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...
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.
@@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.
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.
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 :)
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.
@@Oh_deer777 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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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!
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 hood omen.
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.
I feel like Jason Schreier is the MVP at this point. His investigations are so valuable that lots of youtube gaming news reporters use his articles as material to make videos with. Guy seems very passionate with his job
I can't imagine being a game dev being in a meeting room with a bunch of bloodthirsty animals with an unquenchable appetite for blood, knowing every moment you work there that it would never be enough.
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...
When someone talks about current game production costs my mind always goes back to King's Quest 5. They bragged about it costing a million dollars to produce. Back then that was a lot. "According to Mobygames, King's Quest V was the first adventure game to be released on CD-ROM in Multimedia PC format, the first to have digtitized voiceovers, the first to use digitized hand painted backgrounds, and the first to cost over US$1,000,000"
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.
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
The problem with the horse is that its taking advantage of decades of building a large player base and a stellar reputation. Part of it built by StarCraft. And then it was taken over by a new generation or corporate management which basically traded the good name for profit. Exactly like Boeing.
The writing was on the wall when Blizzard started screwing over WoW addon authors, particularly given how much they helped save the franchise by fixing UI and DirectX errors to get Burning Crusade out the door. By the time Wrath came out, add-on authors were being royally screwed, Blizzard essentially profiting off free labour and not giving a toss.
Blizzard hit what I call too big to succeed. When a company can't get out of it's own way to overcome its own logistical limitations. Too many competing agendas and priorities pulling it apart.
So what I am hearing is that the company wouldn't let them do things because they weren't confident they could and it be successful, and then when they did let them do things they couldn't do it and have it be(stay) successful...
As Blizzard became a more corporate share-holder focused company they seemed to lose the connection with the core fans that made them what they are. People were not Warcraft fans, WoW fans, Diablo fans, they were Blizzard fans. The IP that made less money like Starcraft RTS and events like Blizzcon were part of the package. If you want to sell micro-transactions and get that free money, you have to support an ecosystem the players love. It's hard to measure and spreadsheet the kind of devotion Blizzard fans had back in TBC, they burned through their credibility like they had nothing to lose.
It's pretty depressing, I started out with Warcraft 2 and ended with World of Warcraft Cataclysm. Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo 3 of the biggest gaming franchises put straight into the ground. That's life I guess.
Kind of reinforced the sad reality that fundamentally the money spreadsheets people are incompatible with creative minded ones yet at the same time in the games industry they needed each other very badly
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.
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.
I wish this information had a better source than the otherwise unreliable Kotakuguy, but it makes for an interesting fanfic if anything. Hopefully in the near future, we'll have a way to corraborate or refute Kotakuguy's stories.
As someone that was connected to Blizzard by my love of Starcraft, I went from feeling the passion and love in Wings of Liberty, to feeling the empty soullessness in Legacy of the Void, that we feel in most modern media.
I think one thing regarding StarCraft isn’t mentioned a lot and imo it has huge impact on the franchise. Do you remember that lawsuit between and the Korean Esport association that prevented all pros from broodwar pros to compete in sc2? By the time that thing came round League of legends has already began its esport domination for a few years. I really do wonder if StarCraft 2 could have maintained its esport dominance if all eyes were on sc2 back in early 2010s.
Umm... it fell apart twenty years ago. Did you not notice how they failed to iterate on Alterac Valley and turned from PvP to whatever a 4x4.... err... World of Tag Team Craft fight is. Or how they failed to keep releasing DLC for Starcraft and Diablo? Just because they were making money doesn't mean they weren't already falling apart.
Maybe it is very simple. Games were made by people, who loved gaming. When their products were great, they earned money. When someone earns money, there are others that like to earn money. These people do not like games, but the big one game: Get rich. Blizzard went down, when the gaming-industry became the biggest part of the entertaining-sector. Blizzard-Activision was too big, too successful to be not viewed by money-players as a possible way to get richer. Blizzard went down, when it lost the contact to the players, reduced the support, get doubts about blizzcon. Blizzard went down, when it makes no longer good games, that lead to commercial success, but try to sell products, which are at random games. They money-maker like Kotick take over, and they were too stupid to understand: First you have to have a good game for players, then you can earn money. It is the same for Ubisoft and others. A good game is more than any product, you need the players, who like it and not only consume it.
