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Shreier can't possibly understand how heated discussions and shouting could ever be a positive thing, since he looks and sounds like he's got an overwhelming amount of estrogen in his body. Funny how Blizzard started collapsing once the kind of corporate environment that Shreier loves took over.
Its kind of weird how you assume that all women hated it or were sexually harassed when there were a few cases in a company with 100 if not 1000s of employees. One or two getting harassed does not equal all women being harassed.
Two main things this made me think about: 1) Project Titan seemed like the epitome of "Perfect is the enemy of good." They wanted nothing short of perfection, and while they probably had something good enough to be a great success if they ran with it, they never allowed it to happen because it wasn't perfect enoguh. 2) PirateSoftware (aka Thor) really summed up how bad the pay at Blizzard was in some of his videos. At one point, for a significant period of time, he was making ONE-THIRD of the industry average pay of someone in his position. And then after he eventually left and went to AWS, he told a story about telling a manager that he was feeling like he wasn't contributing enough and the manager telling him to take the rest of the day off and the next day and come back after the weekend. He got so used to grind culture that he wasn't used to actual normal working practices and his work being valued, and he realized this after the weekend. He *was* being productive, he just wasn't constantly on edge grinding himself into paste. It was a hell of a few deep insights into how things were at Blizzard.
Thor needed to Grind harder AGS Breakaway. Grand tour. Crucible. Lord of the rings MMO imploded into singularity. New World is Kinda Arse too compared to WOW, but its functional.
Deadlines are important guardrails. They should neither be adhered to religiously nor ignored completely. Creative directors will iterate forever if you let them.
I had someone in an organization that I was a higher-up in, his best friend told me that "he tends to get power hungry", and I saw him starting to do more and more things because he didn't trust others to get things done properly. The worst thing is, now that he's not with our organization, he's moved to another larger one, and him and his wife are both pushing their way further and further up the chain. And I'm afraid that it'll all come down to the same thing yet again once someone tries to put him in his place.
eurocentric culture is literally just egomania given priority over societal well being... its absurdly childish and is going to make our culture go extinct instead of morphing into something adaptable and productive for the modern world..
I’m gonna go ahead and bring up Warcraft 3 reforged here and how much they insulted their audience by not even allowing the original game to exist. This should be enough evidence that the people in charge despise the original blizzard team
@@JJJBunney001 Despise may be a bit strong but if they crap all over a companies history, legacy, good name and customers to make a quick buck at the very least they hold all of those in utter contempt.
@@JJJBunney001 the old team... Flaws and all did a better job. Canada's best PM beat his wife and cheated on his wife. Meh. He created more opportunity for average Canadians than the feminist running Canada today.
@@JJJBunney001 I realize that. I guarantee though, those people who are 100% motivated by money don’t respect you or the devs that care about quality over quantity.
When Warcraft 3 Reforged came out, it was definitely driven by Kotick and his cronies to try and squeeze more money out of the gamer. We shall not forget the fact that a lot of the talent that made the amazing games we came to love Blizzard for have left the company already even before all these issues arose.
Most AAA game companies these days aren't making games. They're making cash shops with games attached. Profit first, game second, and any fun you might have in the process is almost accidental. It's been going on for years, and I'm glad to see players finally getting fed up with it and voting with their wallets in big enough numbers that the corporate bastards are feeling it. Whether or not this will be a revolution for the better remains to be seen, but in the meantime, burn baby burn.
Nothing is burning 😂 people are still spending loads of money on triple A games. Might be burning in the tiny section of people who pay close attention to these things but majority of people do not care whatsoever… they want to get home from work, play some video games to relax. They couldn’t be bothered whatsoever 😂
@@deadjosh13 So in other words they are npcs with no ability to do any critical thinking. Npc theory does seem more plausible every day so you may be right.
@@deadjosh13 every AAA company announcing massive layoffs just to keep themselves afloat is screaming otherwise. it's very much burning. theres a couple of shit franchises that have retained enough of their braindead playerbase to not be impacted much, but sales have been abysmal for AAA. Almost no AAA games are in the top 20 best sellers year after year
This thread is pretty silly. Terminally online gamers are unquestionably the people most detached from reality. Of course studios prioritize profit first. They're friggin' businesses... Statistically, there are more indie games released than mega studio blockbusters. They're less likely to be there, because they're outnumbered.
@@itmeurdad the point of a AAA studio is to have the resources to make a game that more people would buy so its absolutely reasonable to expect the industry giants to be on the annual best seller list. Thats like saying there are more mom and pop hardware stores so naturally one of them sold more shovels than Home Depot.
And yet the success of Overwatch 1 makes your statement patently false. Games designed for everybody just are harder to make appealable to a large crowd.
yeah, a lot of modern gamers really need to understand that not every game is going to appeal to them. turn-based rpgs will always exist, regardless of whether some people think it's an outdated genre or not. similarly, games can have non-white protagonists, regardless of how racist some gamers can be.
@bria243 overwatch became successful because of the amount of "+18" fan made content it had even before release. Literally gooners made it popular. Then it fell off once they started changing it to fit in with all the other crowds.
World of Warcraft at its peak, full prime crushing everything in front of it. What does Blizzard do ? Pull people off the mega hit, start insane investments into something to replace it... why ? It was one of the rare games at the time that could say it was making ALL the money.
@@philippecote8571 don't romanticize big corps, all of them are aiming for big profits and have made low quality products for the sake of it. DotA 2 had to be re-released and let's not forget artifact.
@@cabrondemente1 I'm right there with you bud. Sadly that's a downside of capitalism in any industry. The big fish eats/acquires the small fish and their business models are based on growth instead of revenue (ticking timebomb for no more passion). I wouldn't romanticize big corps but I do believe some fish are worse than others.
stuff we never knew but guessed and called them out on for ages titan leaching people from wow so we never got the end to wrath we were supposed to get, the reason we lost so many features wrath was promised to have, still have the box with CD and its got features we never saw, all because of kotic and titan -.- having a cfo who doesn't understand an industry being put in charge of that industries leading company is truly dumb, freaking soap man
"titan leaching people from wow so we never got the end to wrath we were supposed to get, the reason we lost so many features wrath was promised to have, still have the box with CD and its got features we never saw, all because of kotic and titan -.-" and really that's so wild. Imagine your 1 game is your cash cow, and in wrath it's more popular than it's ever been, and you take a bunch of people off it and end up compromising its future success to make an unproven IP that you end up canceling anyway.. fucking lol
@@EB-bl6cc That's arguably what's happening to FFXIV. It's the big moneymaker, the thing keeping Square afloat...and then they blow it on shit like Forspoken instead of reinvesting
Remember the giant Gundrak temple at the end of Zul'Drak that you can't go inside? The one where they were supposedly sacrificing their own gods for power in order to fight against the Lich King? Yeah... that was obviously supposed to have been an entire other raid tier. Azjol-Nerub was supposed to be a huge subterranean zone. Utgarde Keep was also allegedly supposed to have a raid inside that was likely turned into the second dungeon Utgarde Pinnacle. Flying combat was cut so late in development it was on the back of the box when you bought the game! XD
It's been in my experience you let your workers work. Your artists design, your story writers write, and your musicians make the music. You then ensure that everything is up to par, but you need to let them express themselves. If one of your workers come to you, you give guidance, give them an idea where to take the story, what to design, and you let them roll with it. There has seemingly been a severe lack of that as of recent. Not only from Blizzard, but damn near all game companies right now. I am looking forward to the firestorm that is coming, while it will suck that some companies will die, people will lose their jobs. That sucks, but I do feel these game companies will right themselves here soon. At least that is once their feet are held to the fire till their feet become ash. Examples will be made, people will get "hurt" (financially), and it's something I look forward to.
@@Carakav EXACTLY. I think these companies got thr big $$ signs in their eyes and that's was that. Sold out their fans. Their passion. And love for not only art, but games for money.
They all got infested by businessmen rather than creatives who can also do business. So many gaming companies suckered into corporate money making machines rather than being, a game company.
