way of social commentary with direct political statements that might as well be just local politics.
@@Nightstalker314OP is probably referring to when Blizzard was kowtowing to China by banning people expressing pro-Hong Kong sentiment a few years back.
Is this about the heartstone player who said he wanted freedom for Tibet?
@@Nightstalker314 Or direct statements on social media that are poltical, not to mention the blatantly obvious pandering of specific groups and ideologies instead of making a good product.
kotick just didnt understand creativity and like all professional execs wished games were like car tires, or bread, which you can mass produce and shift them every day with minor recipe changes or tread patterns. probably never understood why gamers complained about that.
Problem is that while Bobby was wrong in his approach, taking "business" part from the equation killed so many great studios or they got sold to something like EA. Bad business decisions will kill you, no matter the creativity of your team.
Kaplan knew. Too many cooks in the kitchen ruins the meal. Adding more people to a team especially a whole new team is just going to create more problems and issues and I'm sure Jeff didn't want that at all.
My thoughts exactly. He even mentioned it in the video then says Kaplan made the wrong choice for the players. I don't think it would have turned out any better with another development team. It would just slow down development in a different way.
When Jeff Kaplan, the face of OW left, I basically wrote it off. He was the most involved in the game from the start, and him leaving meant that he saw no future in the game. Turns out, he was correct.
Yet OW2 is complete dog water so maybe he didn't in fact knew
Gordon Ramsay should have came to the rescue at Blizzard HQ.
No idea, but there was an issue on one level or another where after the launch of OW1 new content came at a crawl, from a major company with abundant resources. They absolutely failed to capitalise on and sustain it, and there's no question there. They also failed to develop the PvE that allegedly was a big part of what they were doing while not producing content.
Was it a lack of people, a lack of focus, poor decision making, poor management? No idea. But the idea that they could have sustained the game while working on new things simultaneously with more resources is not at all unreasonable given how financially successful it was.
Smaller teams managed it with fewer resources much more consistently and rapidly. If you want to say it's "blizzard polish" that prevents that, then maybe you do need more resources. If the idea is that only that small team could do that job well, then one might question why they failed such a large proportion of the time to do so. After all, extremely low productivity either means enormous inefficiencies or rejecting a lot of work internally, or just not doing the work.
Steve Jobs had a great take on this. What happens when the bean counters take over from the creative talent. So far, I don't think he has ever been wrong, in regards to, what happens post bean counter takeover.
Honestly, the more time goes on the more based I realize Steve Jobs was and also what he really did.
Steve Jobs role was to be a bigger more unreasonable, unhinged and unrelenting piece of shit then the people who wanted water down the quality of the product for whatever reason and those people were everywhere and his task was impossible.
Ironically he were very much like them when it came to business. Hes worse than bobby. Their factories literally had iron bars, on the windows,so people couldn't jump out
@@GoalOrientedLifting Yah, the only difference is that he was a monster is the service of making an incredible high quality product and profit. Whereas most our business monsters are just trying get themselves rich and destroy the quality of the product to do so.
It’s like. Look man the CEO bar is real low ain’t gona lie
@@brandonedlin2052 I signed out of pursuing luxury branded goods years ago. I realized that Gucci clothes are made in the same sweatshop factories as cheap Sinsay clothes. So if there's no diffrence, why bother paying 10 times more? 10 years ago an iPhone stood out from other smartphones. It offered on-par performance with half of the on-paper computing power. And its design was different from other phones. Today you can't even tell an iPhone from Xiaomi or Samsung at a first glance if there's no brand logo. Everything looks the same. "Default design" penetraded just about any venue of our lives. Phones, SUV cars, fashion, computers, TV's, anything.
That clip has no value when trying to praise Steve Jobs for that statement when his long term goals were just what he tried to condemn there.
I have to disagree quite a bit by the 8:55 mark. "Spreadsheet guys" are absolutely one of the largest problems not just in gaming, but the entire world. These robots in human flesh are completely apart from reality, think in a manner that is utterly inhuman, act in a manner that is completely alien and have neither idea nor *interest* in the consequences of their actions and plans. They live in a world of "good number go up," care nothing for how it is accomplished, and brand it as 'data driven' to be in line with the rest of their soulless existence.
@@evanulven8249 totally agree this is why my job stresses me out so much, because management only look at people as data and numbers, not people
Amorality is the future in cooperate America
@@David4321-u6rIt was also its past. Everything is cyclical. The first Gilded Age did come to an end, and the second one is fated to end too.
Yeah, people like this treat people not as individuals with wants and needs, but as just what they call a full department: Human Resources. A resource to be expended and discarded once it has forgone its use.
Never have an actuary in fantasy football. 😂
honestly, i was a massive blizzard fanboy from 2000 (release of diablo 2) all the way to about 2010. the thing is that blizzard was sold in 2008 to activision. but to me it was incredibly noticeable that everything had changed in wow when cataclysm came out and then we got that horrid release of diablo 3 in 2012. and you can look at the numbers and see for yourself just how many of us abandoned ship after wotlk ended. it's not just that we "got old", but it was really an end of an era of great blizzard games. the fact that so many people still "hung in there" even today is really just a testament to how great the original product was despite activision trying to squeeze it for everything it worse at the expense of both its longevity and its player base. you can look at games like heroes of the storm, hearthstone, overwatch, and even diablo 4 and see the potential those games had yet here we are and very few people are left feeling excited about those games. its just corporate greed that has sucked the soul out of their products and now its microsofts turn to squeeze the last drops out of these franchise if there's anything left.
Yup, this was me. Left by mid Cata. Came back for Diablo III as I waited so many years and wanted to see how it turned out. Left a while after RoS came out.
Never played or cared about a single Blizz game ever, ever again. All looked like pure corporate slop.
Yep. Activision ruined it. Everything changed after that.