"Blizzard makes big and epic games" What games? None of the games they're known for since wow are big and epic. They're reasonably sized fun games with a wide style of games which means somewhat experimental. That's what blizz was known for.
Assuming all this is true, Kotick doesn't sound like the unreasonable man in the company. If anything, sounds like he was mostly reasonable while his underlings grossly mismanaged just about everything, even to the point of not wanting resources he was willing to give. I would take more control over a company too if my best talent spent seven years on a botched project, then botched the salvaged piece not long after. While botching every single other franchise, then scoffing at making a Valheim competitor when they likely couldn't out-do that game either. They 'make big epic games' except they don't. And haven't for a long time.
Like a lot of studios who were hot shit but then started to struggle, one could argue that Blizzard bought its own rockstar hype and didn't develop a good pipeline when game development got more and more complex and expensive. The toxic culture probably existed before the merger too, although Kotick I'm sure didn't exactly try to do anything about it until it blew up/
We now have bowls of fruit, female dwarves with beards, and im forced to be best mates with Alliance after years of merciless slaughter. Surprisingly though, TWW is actually a pretty good expansion thus far.
Thats very interesting thanks. I remember a quote from Ion Hazzikostas about how if they did player housing in wow it would need to be "Blizzard Quality". I wonder... it seems like there must be so much financial and cultural pressure within the team to make the next big thing that the project scopes rapidly grow out of control.
It very simple. The games industry is not business. Games are not a commodity, they are a pastime, so if you treat them like a commodity, you get commodity buyers who have no impulse control and are difficult to retain because they have no concept of studio loyalty (which is rooted in good gameplay) and are distracted by shiny things. You can easily get usurped by anything with better systems, and you never get that back. Meanwhile, real and loyal gamers have very little money for you. If you don't make something compelling, you don't even have a chance with them, but as long as you do, they'll buy your game and the next one and the next one and so on. Bobby Kotick spent every last bit of Activision's and Blizzard's good will in the pursuit of the short term profit, and they had a lot to burn.
So I did start playing WoW after a 9 year break and I instantly see that Blizzard has big intern problems. The whole game is a mess. Bugs, you can brick every quest, rushed expansions, unfinished or confusing questlines that are connected but dont fit together, story that is told in a uninspiring way, many rushed corners and way more. Not sure about "The War Within" but between TWW and legion there is nothing to be proud of.
We can blame Activision all we want, but half of the shit they've been doing would have happened unless it was green lit or allowed by others in Blizzard.
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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.
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:
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.
_"It doesn't make him bad"_
A businessman who doesn't understand their industry is a bad businessman. They don't even try.
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
I feel like HOTS would have done a lot better on Steam.
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
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?
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.
@@Oh_deer777 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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
Breaks my heart that warcraft IV was on the table but didnt make the cut
Yea that game should’ve been a priority
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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...
A Jason Schreier AMA?
Cant think of a better and faster way to get permabanned from Reddit, lolol
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!)
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.
@@DagothDaddy yeah, but also, that’s capitalism, uproot the system for potential interests…
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.
God damn I've never seen Jason but he 100% fits the physiognomy archetype.
Yes he certainly does
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zerza and Bobby are the villains of the story and any attempt to say otherwise is just historic revisionism.
What is still left of Blizzard?
Frost Giant seems in deep trouble with stormgate failing it's launch.
What about Dreamhaven ?
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.
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.
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.
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 hood omen.
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.
I feel like Jason Schreier is the MVP at this point. His investigations are so valuable that lots of youtube gaming news reporters use his articles as material to make videos with. Guy seems very passionate with his job
He's been declining and losing some screws as of late though. Starting to get too opinionated and drinking the koolaid, screeching on twitter
I can't imagine being a game dev being in a meeting room with a bunch of bloodthirsty animals with an unquenchable appetite for blood, knowing every moment you work there that it would never be enough.
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.
Sounds like a combination of intentionally, and unintentionally created perverse incentives slowly corrupting everything they do
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.