@@Geneticspore The only thing that I'm afraid of is that, if a videogame crash happens, the only big company that would remain would be one that does all of the things you said AND still make a profit (EA is a good example)
@NuclearAcorn overwatch was great. Ow2 killed it all though. It's undeniable that ow was a massive success until they put it on life support to make ow2
Overwatch was such a fucking good game, but they really had incompetent character designers/balance. In a game like overwatch you have to be extremely careful about the kinds of metas and mechanics you bring into it because you will end up with things like Brigitte on release which will make people quit. They had this problem with Heroes of the storm too, just heroes that were just absurdly overpowered (not just numbers, like they needed reworks within 6 months) and unfun to play against because they weren't QA'd properly. they had a golden egg and they squandered it big time
@@DWlsh43 In HotS it was likely a deliberate move. Release new champ, it's objectively OP on release just enough to have an all around edge so casual mass of people (which is the majority player base everywhere) would be compelled to donate to try it asap. Then nerf it by the time most softcore free2play players can afford it with earnable currency. Monetized FOMO, devs do it all the time in live service games. LoL did that too (heck, could be doing it to this day, idk tho, haven't played since 2014). The amount of people who leave because of that is negligible.
A superhero game where you also have to manage your secret identity sounds like fun! The only game series I can think of that comes even remotely close is the Persona series. High schooler by day, Shadow battler by night.
@@bsherman8236 There are some old super hero games. Finding them might be a problem but they are out there. (and i mean fairly good ones, Fantastic four is not a good game for example)
@@davidmiller9485 i remember city of heroes but the game engine is so outdated, a dedicated sandbox superhero game with character customization and modding would be great
@@bsherman8236 I played city of heroes but that isn't what i was referring to. Hero X and Freedom Force and it's expansion. They are old games but lots of fun. Of course their is the batman games as well.
Part of this story reminds me of when I worked for EA Tiburon almost two decades ago as a tester. You'd spend hours testing, take thorough notes and then go to the "shared computers" to enter them just to find out all of those bugs had already been entered. Complete and utter waste of your time and their money. Who'd have suspected they would later shut down? **blank stare**
Worked on governmental project costing billions, they have the same meetings. Got removed from a team after I told one of the lead his pointless "45min rant" costed the tax payer over 50k.
This type of news I’m sure is devastatingly to the blizzard fans who cultishly still believe that Blizzard couldn’t have been the problem and it was everyone else fault for their downfall.
@@vinnythewebsurfer I have always thought the blame was in great part on their partner/parent company for pursuing profits and appeasing to investors at the cost of making a subpar product, but there's no doubt that there must have been some management issues that made projects stagger and therefore not release.
Personally, I always knew that there was project mismanagement at Blizzard since the late 2000s, because it was pretty much only Blizzard who would take 7-8 of production(prototype+pre-production+production) to ship their new titles. That is more than decade before most other triple A(ie. almost everyone but Rockstar) started to see these much longer development cycles. It was clear that it was a symptom of throwing a lot of things at a wall until they "figured it out." In hindight, Metzen and other senior creatives(from the 90s) being assigned to so many projects was a big clue as to how bottlenecked decisions could be on a day to day basis. People can't be making such big design and production decisions for multiple titles at the same time, it's not how things are done at the scale of productions that newer games are made of. Lots of the company seemingly was ran like a studio in the 90s and not like a mega office with thousands of employees.
@@Eltener123 Overwatch was already the zombified corpse of whatever Project Titan was meant to be. Arguably, it's a miracle Overwatch even exists. Activision "stepping in" would have just resulted in the entire thing being scrapped due to the sheer amounts of money it was losing in development. Let's not kid ourselves, Activision is definitely not the only problem, but they have been nothing but an albatross around Blizzard's proverbial neck since the buyout.
@@Zalinth Someone needed to step in after OW1 released and tell Jeff Kaplan "balancing around Plat is stupid;" "drip feeding lore will eventually kill the hype;" and "Overwatch 2 as a new or seperate game is a stupid idea." Blizzard wasn't going to do it so it may as well have been Activision.
Well Kotick is gone and Metzen is back. It's not the redemption arc one would hope for, but at least there's some sense that they're trying to right the ship.
then why did he agree to partner up with Activision in the first place? he didn't have to do that, its not like they were forced to take on the partnership. they made enough money with WoW to be able to continue to make WoW expansions and other games alongside it. Its not like the output of Blizzard in terms of actual new games increased drastically since Activision came in. They still take an average of 5-6 years to ship a completely new title, actually more. Whats the last new game they shipped before D4? OW2 doesn't count since its just a rebrand of OW1. D2R and DI were handled by other studios and Warcraft III Reforged was a remaster not a remake or new game. So basically before D4 their only new game was OW1 in 2016, so it took another 7 years after OW1 to bring out a new game.
It's nice when everything I've said online in the past about Blizzard is proven to be fact, you know, because I've talked to people who used to work there and I've been told many stories. Basically, it's drama there from the very top to the very bottom and Bobby coming into the mix just made things worse. But, somehow, for some reason, Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft (before Warlords) somehow was *really* good despite all this and it had more to do with game devs ignoring the idiots in charge and doing their own thing. Problem is, soon as the devs no longer held the ability to get away with ignoring the idiots in charge, that is when WoW got worse and how all the modern titles suck.
WoW and Warcraft 3 were created back in the era before things got too out of control and all the top talent was poached from those teams. I don't think people appreciate how damaging it is to hemorrhage talent from a dev team or a company at large. Open AI is about to collapse from this very same thing. They still have a backlog of projects that they are releasing from the good ol' days before they hemorrhaged all their top AI experts and researchers, but once those people are gone and all you have is management and the chafe then no new innovation will occur. That's what the Warcraft 3 and WoW era was for Blizzard.
@@kirbyjoe7484 Both Riot and Amazon set up studios within 30 minutes drive of Blizzard. Amazon Games Studio was right down the road from Blizzard, both building were visible to each other, you could look out the window and see the other, both in the same business park. While Riot Games is located 5kms away on the other side of town. Not only did both offer better hours, better conditions and better pay, they were both conveniently in the same place, which is why all the talent at Blizzard left for Riot Games, while Amazon was simply happy with poaching anyone who had a history at Blizzard (So they got all the people Riot Games turned down). This was around the time the quality of Blizzard's games, WoW expansions and "Remasters" took a massive nosedive as all the talent which had been carrying the clowns in charge of everything whom had not worked on a single game themselves in 20 years and those above them who were not even game developers, but suits, are now all gone. So Blizzard hires desperate poorly educated interns to replace them all, of whom the only ones with any semblance of talent being the artists, with increasing reliance on outsourcing of programmers and pre-made coding tools, all while the game designers and narrative designers are replaced with consultancy groups.
Old WoW is often viewed thru very rose tinted glass. The reason people remember it fondly is because back then we did not have the access to online resources as we do now. Modern WoW still is the most relevant MMO out 😂 no other MMO other than maybe FFXIV is even close, but even then it only became extremely popular cause Blizz screwed up really really bad.
This is all so familiar after seeing what my partner went through on another recently "failed" AAA project. It's really disheartening how much work, effort, time and pain can just be thrown away due to bad leadership.
Bobby is a giant scapegoat for all the bad things that Blizzard did. "You think you do but you don't" didn't come from Bobby. That was Blizzard. Killing Overwatch? That was Blizzard. Killing D3 and SC2? That was also, surprise surprise, Blizzard, not Bobby. Stop defending Blizzard and blaming Bobby.
@@GetterRay the biggest laugh was how adamant they were that we didn't want vanilla wow, and it currently has more active players than retail. Always hilarious.
@@GetterRay Bobby Kotick is the only reason why Activision came back to life after it went bankrupt, changed its name, and was fading into obsolescence.
@@trueandfact I don't think it has more active players than retail, but its definitely not an insignificant portion of the WoW player base and it was fucking stupid that they laughed at us for wanting classic.
Ouch. As Izaro once opined: "For those who asdend too quickly, the fall is inevitable." Somehow, the original love what you work on formula has kept pace at GGG. Even after the 10 cent acquisition.
we, the old school Blizzard fans, knew for a time and finally acknowladged with a mix of heartbreak and fury, that Blizzard would never be the same the day they released Diablo 3.
Just want to give a window into the kind of commute a Blizzard Employee might have. I regularly drive from a much more afforable area to Irvine and even right on the Coast in the heart of LA. If they are leaving the office after 3 pm, it could take them 2-3 hours depending on time of day and how far they live. They also need to pay for the toll road (~$10/day) or add another 30 minutes. If they wait until ~ 6 pm to leave traffic has mostly cleared up and it takes ~1-1.5hrs. If you have some friend there it makes sense to just hangout at the campus, have some fun, maybe grab a drink.
I live local in SoCal, and people deciding to live beyond the toll road are trolling themselves, those areas beyond the toll (The 73) are all high rent/lease. The real commuters live in the hood in SoCal and commute from the west toward Irvine. Toll roads are for the dudes who think they make enough money and then down the line realize they are still broke because they thought living in Laguna Nigel or Lake Forest was smart. The smart devs stayed like you said and just played the games till traffic cleared to leave.