Shoutout to The Frozen Throne.
@@Ohdeerhere SC2 was my first red flag when they insisted on splitting the game into 3. It was the most obvious way to squeeze out value and prolong the game pre live service. They were already attempting to shove needless always online crap as well to test the waters.
D3 came and it confirmed that the Blizz I loved was no more.
Mid Cata was also my jumping off point for a long time. I did come back and play a bit of D3 but that didn't hold my interest long. Only thing I've played from Blizzard since is Diablo 4 and that felt like a wasted purchase even though I bought it on sale. Still plagued with lag and other weird issues you'd have thought they could have had fixed long before a year after its release.
After the takeover by Activision, it was all about just cranking out quantity of content and titles or whatever it was, instead of quality, to the potential of perhaps i always wanted a Starcraft MMORPG, which never happened. Blizzard is in name only, nothing exist from the past.
Whomever made the decision to take or make Blizzard a publicly traded company is the one who ultimately killed the company.
Name one AAA studio that is tradeable on an exchange which still holds the high regard of gamers and fans?
... thought so.
Was gonna say Valve but then remembered the tradeable point
@@tmbcyberman Yeah I don't think Valve makes games anymore at this point, at least stuff we consumers would care for.
@@FriezaReturns00001 Deadlock...?
@@FriezaReturns00001the new game leaks other than deadlock....?
@@FriezaReturns00001 they do take a ton of time making games but they do, like HL Alyx
I’ve never seen a game triple dipping on monetization as successfully as WoW was back in its Hay day. It got you to pay full price for the game and expansions, then pay a monthly subscription, and on top of that Micro transactions.
Given how successful WoW was at milking its audience, that makes it all so confusing how they could simply allow the developers to ruin the game via bad design decision. They cooked the golden goose.
Idk, I don't remember the additional mtx back in WotLK, but then again I stopped playing WoW mid Cata as Blizzard started to really stink like the rotting corpse by that time
This is precisely HOW they cooked the golden goose, the customer are your golden eggs, you break into their savings too often, you build resentments and irritation that induces apathy if not bankruptcy.
It's like if you stripmine a mountain you own too efficiently, sure you get more money, but if you then need to clean it up and become out of work with too much unused hardware you cannot sell, you've screwed yourself.
Every decision can cause friction. I feel it in my own work. The frictionfrom other teams diminishes my own outlook on things and causes a worse sentiment if the company and products.
Put that in the creative works and i can't imagine how bad it would feel. Add forced12h shifts and terrible nonsense deadlines and oof.
It was inevitable. The great thing about Vanilla, TBC and WotLK was that almost everybody knew the lore, since the story follows their Warcraft games. Personally, it was amazing to go through Dark Portal for the first time and it was also amazing to see all the heroes we used to control in those games (although many of them went insane and became bosses in dungeons/raids).
It´s kinda sad, they didn´t continue with the RTS in order to expand the lore and prepare players for future events. It was just abandoned. W3 Reforged was the finishing blow.
@@Morpheus-pt3wq why expand the lore through games when you can have someone write a novel for your franchise and milk that additional income stream for free?
When your mantra is infinite growth, there is nothing more terrifying than a satisfied customer.
I still can't forgive Blizzard for deleting my copy of Overwatch 1 from existence to force me into Overwatch 2. If they didn't want to provide any more additional content for the first game, fine, I get that, but don't simply destroy it by overwriting it with it's own sequel. Imagine if installations of Starcraft 2 simply removed Starcraft 1 and further that all copies of Starcraft 1 simply stopped working entirely.
It's such a simple reason there's no way you don't understand it. It's the same reason valve removed csgo: they don't want to maintain 2 games, they don't want to separate the community into 2, they don't want to increase queue times
Agreed. I blindly preordered overwatch 2 for the PVE and to get into the OW2 beta, only to find out the game is free to play and no pve. I already owned overwatch. Literally paid $40 for an expansion and they deleted my game. They won't ever get another dollar from me.
@@zilliq-qz5uw I don't care what THEY want. They stole the game I bought back from me. That's inexcusable. Also, CSGO is still available. It's a "beta optin" setting that allows both games to exist on your PC, fully playable, simultaneously. Like I said, I don't expect them to keep updating the old game. They can just leave it be. I just want to still have access to it. As for "dividing the base", that's up to us, the players. WE decide if the "player base" gets divided, not them. But, once again, would you argue that for Starcraft 1 and 2?
@@Dark_Jaguar sc2 is a brand new game compared to sc1, with completely revamped races, new campaign, new engine. It's 2 different games. Also 12 years elapsed between brood war and wings of liberty. Csgo to cs2 as well as ow1 to ow2 are mere engine upgrade, the gameplay didn't change except from 6v6 to 5v5 and subticks/smokes.
@@zilliq-qz5uw Yes, the gameplay changed, and so the past should be PRESERVED, forever! I lost my old game, and they demanded I pay to get all the characters "back" in the new game, which offered fewer gameplay modes than the first at launch.
They should have kept the original around. It would cost them nothing to just toss in a LAN play mode and call it a day. It BARELY would cost them anything to just keep hosting the multiplayer matches.
Stop defending them. You don't get anything out of it. Be more selfish.
Heroes being shut down really killed Blizzard for me, they focused so much on the esport aspect of it they ignored the great game they had. And then killed it because it didnt make infinite money
Yeah myself and some friends still play for fun.
It looks and feels better than any other MOBA
Core blizzard is dead and has been for a long time and will never return and Microsoft isn’t going to make it better ,this obsession with live service , loot boxes , always online and corporate greed has killed blizzards ability to make legit real games , and it’s killing the industry as a whole I just look at Mike Ms new production and his studios are literally doing the same shit that people are sick of and these new studios were supposed to not do.
Microsoft is such a dogshit company, everything they touch or purchase turns to shit.