If you want to see a person who is totally detached from reality, look at a CEO
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
When someone talks about current game production costs my mind always goes back to King's Quest 5. They bragged about it costing a million dollars to produce. Back then that was a lot. "According to Mobygames, King's Quest V was the first adventure game to be released on CD-ROM in Multimedia PC format, the first to have digtitized voiceovers, the first to use digitized hand painted backgrounds, and the first to cost over US$1,000,000"
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.
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
@BellularNews keep up the great work.
Now I really want to see an interview with Kotick, knowing some of what he did working at Blizzard.
If Blizzard disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't bat an eye. That's how much they've lost me.
i wouldn't even know😂
You think Blizzard is bad look at Hi-Rez studios. They ruin everything they touch.
The problem with the horse is that its taking advantage of decades of building a large player base and a stellar reputation. Part of it built by StarCraft. And then it was taken over by a new generation or corporate management which basically traded the good name for profit. Exactly like Boeing.
The writing was on the wall when Blizzard started screwing over WoW addon authors, particularly given how much they helped save the franchise by fixing UI and DirectX errors to get Burning Crusade out the door. By the time Wrath came out, add-on authors were being royally screwed, Blizzard essentially profiting off free labour and not giving a toss.
This hurts. Just hearing about all the fun I should be having playing these canceled games. That battlefield StarCraft game sounds like a hit
Blizzard hit what I call too big to succeed. When a company can't get out of it's own way to overcome its own logistical limitations. Too many competing agendas and priorities pulling it apart.
So what I am hearing is that the company wouldn't let them do things because they weren't confident they could and it be successful, and then when they did let them do things they couldn't do it and have it be(stay) successful...
As Blizzard became a more corporate share-holder focused company they seemed to lose the connection with the core fans that made them what they are. People were not Warcraft fans, WoW fans, Diablo fans, they were Blizzard fans. The IP that made less money like Starcraft RTS and events like Blizzcon were part of the package. If you want to sell micro-transactions and get that free money, you have to support an ecosystem the players love. It's hard to measure and spreadsheet the kind of devotion Blizzard fans had back in TBC, they burned through their credibility like they had nothing to lose.
It's pretty depressing, I started out with Warcraft 2 and ended with World of Warcraft Cataclysm.
Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo 3 of the biggest gaming franchises put straight into the ground.
That's life I guess.
Kind of reinforced the sad reality that fundamentally the money spreadsheets people are incompatible with creative minded ones yet at the same time in the games industry they needed each other very badly
When 50+% of your thumbnail is text meant to grip the viewer to click, a grammatical error within it makes the team look much less professional.
Its not about pleasing your customers/players anymore, its pleasing your stockholders and it has been that way forever now.
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.
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.
I wish this information had a better source than the otherwise unreliable Kotakuguy, but it makes for an interesting fanfic if anything.
Hopefully in the near future, we'll have a way to corraborate or refute Kotakuguy's stories.
As someone that was connected to Blizzard by my love of Starcraft, I went from feeling the passion and love in Wings of Liberty, to feeling the empty soullessness in Legacy of the Void, that we feel in most modern media.
I think one thing regarding StarCraft isn’t mentioned a lot and imo it has huge impact on the franchise. Do you remember that lawsuit between and the Korean Esport association that prevented all pros from broodwar pros to compete in sc2? By the time that thing came round League of legends has already began its esport domination for a few years. I really do wonder if StarCraft 2 could have maintained its esport dominance if all eyes were on sc2 back in early 2010s.
Still would love to see actual gameplay footage of titan in its most finished form.
Umm... it fell apart twenty years ago. Did you not notice how they failed to iterate on Alterac Valley and turned from PvP to whatever a 4x4.... err... World of Tag Team Craft fight is. Or how they failed to keep releasing DLC for Starcraft and Diablo? Just because they were making money doesn't mean they weren't already falling apart.
WoW wasn't even released 20 years ago
Maybe it is very simple. Games were made by people, who loved gaming. When their products were great, they earned money. When someone earns money, there are others that like to earn money. These people do not like games, but the big one game: Get rich. Blizzard went down, when the gaming-industry became the biggest part of the entertaining-sector. Blizzard-Activision was too big, too successful to be not viewed by money-players as a possible way to get richer. Blizzard went down, when it lost the contact to the players, reduced the support, get doubts about blizzcon. Blizzard went down, when it makes no longer good games, that lead to commercial success, but try to sell products, which are at random games. They money-maker like Kotick take over, and they were too stupid to understand: First you have to have a good game for players, then you can earn money. It is the same for Ubisoft and others. A good game is more than any product, you need the players, who like it and not only consume it.