There is a concept of brothers in arms. People who have fought and suffered together are bonded together. It often refers to military people, but the same applies to people going thru hardships together. Companies can use that to create a bond between employees and employees will accept more abuse before leaving. The problem with that is when people start to leave, it has a domino effect, and then only a few people leaving cascades into everyone leaving.
9:00 it sounds like the problem wasn't direction, it was impossible goals. They should NEVER have started off trying to beat their main IP. Start small with near indie level projects, build up, and then when they have a fanbase for that title release a major blockbuster type game. Its a huge problem the AAA games industry thinks every game they make needs to be some 100Mil mega project.
Who's "They"? In the video we clearly got the names of everyone actually responsible. And there isn't a name Bobby among them. Bobby appears only after Blizz actual death.
I think the idea of bonus' being spread among all teams is better, I worked at a studio, and only 2 projects got good bonus', problem is, getting on those teams becomes a political matter and not a skill matter, and talented people couldn't get on those teams, because when their projects release there's no room for them on other teams at that time, so they are stuck on newer projects, and not the older IPs
Yes. It causes a lack of morale to even try on other projects and it adds fuel to office politics, so people will attempt to find a way to jump over to the more successful team and get better rewards due to who you spend time with. Not too dissimilar to how people flock to the biggest servers in WoW just to get the benefits of being where the action happens. An individual developer does not have full control over the success of a project, so it becomes unfair to be judged based on a metric that you can't control when you already do your job well. I can see maybe giving additional bonuses or accolades to individuals that exceed expectations in their field, but those should be done sparringly and on top of bonuses if the company is doing well as a whole and they should not completely overshadow the already existing bonus.
This. So much. You need to motivate your profit centers with a little extra, that’s fine (you usually pay them a little less in salary.) but THE bonus is for the organization. From the QA to the executive assistants. You are begging for disfunction doing it the Kotick way. The man must be an off the spectrum genius in some ways because he has no social awareness. In another era he wouldn’t have survived childhood.
Again I say, Mike Morhaime if he may appear nice and loveable, which I'm sure he is and probably is part the problem too, he is a terrible leader, and eventually he ran his company to ground. Blizzard's decline started when Alan Adham stepped down and Morhaime was 100% in control!
You hit the nail on the head. You can't make a a Sims player go start shooting willy nilly using special powers, and you can't get a COD player play inZOI. Sure, some MMO players can try to dabble a bit in both aspects but this is why MMOs don't go full DnD rules where a whole session can be devoted to a meal in a tavern - and even then, most of the DnD handbooks revolve and focus on combat and adventure, not "oh lets have a casual social situation and then have a contest to see who can carve a better sign for the inn to replace the stolen one".
I don't think games need to be harder, take longer, or be bigger. Just make smaller games! That's all you have to do. Make smaller games! Not every game needs to be bigger and badder and crazier. Just make smaller, quality games and people will buy them and play them.
But think from a big company's perspective. They aren't making a one-time product, they are trying to sell you an ongoing service to print themselves money. Making a one time small purchase doesn't get a big studio out of bed in the morning. That's why I feel we're in an era where indie games are almost better than AAA games because they have more intentionality, creativity, expression, uniqueness and even completeness (no big studio wants their game to 'end', they want you paying perpetually)
@@GlobusTheGreat Indies are not almost better. They are better. As evident to more and more ending in the top 10. Games used to be like books. You finish one you are ready for the next one whenever you please. In this environment competition was good as it kept gamers interested while you finish your next title. Now they are long term commitments. Which result on them being more expensive to make, longer time to make, and a much bigger price tag. But the thing is. People do not have time for several long term commitments. Only one maybe two. So in this new business model competition will kill you.
Times were simpler back in that era. Games had less, thus they succeeded with less. It was easier to get stuff out the door without screwing up. That's not so much the case anymore.
@@scaper12123 Um, Wow (as an example) up through Wotlk, had a game design that respected the player, gave them the tools to create the gaming experience they wanted to have, rather than forcing them down a rail on a theme park ride, holding hands the whole time, like it is now.
I had the fortune of meeting Morhaime in 2017 at E3. I was standing in the VIP/Invited Guest line at the XBOX Showcase (Microsoft Theater) and Mike walked up behind me in line. He saw my shirt (former military unit) and asked about it. We had such a lovely conversation. I knew who he was and he was just there in a $45 polo and Levis lol. He later offered me a tour of the campus. I also have friends that worked for Blizz for over 15 years who would tell me that Mike would come down from his office and just sit in the Customer Service rooms and answer tickets and handle calls. He also would invite staff over to dinner at his home so he can just talk with them and get to know them.
I met Mike at a charity dinner. My wife is a big Rush fan, and he is too, so they had a chat about that and he was quite pleasant. Frank Pearce, Metzen and Samwise were all cool dudes too. I think the success of WoW really ran away with them and they made mistakes selling to Activision and accepting so much outside control. They've all moved on... but for Metzen who came back. I'd like to think he's designing for cool and not for shareholders now.
My issue with all these news curation services is in the operative word “curation,” ie, the selective inclusion or omission based on certain criteria. So, since I’m not the one doing the curating and can’t see what isn’t shown me by the curation software, what am I *not* being shown? It’s an open door to any entity with an agenda, and I don’t like that invading how I stay informed.
When I hear certain stories about certain managers being unable to make decisions I can kinda feel for those people. I think we are going to hear more and more stories like that as the cost for making games gets higher and higher. At my job if I make a mistake or if im a day late on a deadline I might cost my company maybe 5000 to 10,000 bucks. These managers in gaming are seeing these multi-million dollar projects that if they fail will cost their company hundreds of millions of dollars. Now you might say "Well if they can't handle it they shouldn't have taken the job." And you would be absolutely right for sure but you also won't know if someone can do a job until they try. At my job managers are never outside hires. Our managers come from within the company that way it's never someone that we don't already know and haven't worked with for several years already. Some of them can handle it, some of them can't. It's really just a coin toss.
@@mythicalsyn4598 those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It doesn't matter if content is "pure" or not, it only needs a bot to target it
It's interesting how much of Blizzard North is left out of the history of Blizzard now. Feels a bit revisionist on their part, but I don't know what would motivate it really. Just something I've noticed taken hold over the years.
Blizzard didn't have a choice in the matter. They were wholly owned by Vivendi already. Selling themselves to Vivendi was the original sin in this case.
@@jackinthebox301 We need to bare in mind the 90s was a very different time in gaming. I mean, look at Square Enix, they were forced to merge due to how turbulent the 90s were. 90% of video game studios went bankrupt or bust after just making one or two games, while giants of the 80s were also going belly up, the climate was very different back then and the only studios which appeared to have any actual success were successful because they were in bed with some big publisher with the financial capitol to advertise the hell out of their games. All the successful title of the late 90s were successful because of advertising and this felt like a safety net worth risking being controlled by corporate interests to protect the jobs of the people working at the development studio. These were the days before we had digital media, everything was still physical back then, these were the days before the internet had social media or wide spread cheap advertising or algorithmic recommendations of content, if no one advertised your game or covered it in a magazine, no one knew it even existed. Worse still, when a company was successful and their success outstripped their financial means to meet fan expectations when rapidly expanding or trying to approach a project which is more expensive than they anticipated, they will need some big sugar daddy company to provide the money to realise their game, so they sell themselves to a big publisher in return for achieving their dream, such as the case with Blizzard and with Bungie, Bungie went with Microsoft and Blizzard with Vivendi. Some companies being the absolute chads they were, refused to sign a deal with the devil and because of it had to languish in commissioned hell, living paycheck to paycheck until by a miracle, fan funding and digital media became a reality and then decided to make their dream game, such as with Digital Extremes and Warframe. While others were lucky enough to be located in a country which adopted the concept of government grants early on, such as the case with CCP and EVE Online and GGG with Path of Exile. So, yeah basically many developers we loved as kids now suck because they were forced to sell their souls to the devil in the first place to make the games we loved as kids, now the devil is making good on the deal...
Blizzard was bought by Vivendi in 1998 There is no way to know if the Blizzard timeline of great games in the 2000s would have unfolded in the same way that it hadn't sold. Yeah, staying independent might've been great for them... Who knows, maybe they wouldnt have the resourcing and scale to do a project like developing an MMO...