Ok Asmongold can i have link to buy an otk 2 dollar t-shirt for 70 dollars .
This hurts. Just hearing about all the fun I should be having playing these canceled games. That battlefield StarCraft game sounds like a hit
Lets not forget Kotick covered up years of sexual harassment and also threatened to kill an assistant. An Activision employee committed suicide after a photo of her privates was circulated at a company party. The dude is an absolute cyst of a human being and painting him as "just a businessman who liked money is disingenuous."
How did that photo get taken?
This should matter least to everyone. A me also bunch of nothing. Now we have a f3m4le filled mess of a dev team who have turned wow into the most soy filled alphabet army pile of crap. Bring back the boys club please.
@@nickrowan Preach. Kotick and his ilk is a leech on humanity.
I hate Blizzard as much as the next guy for what they have done to my favourite franchises, but I don't believe any of these rumours at all. They welcomed DEI into their workplace and had a massive influx of young female employees, straight out of radical left wing universities. It naturally follows that an avalanche of unsubstantiated accusations about SA and grape follows straight after that, with zero prosecutions of course (because the criminal standard of evidence is never met). Then, all of the people accused are fired without recourse or due process (e.g. the McCree voice actor), leaving behind a workforce of incompetent diversity hires who hate video games, hate Blizzard's franchises, and hate their core audience. Now all Blizzard can do is spit garbage out every year.
@@nochpo4230 I think you need to touch some grass and stay off the internet for a year mate
It's so sad seeing how many plans they had for Warcraft 3 Reforged and what we ended up getting... Also a Thrall God of War game would have been sick.
Thrall is one of the most interesting orc characters in fiction. A God of War style game with him as the protagonist would have been awesome indeed.
How ironic it is - spending on useless microtransactions for games you love might kill other games you love.
People spending money on garbage products is why we're where we are. We can blame Bobby all we want but the people consuming his shit are the real problem. There's no supply without demand.
@@Kross415 What would Diablo be without Archbishop Lazarus? Of course there would be Diabolites, Baalites, and Mephistites.
Not true, actually. It's a tendency people have to reach that conclusion, but the reason there have been tons of great games is precisely that the development industry is extremely broad and diverse. Blizzard might not make those games, but you still get your Disco Elysium, your Baldur's Gate 3, your Outer Wilds, whatever it is you liked and enjoyed.
You might not get a game you might love from a Blizzard IP but that is never guaranteed.
Yes the incentive structure at large publicly traded companies is to make the most money for the least cost. But they aren't the whole market. And you can't stop people throwing away money, so there's no point worrying about microtransactions unless they are explicitly predatory in the underlying psychology. And that's a matter for legislation and regulation, not consumers.
If all you want is more warcraft, then, well, doubtless Blizzard will make that. If that IP is all you want, then you'll get it. If you wanted specific games that they might have made and didn't, that's never guaranteed.
And if you want to support a particular genre, you do that by supporting the genre, not a company.
@@simonkapadia7582 So why would Blizzard make a new Starcraft when they can make much more money selling 1 mount and 1 lvl 80 boost on wow for almost no development cost? If people rejected those things back then or now they would have to make new games instead of milking whales, that's a fact.
@@Kross415 because (potential) customer perception is essential for long-term success. Yes, the mounts might make more profit, but they do nothing for the reputation of the company. For a long time, Blizzard had a crazy number of customers who weren't just fans of specific products, but fans of the company itself. These customers would consume most, if not all, of what the company produced. It ensured that it was difficult for a product to not at least be somewhat profitable and it gave the company the freedom to explore new ideas and search for the next big thing. Even a product that failed to produce astronomical profits was a success if it pleased the consumers. Those loyal customers would proceed to line Blizzard's pockets via other channels once they moved on from that one specific product. Now, that loyalty is mostly gone and products have to earn a much larger part of their customer base. Those customers switch to products from different companies much more easily now. It makes the development of new products a riskier endeavour. Yet, without those new products, sustained success is damn near impossible.
That's the problem with approaching business purely from a sales perspective: it fails to take secondary effects into account. In any case, wanting to profit from whales is fine (although, arguably, morally questionable), but you still want as many of those as possible. They're easier to attract when the developer inspires confidence in the future of the product, both in terms of longevity and quality. Public perception matters a lot in that regard.
I'm convinced most CEOs like kotick do nothing but drain resources from these companies.
That IS what they do, they're THAT out of touch with reality.
So Kotick wasn't a bad leader for making a bunch of bad decisions, he was a bad leader because he didn't stop them from happening. Glad we cleared that up. He's also been Mr. Crabs since grade school.
Imagine:
Gothic / ElderScrolls style massive semi-open world action rpg, were you play as a farmer->footman->knight->lord/paladin from Stormwind
Starts in gnoll war, then troll war, then first war and finally second war
You see basically the entire continent, meet some of the famous characters, take part in world-altering events
Expansion style dlcs adding bonus content and new mechanics / ways to play
It's called "World of Warcraft2". Idea isn't new ;)
@@Nightstalker314 that would a mmorpg and I'm talking rpg, also having a life service mmo game as a preguel to another would create lore issues very fast.
Not that any of it matters with current day blizzard
@@cathulionetharn5139 Okay, maybe started on the wrong foot with calling it "world of". but I'd agree it should be a session based game set in a restricted time period within the story of Warcraft 2.
The curse of every publicly traded company: your ACTUAL customers are the people your stockholders are looking to sell their stocks to with a profit. Your ACTUAL product is increased stock value.
"He was tired of fighting Bobby"
I met Mike Morhaime at a small game dev backyard BYOB gathering in Israel, IIRC circa 2014 or 2016.