"Blizzard makes big and epic games"
What games? None of the games they're known for since wow are big and epic. They're reasonably sized fun games with a wide style of games which means somewhat experimental. That's what blizz was known for.
People are gonna learn to leave game devs I think it's mainly the 30+ gamers that are mentally stuck in abusive relationships with game devs
The downfall of Blizzard was, unironically, World of Warcraft.
Kotick must have looked over at POE and crapped his pants at how quickly they produce new content...
It's way past time for blizzard , you go from hoping the next game will capture what they were to now rooting for their expedited demise.
Assuming all this is true, Kotick doesn't sound like the unreasonable man in the company. If anything, sounds like he was mostly reasonable while his underlings grossly mismanaged just about everything, even to the point of not wanting resources he was willing to give. I would take more control over a company too if my best talent spent seven years on a botched project, then botched the salvaged piece not long after. While botching every single other franchise, then scoffing at making a Valheim competitor when they likely couldn't out-do that game either. They 'make big epic games' except they don't. And haven't for a long time.
Like a lot of studios who were hot shit but then started to struggle, one could argue that Blizzard bought its own rockstar hype and didn't develop a good pipeline when game development got more and more complex and expensive. The toxic culture probably existed before the merger too, although Kotick I'm sure didn't exactly try to do anything about it until it blew up/
We now have bowls of fruit, female dwarves with beards, and im forced to be best mates with Alliance after years of merciless slaughter. Surprisingly though, TWW is actually a pretty good expansion thus far.
Blizzard has been dead for years. Its corpse just keeps on decaying more and more as years go by.
Thats very interesting thanks. I remember a quote from Ion Hazzikostas about how if they did player housing in wow it would need to be "Blizzard Quality". I wonder... it seems like there must be so much financial and cultural pressure within the team to make the next big thing that the project scopes rapidly grow out of control.
It very simple. The games industry is not business. Games are not a commodity, they are a pastime, so if you treat them like a commodity, you get commodity buyers who have no impulse control and are difficult to retain because they have no concept of studio loyalty (which is rooted in good gameplay) and are distracted by shiny things. You can easily get usurped by anything with better systems, and you never get that back. Meanwhile, real and loyal gamers have very little money for you. If you don't make something compelling, you don't even have a chance with them, but as long as you do, they'll buy your game and the next one and the next one and so on. Bobby Kotick spent every last bit of Activision's and Blizzard's good will in the pursuit of the short term profit, and they had a lot to burn.
Schreier? Isn't that the clown who tried to kill Dragon's Crown and accidentally made it sell millions? He's still around?
Sounds like every executive I have even spoken to or heard of tbh. "Strategic thinking"
Sounds like every executive I have even spoken to or heard of tbh. "Strategic thinking"
"capitalism effectively replaced all the values of humanity into one single entity ; capital"
so what youre saying is, it was as bad as we thought. shocking. wasnt hard to see the change when Bobby and the beancounters took over.
Sounds like every executive I have even spoken to or heard of tbh. "Strategic thinking"
So I did start playing WoW after a 9 year break and I instantly see that Blizzard has big intern problems.
The whole game is a mess. Bugs, you can brick every quest, rushed expansions, unfinished or confusing questlines that are connected but dont fit together, story that is told in a uninspiring way, many rushed corners and way more. Not sure about "The War Within" but between TWW and legion there is nothing to be proud of.
That’s how companies get down.
We can blame Activision all we want, but half of the shit they've been doing would have happened unless it was green lit or allowed by others in Blizzard.
They ruined WoW for me since World of Draenor. They deserve all what’s coming to them.
Legion was genuinely great... until the end of the expansion when they destroyed everything you worked for and negated the entire feel of the game.
*Warlords of Draenor
Blizzard was in the decline ever since it was acquired by Activision.
A videogame company stops making games and begins making services. What could go wrong?
Man I had a pre order for Starcraft Ghost for like a year before I gave up.
feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation
then again, a lot of things get like that these days...