@@foxdavion6865 It's wrong to say that Starcraft at the time wasn't successful. It held the record for highest week 1 PC game sales for over a decade. It was in the Guiness book of records.
Blizzard (then Chaos Studios) was bought by Davidson & Associates in 1994. D&A was bought by CUC international in 1996. D&A was sold to Havas in 1998. Havas was bought by Vivendi in 1998 Vivendi merged it's game publishing with Activision in 2008
Mikes problem was owning small % of shares. Not sure but he should have bought adham’s and Pearce’s ownership when they left if he could afford it. Him losing his grasp on the company is his own fault.
Ahh yes, Blizzard Entertainment. The employer I once had that crushed my dreams, destroyed all of my motivation for the rest of my life and started the trend where every time I drive through an intersection I hope someone t-bones me at 100 mph. The things working at Blizzard taught me is hard work doesn't matter, doing what you're told doesn't matter, and it's not what you know or what you can do, but rather. It's who you know, that's the only thing that matters. If you don't have the right friends, you don't matter. As terrible as that sounds, it's true. That's simply the world we live in. I just wish I would have been into carpentry or something growing up. Pursuing a career in game development ruined my life.
Not to be mean but if the quality of current devs at blizzard is any telltale sign, its not that you need to know the right person but rather you are a legitimately C tier programmer with a D tier curriculum. The game is so trash that barely any changes have been programmed from the glory days of old and somehow they manage to make it worse. Have you really taken a look at yourself and compared to other real programmers (not game dev) and could you hold a candle to them? Yes I do see that it may seem mean, but here is the bright side. You are either a really good programmer, and you just need to start sending applications or you are not really a good programmer and you can simply accept that truth and start studying again to get where you need to be. The good side of programming career is that since its always changing, you can always update yourself and break through barriers through plain good studying and effort.
@@trueandfact I worked there during what you call "the glory days". I worked there during the Wrath of the Lich King years. At the beginning of the transition to Activision when they brought in all the Activision people that made that place hell in the first place. I was let go after my boss found out I was friends with the girl he had been trying to hook up with for the 3 months before I moved to his team. He saw me as competition and worked out a transfer for me as a "promotion" to the then, brand new Austin TX offices. I was told I had 3 weeks to get to TX, that I wouldn't be getting a raise because at the time it was "like a raise" because it was cheaper to move there. I also wouldn't be getting any moving assistance. Also Blizzard has more than 1000 positions that aren't programming. I can tell you've never actually worked in the industry. I hope that never changes. Your reply says you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
@@Alex-j8m7j right so if he is so good a programmer, why can't he land another job? hint: he is not that good. Blizz only recruits the lowest of the low, hence the quality of their games are so trash for the last decade.
@@trueandfact "not to be mean but let me fantasize about a scenario in my head that justifies everything bad that happened to you with absolutely nothing to prove it solely to be an asshole" mission failed brother youre a c tier human with d tier social awareness, when you get your first job you're gonna be shocked by the concept of office politics existing
While the corporate environment is rarely a fertile bed for creativity, this story goes to show you that some rigidity - some kind of organizational framework that strictly defines individual spheres of influence - is absolutely necessary, even in game development. These people with all these poorly-established roles and way too much power and influence brought this whole thing down. Everyone - from top to bottom - needs to have 'a' job. They cannot wear 10 hats - they need to have a role, and to have that role *restricted,* featuring clearly-enumerated objectives and benchmarks. Anything that deviates from this is chaos. And while chaos CAN occasionally result in brilliance, the lesson from Blizzard is that chaos is not a sustainable formula for massive success. Chaos eats itself.
This seems brutally obvious to those of us who work "real" jobs-one can instantly tell from my job title (Accounts Payable Specialist) what I do from nine to five, and even if I didn't work for a fairly small company with a short ladder, even someone in a completely unrelated division would know why they pay me. Game companies are notorious for not doing this. It's like watching a game of American football where all 11 players on offense are trying to be the quarterback.
It's because becoming too corporate makes the games more obviously soulless. We can see this in all of the output of modern AAA companies. That Blizzard was unconventional was no small part in why their games were so special. If anything they just needed tighter leashes on how much freedom the top talent were given. Seemed like things were delayed for way too many years before they were able to resolve their issues.
Blizzard should have done what they were already doing. Keep the same ways of when they produced WC3 and WOW. Same management style, same team sizes, same type of employees. Then, with the money, create more teams like that working of other projects.
What I wouldn't do to just see Blizzard make smaller teams and let them COOK and SHIP games despite it not going to be a multi trillion billion dollar game. You can't make anything successful with the framework of "if it's not going to be the next WoW, don't make it", it's such flawed and hopeless logic.
It's the deathblow for most studios. They get this big and they become AAA content farms now. The small teams cooking and shipping games without a corporate checklist are the indie folks now, for the most part.
I knew someone that was good friends with the lead programmer of Diablo 2. He told us what the bonus structure was. This was back in the mid 2000s when he told of this. Every employee got $10k for each year they worked for Blizzard, paid out every December. His bonus that year would be $100K since he had worked for the company for 10 years. He ended up leaving Blizzard after the game was done so he could travel around the world with his GF.
The fact that moorheim had to carry the projects and was so well known and beloved even by low level staff shows that the system was rotten all the way up.
People wonder why businesses and schools have things like uniform requirements. There's a point where you just start letting everything slide, held to no standards, and everyone just starts doing whatever they want. It sounds like a slippery slope argument, but generally if you give people free will to do whatever, most will, and most people's free will doesn't include "I should also be considerate of my neighbor" while meeting their own desires.
Where compliments are due. Thanks to your reporting and Jason's new book. Much appreciated in Asmon's midlife crisis. He made me aware of your channel.
I'm down for reading this too. It sounds like it'll be a great book. But I also have to finish "The City We Became" by N.K. Jemisin first (seriously, if you like sci-fi/fantasy, check her out)
@@ShadowsOfThePast And you wouldn't be wrong, If I said it's not making money. Blizzard is making money. That doesn't change the fact that the old Blizzard, that used to make quality games is dead. Why the F would I care if their investors are happy or not? :D
@@0ne0fmany Well I can't speak for all the games but the biggest and most important product they have (WoW) is doing just fine and there's also speculation it might be on its all time high. At least it is doing very well atm and there's a good chance it will only get better with the 2 upcoming expansions..
I love this channel. So much great information. I stopped playing WoW after Mists of Pandaria, and other Blizzard titles shortly after that. I could feel something was amiss, maybe the quality going down, but could not put my finger on it. This shines a lot of light. Sounds like the Titan debacle caused a lot more internal damage than they initially let on. Keep up the good work.
Pardo was also responsible for Diablo 3's miserable state at launch. People tend to only blame Jay Wilson, but Pardo had a leading role in design and was the executive producer. This stays relevant up to today because the upcoming D4 expansion will turn the game into 3.5.
Not gonna lie, I despise Schrier after his stint at Kotaku. But there is no doubt he puts his time into finding things out. It's just his personal opinions and the things he bullshitted about early on that gets me.
Pardo and Kaplan are legends of the gaming industry. Both of those guys have been in the online gaming world since the birth. Hopefully we see them reunite or do something again in the future.
(Wiping blood off his face and breathing heavy) "OK.... FINE.... we can (spits out a tooth) call the Intellect and Stamina gear... "of the eagle"... instead of... "of the wyvern"... But It's going to be a cold day in hell... when I let you name a dragon... after your stupid deathwing terminator miniatures.... I think I have a concussion..." -Pardo, a creative discussion with Metzen
If i remember correctly I contacted Mike when MoP came out and he posted how it wasnt true about people getting into MoP beta before the preorders. I told him that I preordered the game and my friend who didnt and didnt even have a sub got into the beta. What I remember was a reply that said something along the lines of that was what he was told and he was sorry. It didnt change anything or what was going on but it did make me not hate the company as much as I would later.
Creatives arguing and fighting created some of the greatest games and IPs ever. There's no way that will EVER happen today. In fact, today you're not even allowed to have valid criticism or else you're considered "toxic". It's a joke, and the majority of the gaming industry is going to burn as a result and I hate it, smfh.
Glad I quit Blizzard entirely during Shadowlands, it allows me to watch Blizz burn to the ground without losing anything and even toast the marshmellows on the flames.