To say he looked tired would be an understatement. And it's not to say that he simply looked physically tired, as if it was jet lag. He looked mentally exhausted. His soul drained. He was very passionate talking about Blizzard's past games (Lost Vikings, BlackThorne), lessons he learned, WoW business decisions (the Panda character that China's market really liked) and the such.
But he looked like he was done.
At that point I knew for certain what we all thought for those past years: Kotick had ruined Blizzard and it was only a question of time.
So it's Kotick fault that Titan failed? Kotick is no saint, but from this video that all went downhill from that. And since Titan took 7 years before falling apart, i want to know why Morhaime didn't do anything before that. If leaked concepts of the game are legit, i dunno what outcome they expected. It sound like a horrible idea.
@madzaisa Diablo 2 took 3 years, had no design document and was made on the fly as they went.
Warcraft 2 took 2 years.
Starcraft 1 also took 3 years.
And Starcraft 2 took 7 years.
Blizzard used to have a motto of releasing when something felt polished enough and refining them until they were.
Titan WAS cancelled, though.
And its assets repurposed into Overwatch which saw some success and rekindling of flares.
But there were alot of changes made to Blizzard when Kotick took over and a lot of key staff left.
Is Kotick responsible for Titan failing? Probably not. Most pin the blame on co-founder Pardo, which might explain why Morhaime didn't go in to personally axe it.
Is Kotick responsible for Blizzard entering a downward spiral? Definitely seems so from all we know throughout the years since he took over.
As for the concept? Sounds like an attempt to make a cross between city of heroes/villains and Team Fortress.
Not that far fetched of a thing to make. But definitely complex and hard.
@@Foxstab That's exactly my point. Prototype fast, try the concept, develop fast if concept is working. Refine until quality is acceptable. Wasting 7 years on a sketchy prototype, with all the other great ideas, mentioned in this video? Why? A classic, most conservative RTS in times where RTS is more or less dead took 7 years to develop? People at Blizz complaining why it's selling worse that horse mount in WoW? I'm seeing a problem here. A massive problem. And Bobby wasn't even in the picture yet.
Also, there is a thing about old Blizzard, where the pay in company wasn't that high compared to so other in industry. Main income for actual people working on games came from bonuses they received *only after* the game is released. So if Titan took 7 years of time from best Blizz talents, they, in return, received no decent pay for those years. I imagine it was an internal catastrophe.
@madzaisa Again, Starcraft 2 took 7 years. So it's not really that much of a matter. And had Titan succeeded as SC2 did and everyone got fat dividends no one would bat an eye.
@@Foxstab > Again, Starcraft 2 took 7 years. So it's not really that much of a matter.
It's very much of a matter. It's very basic RTS game with minimal amount of new stuff, not much to work on and had best in the world team dedicated to RTS making it. 7 years is way way too much.
> And had Titan succeeded
Nothing we know about Titan itself or plans about how it's supposed to work, like it was supposed to "kill" Wow hints on its possible success. It's basically a Session-like game akin to WoT and similar with kind of social\sims MMO hub between sessions. While, this may work, no chances in hell this concept was going to overthrow WoW. Especially without pre-established setting.
Man, I need to compliment you on these thumbnails. They’re insanely capturing. Every time I scroll past a video of yours, I stop for the thumbnail not even knowing it’s this channel.
D4 didn’t mature with the original fans of the series. It failed to teach, inspire, frighten, guide, motivate, and much more.
Welcome to the gig-economy, there's no long term strategy for anything anymore.
And foreign field bureaucrats in C-suites only push papers back and forth that share price goes up for the next quarter.
We lost a THRALL GOD OF WAR GAME
@@foncon9642 are we've lost even more by the book and you'll find out the reason why Blizzard entertainment has been the last company to Port any of their games over to console. Tldr blizzard wanted to make a console 12 years of development and they fired everyone a part of that team.
But new god of war is ass, why would you want thrall put through that?
Would have been trash anyway bro best we didint get it. That timeline is cursed
@@FoxHoundUnit89Nah, new God of War is great, it's just completely different from the original stuff.
@@operator8014 GoW 2018 is great. Ragnarok, not so much.
Sounds like they had a massive leadership problem. The suits were running the show, and the game devs were not unified under developer leadership. The fact that there was someone in charge that didn't understand Blizz Con was about brand expansionism, and a means to cultivate gamer community and goodwill, is a massive red flag. Also, the fact that the horse cash shop item making more money didn't have anyone high enough in the hierarchy that could say, "cash shop items are short term gains, they may give us more money now, but it's the development of our IP's that keep us relevant and solvent", is again a massive mismanagement. There does not appear to be anyone in the company that seemed to realize a smaller game with a marginal budget and return is an excellent investment since that is exactly the kind of game that lead to World of Warcraft. Stop trying to impress investors with quarterly gains, and nurture your brand long term. That no one seemed to realize this easy fact just shows how badly they lacked real leadership.
Which "suit" caused Blizz to spend 7 years and 100 mill on Titan?
Anyone striving to be in the position of a CEO for gaming companies MUST learn from this. If the CEO of Devolver or New Blood aren't reading this book, it's not a good omen.
having a business plan that expects profit every year, year on year, ultimately leads to customer exploitations and price gauging. The whole world is where it is now because of this, not only blizzard or gaming companies.
The fact we lost OW2 PvE is still devastating. Can't believe it.
D3 and D4 don't need live services to cover costs when a large portion of the playerbase is like "WHY CAN'T I PLAY THIS GAME OFFLINE!?"
1990s-2008: Fuck yes, new Blizzard game is coming out. Another milestone in gaming history.
2008-2018: Well, they have their problems but their games are still rock-solid most of the time.
2018-present: 🤡🤡🤡
The real issue here is that Suit-people are a big issue everywhere in Gaming or IT generally. They are never connected to the product being produced. They have no place but created their own place at the very top of companies.
Corporatization kills nearly every successful company. RIP Blizz.