Damn i think most of the gaming industry is screwed - Ubisoft is failing hard - Activision Blizzard employees is getting laid off by microsoft - Bethesda is failing - Xbox is getting ignored by devs on to developing for the platform - Sony is failing both on games and hardware (Wii-U still have more games than PS5 and concord) - EA is somehow riding on the red line between failing and on the verge of failing - Game Journos all worshiping DEI like its the second coming of Jesus. - Annapurna's eulogy - Bungie still can't get their shit together despite celebrating seperation with Activision. except for nintendo, most fans are awaiting its upcoming console early next year. (palworld situation aside, thats their legal department, not their gaming department, we talking their gaming department here.)
@@BlazeBluetm35 well not delivering quality-wise i really really hope the next pokemon game which is legends Z, is good. they actually didn't release a pokemon game this year unlike every other year so im hopeful the quality will be better.
What I've learned is that - at any scale - perfectionism is just a form of procrastination and is rarely indicative of actually having such high standards. Things become better through practice and iteration, perfectionism keeps you from getting enough completed projects to count as practice and keeps you from iterating far enough to see what it could be in practice while you keep dreaming. Deadlines or separate goals & milestones that follow a certain process help with that.
1:10 as if that was a bad thing. What the soyboys of this age don't understand is that this is how greatness is achieved. You work with people that have differing ways of doing things but are still working towards the same vision. It was this way that Blizzard achieved it's greatness and it's this new estrogen filled way of doing things that is destroying Blizzard today.
"We were really excited about appealing to a broad audience. Gamers, non-gamers, young, old, men, women, everything.." - Says no successful company ever.
I have no friggin idea how they were going to have broader audience than WoW. Seems technically impossible. I mean mobile games nowadays can do that. But Titan was like a decade before that. Why no one stopped them like after a year?
One thing I think you missed is that in the early 90s, most successful software companies operated like that unless they had been around a while. There’s a book about Microsoft employees from even before then sliding pizzas under office doors so people didn’t starve while working so many hours. Looking back, being in it felt good at the time, but it was not sustainable. I was a hacker turned recruited for a company. It legitimized us. We bonded with everyone else in the exact same boat. I never worked for blizzard but I worked for other companies. The one big difference in blizzard was the extremely low pay.
Regarding the shouting matches and arguments: A tight team will have them, and they will be better for it. If you haven't worked in an environment where you can blurt out the absolute most blunt critique and have it quickly shot down, you have never worked in an effective team. I did work in such an environment once - we all had known each other for years, and we could get into really heated arguments about - what outsiders would think were details, but that actually were foundational to the design direction of the software we were building. Outsiders would be unable to understand the consequences of those 'details' since they weren't living and breathing the software.
Orrrr you're just working in an awful, toxic work environment. A team functions DESPITE the shouting matches and arguments, not BECAUSE of them. Those companies always crash and burn.
@@TheStephaneAdam Microsoft did it for decades. Gates was well known for putting 3 or four adversaries in a room (adversaries w each other, not him) and letting them scream/shout it out. Microsoft seems to have grown just fine. Office culture was brutal and rife with politics, but it drove action. By today's standards...toxic? But successful.
But we're not talking about "outsiders", are we? We're talking about the Blizzard devs who were forced to sit in on these "meetings" and witness these arguments firsthand.
@@OhNoTwisted Hot take here, but maybe its possible for businesses to reap extraordinary profit from doing shitty awful things? Maybe the "success" of those decisions isn't actually a justification for them. It's extra rich that you would choose Bill Gates and Microsoft as your example of this process "working". Lol. Lmao, even. I'm sure the people who's lives were destroyed are ecstatic that Microsoft is now one of the richest companies on the planet.
@@OhNoTwisted What action? Microsoft hasn't been at the forefront of innovation for decades. At best it's been chasing the same hype train as every other big tech company, these day's it's AI. Before that was trying to get into the smart phone market. These days the whole windows thing is a sideshow. What's actually making money is providing solid, reliable and unexciting services to companies. Solid business plan, not sometthing done by fisticuffs in the boardroom. What you lionize is the good old "Bioware magic" or the old "Blizzard touch", bad management saved by low-;evel employees doing ungodly amounts of overtime to cover their bosses' ass. And of course said bosses getting al the credit. It's bad management. It goes nowhere. Companies that do it inevitably crash and burn.
If you allow me to present a bit of criticism. Not about the contents of the video, but about the video itself, in the "meta" sense if you will. I appreciate the amount of effort and work that you put into the video, scriptwriting it, filming it, editing it. I really do. However, I think that 23 minutes is a bit too long for this kind of topic. When we put so much effort into a project we sometimes get blindsided by all that work and want to show it, so that all that work doesn't go to "waste". Why put so much effort into something and not show it off, not include it? Problem is, 23 minutes is a bit too long for the topic. I'm somewhat certain that many viewers will doze off, start skipping, or even outright stop watching after a while because the actual point, the actual interesting content, takes so long to get into. I honestly think that this kind of video could benefit from more summarization. Even if you have some kind of intro, some kind of background story about the company etc. it can be summarized to be much shorter, so that you can get to the actual meat of the topic much sooner. I think this video could have been 10 minutes long, even less, without significant loss of information.
My WoW account was frozen for no reason. I called their customer service and it was horrible. They told me it wasn't my account. I said fine, cancel the subscription then. That was 2012 haven't given them any money since.
The conclusion is: Blizzard was the best place to be at in the 90s and early 2000s, when a group of passionate people were creating something big, to be proud of. Any details like fights are just what happens in all start up ideas when they are born. Exactly, they were not businessmen or management so they handled things like normal people without experience would .. Fast forward, their creation is a huge success and the businessmen come in. The great product is slowly transformed into a strictly profit based product. World of Warcraft ended a handful of years ago, and classic was a beautiful farewell gift. Since then, this new wow is rolling... Keeping the name but it's simply not wow.
Blizzard has totally lost it. Just this D4 expansion shows they are pretty much in worse state than both Ubisoft and Bethesda. I stopped buying games from those two more than 5 years ago. And the same goes now for Blizzard. This new D4 expansion is actually totally the opposite of what I want from my ARPG experience. So hearing this Co-op only dungeon is not actually a one off but has already future content in the making... then just no thank you.
actually there is a lot of people that like the expansion - I do not have or plan to have, but my point is assuming that everyone feels the same about that product and thinking that just because you do not like it every one else feels the same is a particularly faulty starting point.
Maybe you missed that blizzard is owned by Microsoft… and news flash… Microsofts most notable games are on console and multiplayer… go cry somewhere else
Everything from 18:20 onward I have experienced in the company I have been working at for four years. The more things devolve the more important 'just looking busy' becomes because there is a manhunt out for someone to blame. The Cliques to protect self interests, the profitable departments vs the ones struggling. Departures of talent.
I'm reminded of the Ship of Theseus argument. Mainly, if you're in your late thirties or early forties, chances are you remember the nineties' Blizzard. The good old days of Spawn Copies, of soundtracks by Matt Uelmen that consisted mostly of MIDI trackers going "bum-bum-bum, this is a Fantasy theme song for industrious humans building an outpost as per military decree!" (e.g. The Humans' theme in Warcraft II) or of him figuring out that adding a ton of reverb to basic guitar-strumming could produce something utterly haunting (Tristram's theme as of Diablo). Tiny devs, big ambitions, limited scope. I think that, specifically, was the recipe for Blizzard's success. Everything "old" Blizzard used to make felt like they'd designed the concept and then worked around what they *could* realistically deliver to produce a banger. Nowadays, we're at the point where the big ambitions remain, but the dev pool now numbers in the thousands - and the scope is utterly unhinged. Plus, add their self-importance and now the Microsoft-led belief that Blizzard is a AAA studio that "can do no wrong", and you realize there's just... nothing left of the passionate world-builders that had actual stories to tell. Now, all that's left is a big, heaving and bloated monetization platform. Overwatch 2 being Free-to-Play really was the death knell for me; OW the first in name felt like the last gasp of genuine passion the studio had. We weren't being bilked for cash, it only ever was a *rock-solid game*. And they ripped it from us, tore the meta apart and demanded we fork over cash. I've had heartbreaks before, but no game had ever broken my heart. Overwatch 2 did. It felt like the devs were saying "Screw your fond memories of pre-game shenanigans on VoIP, screw your finding the perfect niche for your preferred playstyle; all we care about is what's in your wallet."
as someone who works in games and animation, this is a story as old as time, if you look into any big gaming/ animation company, there is a 90% chance it's history looks pretty much the same...
This is the main problem with most companies, private and public. Incompetent managers. It should be left to those who have the skills to manage but also have the people knowledge and who recognise skills and talents and place these workers in the right spots. It's sad to see this happen to companies but as long as they don;t address this it will be the downfall of these companies and the toxic environment will damage/hurt a lot of people.
I remember very first rumours of their next game being a SciFi MMO / Shooter and soon after the name 'Project Titan'. I was gutted when they scrapped it unseen and used some of the assets to create Overwatch.
I'm surprised people still care about the game company that said "We want to take the 'fun' out of making video games". Like what quality of video games do you expect at this point?
i find it absolutely hilarious how pardo got fired for being a spineless terrible manager, immediately started his own company and 8 years later hasnt made a SINGLE game. put the fries in the bag bro 😭
I worked for Blizzard (in Europe) back when WoW was first released... it was BY FAR the worst job I ever had, with BY FAR the worst managers I ever encountered
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Is Chris Metzen tied to any of the controversies in Activision-Blizzard?
Shreier can't possibly understand how heated discussions and shouting could ever be a positive thing, since he looks and sounds like he's got an overwhelming amount of estrogen in his body.
Funny how Blizzard started collapsing once the kind of corporate environment that Shreier loves took over.
no thanks
Its kind of weird how you assume that all women hated it or were sexually harassed when there were a few cases in a company with 100 if not 1000s of employees.
One or two getting harassed does not equal all women being harassed.
no.
Two main things this made me think about:
1) Project Titan seemed like the epitome of "Perfect is the enemy of good." They wanted nothing short of perfection, and while they probably had something good enough to be a great success if they ran with it, they never allowed it to happen because it wasn't perfect enoguh.
2) PirateSoftware (aka Thor) really summed up how bad the pay at Blizzard was in some of his videos. At one point, for a significant period of time, he was making ONE-THIRD of the industry average pay of someone in his position. And then after he eventually left and went to AWS, he told a story about telling a manager that he was feeling like he wasn't contributing enough and the manager telling him to take the rest of the day off and the next day and come back after the weekend. He got so used to grind culture that he wasn't used to actual normal working practices and his work being valued, and he realized this after the weekend. He *was* being productive, he just wasn't constantly on edge grinding himself into paste. It was a hell of a few deep insights into how things were at Blizzard.
Super minor nitpick, but he went to work for Amazon Game Studios, not AWS.
Thor needed to Grind harder AGS Breakaway. Grand tour. Crucible. Lord of the rings MMO imploded into singularity. New World is Kinda Arse too compared to WOW, but its functional.
Jason's job at blizzard was QA, at AGS he was a manager through his father, his job at AGS was to outsource.
I don't know... Toy story like game isn't something I would be interested in.
@@TheArrowedKnee Working at AWS, I hear, is hell.
Deadlines are important guardrails. They should neither be adhered to religiously nor ignored completely. Creative directors will iterate forever if you let them.
if you ignore them completly you get duke nukem forever and george besard.
@@drwilyecoyote5357 Or beyond the good and evil 2
its why early/alpha-acces games is the golden middle route for all
@@agodelianshock9422 there are times when project management is in dire need, even though I hate it. This is one of those times
@@psypokeslowduck2880 Or star citizen
This is the kind of thing that happens when egos run rampant. Unfortunately, a great many people confuse egotism for leadership ability.
I had someone in an organization that I was a higher-up in, his best friend told me that "he tends to get power hungry", and I saw him starting to do more and more things because he didn't trust others to get things done properly. The worst thing is, now that he's not with our organization, he's moved to another larger one, and him and his wife are both pushing their way further and further up the chain. And I'm afraid that it'll all come down to the same thing yet again once someone tries to put him in his place.
Stockton Rush
Cocaine is one hell of a drug.
eurocentric culture is literally just egomania given priority over societal well being... its absurdly childish and is going to make our culture go extinct instead of morphing into something adaptable and productive for the modern world..
I’m gonna go ahead and bring up Warcraft 3 reforged here and how much they insulted their audience by not even allowing the original game to exist. This should be enough evidence that the people in charge despise the original blizzard team
You're thinking emotionally. The thought process was 100% motivated by financial reasons not to kick anyone who's not even working there anymore
@@JJJBunney001 Despise may be a bit strong but if they crap all over a companies history, legacy, good name and customers to make a quick buck at the very least they hold all of those in utter contempt.
@@JJJBunney001 the old team... Flaws and all did a better job. Canada's best PM beat his wife and cheated on his wife. Meh. He created more opportunity for average Canadians than the feminist running Canada today.
@@JJJBunney001 I realize that. I guarantee though, those people who are 100% motivated by money don’t respect you or the devs that care about quality over quantity.
When Warcraft 3 Reforged came out, it was definitely driven by Kotick and his cronies to try and squeeze more money out of the gamer. We shall not forget the fact that a lot of the talent that made the amazing games we came to love Blizzard for have left the company already even before all these issues arose.
Most AAA game companies these days aren't making games. They're making cash shops with games attached. Profit first, game second, and any fun you might have in the process is almost accidental. It's been going on for years, and I'm glad to see players finally getting fed up with it and voting with their wallets in big enough numbers that the corporate bastards are feeling it. Whether or not this will be a revolution for the better remains to be seen, but in the meantime, burn baby burn.
Nothing is burning 😂 people are still spending loads of money on triple A games. Might be burning in the tiny section of people who pay close attention to these things but majority of people do not care whatsoever… they want to get home from work, play some video games to relax. They couldn’t be bothered whatsoever 😂
@@deadjosh13 So in other words they are npcs with no ability to do any critical thinking. Npc theory does seem more plausible every day so you may be right.
@@deadjosh13 every AAA company announcing massive layoffs just to keep themselves afloat is screaming otherwise. it's very much burning. theres a couple of shit franchises that have retained enough of their braindead playerbase to not be impacted much, but sales have been abysmal for AAA. Almost no AAA games are in the top 20 best sellers year after year
This thread is pretty silly. Terminally online gamers are unquestionably the people most detached from reality.
Of course studios prioritize profit first. They're friggin' businesses...
Statistically, there are more indie games released than mega studio blockbusters. They're less likely to be there, because they're outnumbered.
@@itmeurdad the point of a AAA studio is to have the resources to make a game that more people would buy so its absolutely reasonable to expect the industry giants to be on the annual best seller list.
Thats like saying there are more mom and pop hardware stores so naturally one of them sold more shovels than Home Depot.
Games designed for everybody are literally designed for nobody.
And yet the success of Overwatch 1 makes your statement patently false. Games designed for everybody just are harder to make appealable to a large crowd.
yeah, a lot of modern gamers really need to understand that not every game is going to appeal to them. turn-based rpgs will always exist, regardless of whether some people think it's an outdated genre or not.
similarly, games can have non-white protagonists, regardless of how racist some gamers can be.
@@bria243 Games made for everyone just turn out being generic and boring, overwatch 1 was just a new (and pretty good) take on tf2
@@bria243 ??? Are you talking about the story that was basically non existent in game?
@bria243 overwatch became successful because of the amount of "+18" fan made content it had even before release. Literally gooners made it popular. Then it fell off once they started changing it to fit in with all the other crowds.
World of Warcraft at its peak, full prime crushing everything in front of it. What does Blizzard do ? Pull people off the mega hit, start insane investments into something to replace it... why ? It was one of the rare games at the time that could say it was making ALL the money.
Why? Because Kotick wanted to push for profits instead of quality.
Imagine if Gaben/Valve acquired Blizzard instead of Activision 😢
@@philippecote8571 would have been glorious
@@philippecote8571 don't romanticize big corps, all of them are aiming for big profits and have made low quality products for the sake of it. DotA 2 had to be re-released and let's not forget artifact.
@@cabrondemente1 I'm right there with you bud. Sadly that's a downside of capitalism in any industry. The big fish eats/acquires the small fish and their business models are based on growth instead of revenue (ticking timebomb for no more passion). I wouldn't romanticize big corps but I do believe some fish are worse than others.
stuff we never knew but guessed and called them out on for ages
titan leaching people from wow so we never got the end to wrath we were supposed to get, the reason we lost so many features wrath was promised to have, still have the box with CD and its got features we never saw, all because of kotic and titan -.-
having a cfo who doesn't understand an industry being put in charge of that industries leading company is truly dumb, freaking soap man
"titan leaching people from wow so we never got the end to wrath we were supposed to get, the reason we lost so many features wrath was promised to have, still have the box with CD and its got features we never saw, all because of kotic and titan -.-"
and really that's so wild. Imagine your 1 game is your cash cow, and in wrath it's more popular than it's ever been, and you take a bunch of people off it and end up compromising its future success to make an unproven IP that you end up canceling anyway.. fucking lol
@@EB-bl6cc Bungie was watching and taking notes.