Activision had a Battlefield like game that was in the pipeline??? What a terrible shame it shut down. Imagine if it had been released and then Andrew Wilson turned around and told the Battlefield Developers Consortium to go make the best _'Call Of Duty like'_ game the industry had ever seen.
Imagine how awesome it would be to have different publishers actually competing against each other to *MAKE BETTER GAMES* rather than the constant recycling of Call of Duty which at this stage, the horse has been beaten to death but the beatings kept coming till the bones eventually turned into bonemeal....
The franchise was originally made with love and passion. Now its made just to see how can go when it comes to getting you to empty your wallet.
Seeing as how Wilson butchered the Diablo franchise, I can't see how anyone could have hope in a battlefield franchise from Blizzard.
You know what blows my mind? If they had just released even a fraction of the games in their graveyard they would be swimming in it - no money issues, no pressure from Bobby Nodick, nothing.
What a fucking nightmare dude, all that potential and talent wasted.
And they wasted 7 years and 100 mil on a game, if leaks to believe, that have a very weird gameplay. Same story with Blizz Team One. They tried to make a game in genre that was dead by the time of SC2. If best in the world team that specialize in making RTS can't sell it, it clearly a time to move on, or trying to take a completely different approach rather that "classic" RTS.
@@madzaisa I agree, except that Starcraft 2 DID sell amazingly well... Just not enough to match their greed and incompetence.
It will never not be incredible how hard Blizzard has fumbled everything over and over.
They went from everyone, even other developers, saying "Blizzard can do no wrong" to "Blizzard ONLY does wrong".
this is the equivalent of having nearly written lord of the rings and deciding to burn the only copy for no reason.
And for some reason MULTIPLE companies are doing this and have been for years now, what is mentally going on with them that it seems like a good idea to just ruin everything.
It all comes down to them thinking they know better than everyone else when they can't even have a surface level philosophical discussion.
''Things are going TOO well right now so let's shit on the fans and ruin our game/company for the sake of virtue signaling to nobody'' They ARE the villains all the old cartoons made movies about and they don't even see it.
Why would you want to work in these places even if you were desperate? Is it worth slowly killing the industry you supposedly love for the sake of job security as long as you don't speak up and just keep churning out this stuff?
There is money from blackrock and vanguard to push those DEI political agendas, so it’s not for nothing, but I agree with you
You have to imagine the following: Most of these companies sit in America, specifically even California. So many Game Devs with high hopes and dreams came there to fulfill their desire to make games their life. Now they're there, and the companies have turned them into slaves who get just enough money not to become homeless. They are afraid of losing their job because they are afraid that they won't get a better position in this industry.
Ironically, if you want job security as a new Game Dev, you have to find a small studio that is hiring.
Most of those Ivy League executives just want a big package and an even greater career title. They are not good enough for mainstream industries like banking, insurance, energy, pharmaceutical & f&b so they went into video games 🎮 industry for these pay & titles. They don’t love video games at all.
What baffles me about Stormgate is that a crew of experienced RTS creators decided to try and revive the genre with the most generic setting and art style ever conceived. It's SO bland...
Look at Starcraft 1... It has so much style... It's dark, violent, mysterious, it has a vibe.
15:18 I know this is a hot take but I would be happy knowing that we didn't get games from abusive devs. no matter how good a game is, it does not warrent the harassment and mistreatment of staff.
@@ryancasey9763 Making the mother of all omelets here, can't fret over every egg.
@@joby5838 I fully disagree, no-one should be required to suffer for art if its isn't 100% required which it almost NEVER is
@@ryancasey9763 People die either way, art lasts for centuries. No one is going to remember their names either way, but everyone will remember banger games that were made.
@@joby5838 you obviously are just baiting, no one is or should be so calist
@@joby5838 all that troll posting won't fix your life
The complexity of the story and how you can understand everyone's motivations makes this all the more believable. It also helps explain how Bobby stayed in control so long, he's not incompetent, and he's not unwilling to spend money to make more money. What he is though, is a business guy not a creative... but that's also what he's there for. This is of course not to excuse things like the ignored and covered up abuse issues. Those alone should have caused Bobby to be shown the curb (along with many more people).
And he *only* went into power, *after* Blizzard had probably biggest single failure in gaming history till that date (excluding hardware stuff like failed consoles) called Titan.
The moral of the story I took from this is that business and fun don't mix very well. Because of this, the most efficient way to earn money isn't actually the most efficient way, because the interests of the customers(gamers) don't necessarily align with those supplying the games. More games is nice yeah, but what we're looking for is fun, not games specifically. Whether it's old or new doesn't matter as long as it's fun. Killing off old games that are popular, but not as profitable, is better business, but the cost is your reputation and future sales, so it might actually be worse business.
It still doesn't explain Titan. That totally was the turning point.
weird how a game like baldurs gate 3 can just drop as one of the most polished, content-rich and beloved AAA games of all time and the devs can continue existing without dropping 10000 microtransactions afterwards. almost as if studios dont actually need to make every game a live service to succeed and AAA companies and publishers are just greedy to the point of self destruction
Its not only Blizzard. Its the whole AAA Industry minus a few. Lucky that we got a ton of smaller/midsize companies making amazing games and filling those spots. (Vote with your wallet!)
Voting with your wallet is the equivalent of trying to change the tides by pissing in the ocean while some rich jerk straps thrusters to the moon.
@@rhael42 I dont know, lately theres been loads of examples of garbage games that no one bought, and later on failed.
Maybe voting with one's wallet...has a lot of power behind it?
What are you talking about? If basicially nobody buys into AAA games, and the stock falls hard, they change insta. It maybe is even happening right now, with Concord and Hayenas and Star Wars outlaws failing
22:20 I never realized until now...That robot really looks like the proto-concept of Reinhardt in Overwatch 1, when his name was "Wildebeest"
Kotick being the #1 reason for Blizzard's decline has been no secret, but damn it's shameful to see just how much stuff had been ruined behind the scenes. Blizzard deserved so much better and so did we.
I don't understand why everyone say that. Even in this video it's clearly stated that it's Titan that killed Blizzard. At that point Bobby was just a vulture that feasts on a carcass. And it's his job to make money. Blizzard had all the tools to not let Bobby in and they failed massively.
What’s even happen to Kaplan after he’s scurried away? It seemed like the dude just fucking disappeared.
he's working with netflix on something last I heard
@@reddin-on8mm That is a constant way of confusing him with a director with the same name.
A Jason Schreier AMA?
Cant think of a better and faster way to get permabanned from Reddit, lolol
Never forget that Jeff Kaplan promised that there would never be a charge for characters or maps in Overwatch. Then he left the company and the asset flip that was OW2 came out and now suddenly we have characters paywalled behind multiple battlepass limited time events.
@@TheSilverOrn true, although, after Mauga they walked that back: both Venture & Juno are free.
Still, I don't know how they thought that was a good idea for a "sequel."
@@patrickcarter2829 They walked it back because Mauga was OP and pay2win, the idea of a seriously p2w character in the game that is completely above the rest of the tiers. Nothing sours users more than p2w in a previously balanced game, except a garbage expansion. OW2 has been hemorrhaging users and money, and they are adjusting because of this.
@@TheSilverOrn also true. Although, now, they're just releasing collab skin after collab skin, with nothing really groundbreaking in the pipeline; they still haven't brought back Archive events.
@@patrickcarter2829 Because its most cost effective to just make a bunch of skins, half of which are done by third party devs as contractors, and sell them. The people that cared about integrity of the game left after the whole "We can't do pve/story" debacle and the only ones left are the "brown mud w/corn" eating defense crew.
I was so excited for StarCraft Ghost back in the day, it looked legitimately great! After that prototype leaked, maybe it was for the best, but it still had a ton of potential and it had room for improvement if they ever had the chance to make a sequel, but alas, it was never meant to be.
Also that Thrall God of War game fucking hurts...
Imagine for a moment a Space Marine 2 style game but in Starcraft. Where you get to be a Raynor's Raider boots on the ground Marine.
Yah but was likely just a very outdate prototype w/o the typical fleshing we normally get plus from the Xbox mag issue back in 04, that was fine for that era anyways. I am just of the mindset that if I was still a Blizzard fan, I'd have taken anything at this point. Even something that was more 1 player action semi-open world but everything else was made more interesting.
Ghost was really suppose to be about that asassination program which the Terrans made.
6:15 I will continue to argue that the D3 auction house was not a bad idea, but the implementation of it was poor.
I would disagree with not calling soap man bad at his job and like many others signing up for a job and underperforming because they don't understand the demographic or even the nuances would indeed label them as bad at their job, if I was able to just bumble my way around my job and I fucked up assuming I could treat something such as ammonia like hand soap it would literally kill people making me pretty damn bad at what I do
Now cover the new guild bank debacle where they wiped out thousands (if not tens of thousands) of guild banks with cross-realm-guilds and outright refused to restore a single one.
Tbh that sounds like a feature not a bug. Blizzard hates their players having gold, because it means they can buy tokens to not pay an actual sub. Less gold = more $$$
Blizzard is train-wreck and has been ever since it became Activision-Blizzard.
I quit WoW immidiately after the transition (in wotlk) due to a shift in customer-support.
I went from having no issues with support at all to GM's straight up ignoring my tickets or closing the issue without ever contacting me (multiple times in a row).
Hell no, I'm not gonna pay every month to get ignored by support.
It was obvious that Activision plan was to run this show with quota and restricted ticket times.
The path was clear, optimize profits and prioritize shareholders above gamers.
For real. I remember back in the day you could literally summon a GM who would appear in game very quickly indeed and were happy to perform all sorts of tasks that one would consider way outside of their customer service remit such as explain game mechanics, talk about the lore of an area or even settle loot disputes between players. That seems like a lifetime ago.
@@I_am_nobody999 It's a shame, cause Blizzard was not at all the same company. They valued players above all. They constantly gave to the community and the community gave back.
That was Blizzard. Those were the golden days of gaming.
@@noklar8760 the golden days of gaming ..... now we dont get good game any more , only vanila wow and w3 were good game ..... lol nostalgia is strong in this one.
Damn, they had support for costumes?
I still feel the loss of project titan. I wish we could have seen it fulfilled
Honestly this makes me even more disillusioned to the industry in general. At every turn the "money" within this industry leads to companies with good intentions falling to ego and corruption. All the while the workers and consumers get shafted left and right.
Bobby Kotick needed to go for sure. But it's blatantly obvious he was just a public facing blight, the roots of corruption that made him into what he is reach down to the very heart of this industry. And I don't see any way for us to remove them without uprooting the entire corporate structure along with it.
The workers at blizzard didnt get shafted. They got paid.
@@TheSuperappelflap Them being paid is the bare minimum a company should do for its employees. Personally I feel companies need to be held to higher fucking standards so we don't have so much god damn misery everywhere. Being paid for your work is the fucking starting point. This slow crawl back to pre labor rights level of fucking greed is sickening and bootlicking for corporations that could give 2 iotas of a fuck about you is just as fucking gross.
@@kartemp I don't see that, working in IT I get paid a comfortable living wage, there are opportunities everywhere, more training options and courses than I care to sign up for, if you get bored of wage labor and want to start out for yourself most places ive worked at are supportive, they want to build people up. Companies like blizzard that treat people badly and tank their own business are not the norm.