@@EB-bl6cc That's arguably what's happening to FFXIV.
It's the big moneymaker, the thing keeping Square afloat...and then they blow it on shit like Forspoken instead of reinvesting
Remember the giant Gundrak temple at the end of Zul'Drak that you can't go inside? The one where they were supposedly sacrificing their own gods for power in order to fight against the Lich King? Yeah... that was obviously supposed to have been an entire other raid tier. Azjol-Nerub was supposed to be a huge subterranean zone. Utgarde Keep was also allegedly supposed to have a raid inside that was likely turned into the second dungeon Utgarde Pinnacle. Flying combat was cut so late in development it was on the back of the box when you bought the game! XD
@@EB-bl6cc They thought they were midas because they had gold in their hands
It's been in my experience you let your workers work. Your artists design, your story writers write, and your musicians make the music. You then ensure that everything is up to par, but you need to let them express themselves. If one of your workers come to you, you give guidance, give them an idea where to take the story, what to design, and you let them roll with it.
There has seemingly been a severe lack of that as of recent. Not only from Blizzard, but damn near all game companies right now. I am looking forward to the firestorm that is coming, while it will suck that some companies will die, people will lose their jobs. That sucks, but I do feel these game companies will right themselves here soon. At least that is once their feet are held to the fire till their feet become ash. Examples will be made, people will get "hurt" (financially), and it's something I look forward to.
You hit the nail on the head. "Yes, and..." Style of management. It works just as well in improve comedy as it does in every creative project.
@@Carakav EXACTLY. I think these companies got thr big $$ signs in their eyes and that's was that. Sold out their fans. Their passion. And love for not only art, but games for money.
This is how the creative industry should function.
They all got infested by businessmen rather than creatives who can also do business.
So many gaming companies suckered into corporate money making machines rather than being, a game company.
@@Geneticspore The only thing that I'm afraid of is that, if a videogame crash happens, the only big company that would remain would be one that does all of the things you said AND still make a profit (EA is a good example)
"If anyone's going to kill World of Warcraft, it should be us" sounds a lot like Overwatch as well funnily enough
I played exactly ONE game of Overwatch when it came out and immediately knew it was going to be a glossed turd.
@NuclearAcorn overwatch was great. Ow2 killed it all though. It's undeniable that ow was a massive success until they put it on life support to make ow2
@@qsxmirage7274I wish I could hear an honest story from Jeff Kaplan's perspective
Overwatch was such a fucking good game, but they really had incompetent character designers/balance. In a game like overwatch you have to be extremely careful about the kinds of metas and mechanics you bring into it because you will end up with things like Brigitte on release which will make people quit. They had this problem with Heroes of the storm too, just heroes that were just absurdly overpowered (not just numbers, like they needed reworks within 6 months) and unfun to play against because they weren't QA'd properly.
they had a golden egg and they squandered it big time
@@DWlsh43 In HotS it was likely a deliberate move. Release new champ, it's objectively OP on release just enough to have an all around edge so casual mass of people (which is the majority player base everywhere) would be compelled to donate to try it asap. Then nerf it by the time most softcore free2play players can afford it with earnable currency. Monetized FOMO, devs do it all the time in live service games. LoL did that too (heck, could be doing it to this day, idk tho, haven't played since 2014). The amount of people who leave because of that is negligible.
A superhero game where you also have to manage your secret identity sounds like fun! The only game series I can think of that comes even remotely close is the Persona series. High schooler by day, Shadow battler by night.
Persona is like Pokemon and Digimon(in terms of mons series), even when that(like even majority of Mons series) aren't allergic to having superheroes
Superhero genre is so under explored, kinda like cyberpunk until cdpr came along
@@bsherman8236 There are some old super hero games. Finding them might be a problem but they are out there. (and i mean fairly good ones, Fantastic four is not a good game for example)
@@davidmiller9485 i remember city of heroes but the game engine is so outdated, a dedicated sandbox superhero game with character customization and modding would be great
@@bsherman8236 I played city of heroes but that isn't what i was referring to. Hero X and Freedom Force and it's expansion. They are old games but lots of fun. Of course their is the batman games as well.
Part of this story reminds me of when I worked for EA Tiburon almost two decades ago as a tester. You'd spend hours testing, take thorough notes and then go to the "shared computers" to enter them just to find out all of those bugs had already been entered. Complete and utter waste of your time and their money.
Who'd have suspected they would later shut down? **blank stare**
´´these design meetings, fueled by testosterone and CAFFEINE, would get roudy´´ Coke....the guys were doing coke. 🤷♂
Coca cola is essential of course.
Yeah, but saying this would probably get the channel demonitized.
What they were doing is actually good games, something cowards like Bellular never admit.
Based
Worked on governmental project costing billions, they have the same meetings. Got removed from a team after I told one of the lead his pointless "45min rant" costed the tax payer over 50k.
This type of news I’m sure is devastatingly to the blizzard fans who cultishly still believe that Blizzard couldn’t have been the problem and it was everyone else fault for their downfall.
@@vinnythewebsurfer I have always thought the blame was in great part on their partner/parent company for pursuing profits and appeasing to investors at the cost of making a subpar product, but there's no doubt that there must have been some management issues that made projects stagger and therefore not release.
Personally, I always knew that there was project mismanagement at Blizzard since the late 2000s, because it was pretty much only Blizzard who would take 7-8 of production(prototype+pre-production+production) to ship their new titles.
That is more than decade before most other triple A(ie. almost everyone but Rockstar) started to see these much longer development cycles.
It was clear that it was a symptom of throwing a lot of things at a wall until they "figured it out."
In hindight, Metzen and other senior creatives(from the 90s) being assigned to so many projects was a big clue as to how bottlenecked decisions could be on a day to day basis.
People can't be making such big design and production decisions for multiple titles at the same time, it's not how things are done at the scale of productions that newer games are made of.
Lots of the company seemingly was ran like a studio in the 90s and not like a mega office with thousands of employees.
@@MahalGC Jeff Kaplan made and then killed Overwatch. Activision stepping in would actually have been a good thing
@@Eltener123 Overwatch was already the zombified corpse of whatever Project Titan was meant to be. Arguably, it's a miracle Overwatch even exists. Activision "stepping in" would have just resulted in the entire thing being scrapped due to the sheer amounts of money it was losing in development. Let's not kid ourselves, Activision is definitely not the only problem, but they have been nothing but an albatross around Blizzard's proverbial neck since the buyout.
@@Zalinth Someone needed to step in after OW1 released and tell Jeff Kaplan "balancing around Plat is stupid;" "drip feeding lore will eventually kill the hype;" and "Overwatch 2 as a new or seperate game is a stupid idea." Blizzard wasn't going to do it so it may as well have been Activision.
I feel Morhaime, was one the last of the original Blizzard staff and with him, the company is a shell of itself.
and if you ask the victims of the SA and abuse they will all say he was one of the most complicit people there.
Well Kotick is gone and Metzen is back. It's not the redemption arc one would hope for, but at least there's some sense that they're trying to right the ship.
@@faelirra That changes nothing.
he killed blizzard tbh when he agreed to EA money and Kotick.
then why did he agree to partner up with Activision in the first place? he didn't have to do that, its not like they were forced to take on the partnership.
they made enough money with WoW to be able to continue to make WoW expansions and other games alongside it. Its not like the output of Blizzard in terms of actual new games increased drastically since Activision came in. They still take an average of 5-6 years to ship a completely new title, actually more. Whats the last new game they shipped before D4? OW2 doesn't count since its just a rebrand of OW1. D2R and DI were handled by other studios and Warcraft III Reforged was a remaster not a remake or new game. So basically before D4 their only new game was OW1 in 2016, so it took another 7 years after OW1 to bring out a new game.
It's nice when everything I've said online in the past about Blizzard is proven to be fact, you know, because I've talked to people who used to work there and I've been told many stories. Basically, it's drama there from the very top to the very bottom and Bobby coming into the mix just made things worse. But, somehow, for some reason, Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft (before Warlords) somehow was *really* good despite all this and it had more to do with game devs ignoring the idiots in charge and doing their own thing. Problem is, soon as the devs no longer held the ability to get away with ignoring the idiots in charge, that is when WoW got worse and how all the modern titles suck.