@@TheSuperappelflap I'm glad your subjective experience was a good one. But your experience is just that, subjective. In the past year there have been thousands of layoffs in this industry, the vast majority of which were workers. While CEOs and shareholders of those companies basically never take even a financial hit. All while they sit on 1000%+ compensation packages compared to those laid off workers. If you can't see the problem with that I'm not gonna waste any more of my time trying to convince you.
@@kartemp If you choose to work for multinational companies with mgmt that makes millions, thats your own choice. There are tens of thousands of smaller IT companies you can work for. Will the managers still make more than you? Sure. But not 1000% more. And if you are marginally useful you wont get laid off when the market turns around.
By the way, the IT market isnt bad right now. Its still quite good. Those big companies are just laying people off to cut costs and increase profits while times are good. It will come around and bite them in the rear soon enough.
Thing is, it boils down to the question of profit, we all know, if they were to flesh out side projects at a loss, slowly grow their universe, theyd attract more custom and fanbase, also theyd give way to new streams of potential income through new innovation/experimentation. However, putting an idea like this through, is virtually impossible, as theres risk without garrunteed reward. But from what weve seen from studios as of late, e.g ubisoft, they are deaf to the real issues, or are just flat out in denial, riding their own salary trains until that ride runs out.
> Thing is, it boils down to the question of profit, we all know, if they were to flesh out side projects at a loss, slowly grow their universe, theyd attract more custom and fanbase, also theyd give way to new streams of potential income through new innovation/experimentation.
The question is why they banked everything on Titan instead. After Titan failed there was no Blizzard anymore. They had the option to do exactly that you said, but choose otherwise. And now everyone happily blame Bobby "because old Blizz can do nothing wrong".
It's crazy that jeff kaplan refused money to get another Overwatch dev team. Imagine if we had a dev team focused on PVP and another on PVE. We were robbed, man.
No amount of additional people is going to fix a badly managed product. Overwatch was doomed the moment they changed the game for e-sports.
You can throw money at something but if it has no fucking soul, it won't matter.
dam good job over at the bellular news team. thank you!
And people still play the ow scam
Young generations that don't know any better because they entered gaming as slop like that setting the standard for them
Once you go public, you only go down. I truly believe that going publicly traded is NOT for all type of businesses. Shareholders usually have a quarterly view on the numbers. And usually dont give a crap about the company itself besides "does it make money or not". For some companies this is suitable and preferred, but companies where you have a production timeline of months to years, in my opinion is very damaging... We cannot force shareholders to care more, and its an age old thing that they want money NOW. I worked in companies where technological advancement has been hindered to maintain quarterly results and then they were surprised when suddenly our competition could get better overall EBITA cause their SG&A was much lower compared to ours... Really tragic.
The common denominator of this story is that people who dont play video games should not be put in charge of companies that make video games.
Would you hire a man who does not use soap to run your soap business? Would you hire a man who doesnt watch tv to run your studio? Would you hire a man who doesnt use chairs as CEO of your chair factory? Make it make sense.
This is a problem across business in it's entirity.
How many middle-managers come in fresh out of University with a degree they spent several years getting but zero experience on the job and end up being terrible? How many times is the person who has worked there for 10+ years overlooked for said fresh graduate? Constantly.
It happened at a telecomms company I worked for a few years ago. We had someone in the upper management, lead of an entire department, who would have been perfect to take over when the CEO left - but the investors decided to bring someone in who was CEO of a paint company because he had been successful there. The company folded within 2 years.
Business is almost always about luck and "falling upwards" - those with the talent very rarely get recognised.
@@scottcook2643 Yeah internal promotion is pretty much impossible these days at any level. Its much much easier to get a pay raise and more responsibility by switching jobs regularly. You can spend 5 years working at the same place doing the same job and if you are lucky getting a yearly raise that doesnt even cover inflation.
When you change jobs you can get a big raise for the same job if you play your cards right.
Just doing something for a while means you have proven experience and reliability which means you are worth more than whatever the company you started at initially offered you.
But if you ask for a reasonable pay hike they will tell you no. And then get angry all their talented personnel are walking away and people are job hopping every year.
When you get to a higher level than just being a rank and file employee these effects get even worse. Companies will pay recruitment firms massive sums to find someone external and then pay that guy a huge signing bonus and profit share and a golden parachute clause in the contract just to avoid promoting Jeff from accounting.
@@scottcook2643 oh yeah MBAs are worse than useless, they are actively harmful.
"The people who play video games" caused Titan. Can you really blame the investors for trying completely different approach after such a massive failure?
@@madzaisa But it wasn't a failure. Overwatch made that money back and then some. That's how IT projects go. You run into problems, you pivot, and as long as you end up with a good product that makes money in the end, it is a success.
Blizzard used to be about taking a good idea/design, then polishing the game play to a very high shine. These days, the focus of all that polish is on the monetization schemes.
Sure was cool of Jason to sit on this knowledge of rampant workplace abuse till it was professionally and financially convenient.
Jason is a leech, always been. Sure he might have given us a few good articles.. but in the end hes a journo.. they are all LEECHES.
He didn't - DEFH stuff was extensively reported at the time. The book details Blizzard's 33 year history.
@@BellularNews riiight. He did. It's plain to see.
you kinda forget that Jason is, in a world full of quick clicks and likes and clickbaits, an actual journalist. All this info is obviously shown with a lot of information backed up by actual sources. The fact you cant see that just because you prefer the slop that comes out from drama channels and media says a lot.
Schreier is a vile and loathsome thing. And he did absolutely sit on this.
Bobby Kotick and EA should be the poster children for the tv series "American Greed."
Zerza and Bobby are the villains of the story and any attempt to say otherwise is just historic revisionism.
So, tell me, please, how Bobby and Zerza made Blizz waste 100 mills and 7 years of most talented people labor on Titan. Who, tf, forced Blizz to put all the eggs into one basket so hard that they were thrown to Bobby after a single massive failure?
@@Enubatan yeah I think you're nuts drawing that conclusion, this almost completely exonerates Kotick.
The problem with Blizzard, and modern gaming in-general, is one of structural framework. When a company is publicly traded, the management (board, CEO, president, whatever that looks like for that company) is required, by law, to work towards maximizing profits for investors. Maximizing profits rarely runs parallel to maximizing enjoyment for consumers.
What is still left of Blizzard?
Frost Giant seems in deep trouble with stormgate failing it's launch.
What about Dreamhaven ?
@BellularNews keep up the great work.
If Blizzard disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't bat an eye. That's how much they've lost me.
i wouldn't even know😂
Would literally make me happy lmfao
bobby is the kind of guy you could replace with a computer program that just says if (potentialProfit > 0) {act();}, he's the devil on the shoulders of everyone who opted to pay for what he had to sell and no angel was really present to counteract him
The fact is that after Bobby they seem to don't know how to do things. The devs seem completely incompetent
My favorite part of this comments section is the ignoring information provided by the video and the willful misinterpretation of information and statements, both in the service of justifying their perspective.
Heroes of the Storm still has a player base that most game studios could only dream of. Same for StarCraft 2. It is fucking mind numbing to see this company go "well it prints money, but not enough money" with the IP they have.
Alright, I can safely confirm from the end of the video that this was NOT a clickbait! I mean... Damn!
We all suspected many of these things, but Kotick side was a real life plot twist. I'll be waiting for the second part!
Exceptionally naive man realises Blizzard has lost their way only two decades after it happened!
I feel so bad for Blizzard fans and the rank and file employees, programmers, designers, artists and Q and A employees. Ya'll deserved better guys.
God damn I've never seen Jason but he 100% fits the physiognomy archetype.
Yes he certainly does
in what sense? Like what was your expectation?
The warcraft movie killed blizzard a long ago
Having worked at Activision Blizzard for 15 years, I can offer a deeper perspective on Bobby Kotick that goes beyond what the community may believe or understand. Kotick advocated multiple times for increasing the dev teams not only on Overwatch but also on World of Warcraft. In hindsight, the decision not to expand the Overwatch team led to several avoidable issues. For instance, the PvE element of the game could have been fully developed, and Overwatch 2 might have been far more ambitious in scope.
In regards of World of Warcraft, the relative success of Dragonflight was largely due to the increase in the development team. This allowed Blizzard to accelerate content updates, introduce special events, manage multiple aspects of WoW Classic (like Season of Mastery and the hardcore mode), and set the foundation for the upcoming War Within expansion and the Worldsoul Saga. So, regardless of the motivations behind Kotick’s recommendations, ultimately they were sound and strategic, and would have benefited both projects in critical ways.
Regarding the Blitzchung incident Blizzard’s leadership made the call independently, and it wasn’t directly due to pressure from China. Rather, the company felt it had been pulled into the political arena, something it had long tried to avoid.There was some level of internal outrage with some senior leaders being concerned that failing to act then could open the door for even more controversial situations. I recall one person expressing that if Blizzard did nothing, they might soon be faced with far more damaging causes being promoted, such as white supremacy, anti-Semitism, or religious extremism, where they would be forced to take a stand, and then be criticized for not doing the same in regards Blitzchung- and that was the driving force then. And liking it or not, until now at least, by having taken that stance, there were no other similar incidents.
@Solrac-Siul of all the issues in the world, having concerns about "white supremacy" must be the biggest indicator of a clueless and defunct company. I can fully understand that no one takes Blizzard seriously anymore and hasn't for almost two decades now.
Overwatch league was a mistake.
It didn't matter how good dragonflight was or was not. By then, it was too late, after a string of really disappointing expansions and borrowed power as a game focus. By that point, nobody really even cared.
i still dont believe that for a second. bobby is a greedy pissant who doesnt want to spend money.
@@christophertaylor9100 I honestly do not think you have an idea of how many players dragonflight recovered or how many are now playing wow, because if you do or did, you would not say "nobody really cared". A lot of people cared, and a lot of people care as right now wow - over it's all versions - has more active accounts ( accounts with game time) than it ever had, and that means above the wrath numbers.
Blizz: Hey lets give you guys a new race!
Players: I mean, there's better things you could make, but sure, why not?
Blizz: Oh don't worry, this one comes with a ground-breaking twist!
Players: Ok, intriguing, what is it?
Blizz: LADIES WITH BEARDS!
Players: .......................................
It's simple! They stopped making quality games for the "Fans"! These days they have been making games for themselves with little to no passion......Just Greed! Just look at the new DLC for Diablo IV. Jungle, Mephisto, Akarat, Zakarum and Corruption! All these things fit with the Paladin class that should have been in the base Diablo 4 game! No the Paladin doesn't fit! "We" wanted to create something new instead of giving "you the fans" what should have been! Stupid Devs! Total brain Rot! They might as well resign and retire from being a Dev!
Yes, Jungle and Paladin!
THE CRASH OF 20XX IS COMING...
One thing I do wonder is how Blizzard leadership changed over the years. We know many of the original people left over time and it may be that the more problematic and toxic elements stayed on, eventually leading to a massively dysfunctional leadership. It’s seems like the decline accelerated after Metzen’s initial retirement in 2016 which may have been him signaling that he saw the writing on the wall. Many longtime folks started leaving after that.
Let's be collectively honest for a moment: since Activision's take over of Blizzard, there's still been a hope for Blizz to make high-quality games.
But as time passed by, Activision's corporate influence slowly ruined Blizzard figuratively and literally. Politics and activism aside, today's Blizzard is on verge of collapse, because of that type of meddling.
A ton of those crucial people who earned them their original reputation and fame are gone dude. It's just new people trying to imitate a heavily modified formula for $$ and not the original art.