Kotick was amazing
@@905JimRaynor Hi Robot! Nice to meet you! Did Bobby spend money on you? Lol what a loser.
WoW and Warcraft 3 were created back in the era before things got too out of control and all the top talent was poached from those teams. I don't think people appreciate how damaging it is to hemorrhage talent from a dev team or a company at large.
Open AI is about to collapse from this very same thing. They still have a backlog of projects that they are releasing from the good ol' days before they hemorrhaged all their top AI experts and researchers, but once those people are gone and all you have is management and the chafe then no new innovation will occur.
That's what the Warcraft 3 and WoW era was for Blizzard.
@@kirbyjoe7484 Both Riot and Amazon set up studios within 30 minutes drive of Blizzard. Amazon Games Studio was right down the road from Blizzard, both building were visible to each other, you could look out the window and see the other, both in the same business park. While Riot Games is located 5kms away on the other side of town. Not only did both offer better hours, better conditions and better pay, they were both conveniently in the same place, which is why all the talent at Blizzard left for Riot Games, while Amazon was simply happy with poaching anyone who had a history at Blizzard (So they got all the people Riot Games turned down). This was around the time the quality of Blizzard's games, WoW expansions and "Remasters" took a massive nosedive as all the talent which had been carrying the clowns in charge of everything whom had not worked on a single game themselves in 20 years and those above them who were not even game developers, but suits, are now all gone. So Blizzard hires desperate poorly educated interns to replace them all, of whom the only ones with any semblance of talent being the artists, with increasing reliance on outsourcing of programmers and pre-made coding tools, all while the game designers and narrative designers are replaced with consultancy groups.
Old WoW is often viewed thru very rose tinted glass. The reason people remember it fondly is because back then we did not have the access to online resources as we do now. Modern WoW still is the most relevant MMO out 😂 no other MMO other than maybe FFXIV is even close, but even then it only became extremely popular cause Blizz screwed up really really bad.
This is all so familiar after seeing what my partner went through on another recently "failed" AAA project. It's really disheartening how much work, effort, time and pain can just be thrown away due to bad leadership.
You don’t hate Bobby Kotick enough
You think you do but you don’t.
Mike is the main architect of Blizzards demise. When mIKE pushed Alan out for the sake of money, he invited Kotick in
Bobby is a giant scapegoat for all the bad things that Blizzard did. "You think you do but you don't" didn't come from Bobby. That was Blizzard. Killing Overwatch? That was Blizzard. Killing D3 and SC2? That was also, surprise surprise, Blizzard, not Bobby. Stop defending Blizzard and blaming Bobby.
@@GetterRay the biggest laugh was how adamant they were that we didn't want vanilla wow, and it currently has more active players than retail. Always hilarious.
@@GetterRay Bobby Kotick is the only reason why Activision came back to life after it went bankrupt, changed its name, and was fading into obsolescence.
@@trueandfact I don't think it has more active players than retail, but its definitely not an insignificant portion of the WoW player base and it was fucking stupid that they laughed at us for wanting classic.
Ouch. As Izaro once opined:
"For those who asdend too quickly, the fall is inevitable."
Somehow, the original love what you work on formula has kept pace at GGG. Even after the 10 cent acquisition.
An Izaro quote in a Blizzard video is something only a gentile of high esteem could deliver, my lord.
Blizzard reeks of imperfection
@@Ilyak1986 I've read it in his voice 😅
we, the old school Blizzard fans, knew for a time and finally acknowladged with a mix of heartbreak and fury, that Blizzard would never be the same the day they released Diablo 3.
Just want to give a window into the kind of commute a Blizzard Employee might have. I regularly drive from a much more afforable area to Irvine and even right on the Coast in the heart of LA. If they are leaving the office after 3 pm, it could take them 2-3 hours depending on time of day and how far they live. They also need to pay for the toll road (~$10/day) or add another 30 minutes. If they wait until ~ 6 pm to leave traffic has mostly cleared up and it takes ~1-1.5hrs. If you have some friend there it makes sense to just hangout at the campus, have some fun, maybe grab a drink.
I live local in SoCal, and people deciding to live beyond the toll road are trolling themselves, those areas beyond the toll (The 73) are all high rent/lease. The real commuters live in the hood in SoCal and commute from the west toward Irvine. Toll roads are for the dudes who think they make enough money and then down the line realize they are still broke because they thought living in Laguna Nigel or Lake Forest was smart. The smart devs stayed like you said and just played the games till traffic cleared to leave.
Old blizzard crumbled because those who made it what it was moved on while the leftovers got too focused on only the cash and not the players
There is a concept of brothers in arms. People who have fought and suffered together are bonded together. It often refers to military people, but the same applies to people going thru hardships together. Companies can use that to create a bond between employees and employees will accept more abuse before leaving.
The problem with that is when people start to leave, it has a domino effect, and then only a few people leaving cascades into everyone leaving.
To be fair, those that saw the funders and experienced people leave saw the writing on the wall.
9:00 it sounds like the problem wasn't direction, it was impossible goals. They should NEVER have started off trying to beat their main IP. Start small with near indie level projects, build up, and then when they have a fanbase for that title release a major blockbuster type game. Its a huge problem the AAA games industry thinks every game they make needs to be some 100Mil mega project.
That is a problem with direction.
Who's "They"? In the video we clearly got the names of everyone actually responsible. And there isn't a name Bobby among them. Bobby appears only after Blizz actual death.
I think the idea of bonus' being spread among all teams is better, I worked at a studio, and only 2 projects got good bonus', problem is, getting on those teams becomes a political matter and not a skill matter, and talented people couldn't get on those teams, because when their projects release there's no room for them on other teams at that time, so they are stuck on newer projects, and not the older IPs
Yes. It causes a lack of morale to even try on other projects and it adds fuel to office politics, so people will attempt to find a way to jump over to the more successful team and get better rewards due to who you spend time with. Not too dissimilar to how people flock to the biggest servers in WoW just to get the benefits of being where the action happens.
An individual developer does not have full control over the success of a project, so it becomes unfair to be judged based on a metric that you can't control when you already do your job well. I can see maybe giving additional bonuses or accolades to individuals that exceed expectations in their field, but those should be done sparringly and on top of bonuses if the company is doing well as a whole and they should not completely overshadow the already existing bonus.
This. So much. You need to motivate your profit centers with a little extra, that’s fine (you usually pay them a little less in salary.) but THE bonus is for the organization. From the QA to the executive assistants. You are begging for disfunction doing it the Kotick way. The man must be an off the spectrum genius in some ways because he has no social awareness. In another era he wouldn’t have survived childhood.
Thanks for all the great indepth contents over the year! please keep up the good work.
Again I say, Mike Morhaime if he may appear nice and loveable, which I'm sure he is and probably is part the problem too, he is a terrible leader, and eventually he ran his company to ground. Blizzard's decline started when Alan Adham stepped down and Morhaime was 100% in control!
A game for everyone is a game for no one. Project Titan was doomed from inception
You hit the nail on the head. You can't make a a Sims player go start shooting willy nilly using special powers, and you can't get a COD player play inZOI. Sure, some MMO players can try to dabble a bit in both aspects but this is why MMOs don't go full DnD rules where a whole session can be devoted to a meal in a tavern - and even then, most of the DnD handbooks revolve and focus on combat and adventure, not "oh lets have a casual social situation and then have a contest to see who can carve a better sign for the inn to replace the stolen one".
Its kind of funny that they decided to make a game for everyone and just half-assedly mashed together city of heroes and the sims.
Yes, It's Titan that killed Blizzard. Not Bobby or anyone else. And Titan was a project that went against everything Blizz did before that. Why?
I don't think games need to be harder, take longer, or be bigger. Just make smaller games! That's all you have to do. Make smaller games! Not every game needs to be bigger and badder and crazier. Just make smaller, quality games and people will buy them and play them.
They definitely need to be harder longer and cheaper.
But think from a big company's perspective. They aren't making a one-time product, they are trying to sell you an ongoing service to print themselves money. Making a one time small purchase doesn't get a big studio out of bed in the morning. That's why I feel we're in an era where indie games are almost better than AAA games because they have more intentionality, creativity, expression, uniqueness and even completeness (no big studio wants their game to 'end', they want you paying perpetually)
@@GlobusTheGreat No I agree with you, I just don't agree with them and their mindset.
@@GlobusTheGreat Indies are not almost better. They are better. As evident to more and more ending in the top 10.
Games used to be like books. You finish one you are ready for the next one whenever you please. In this environment competition was good as it kept gamers interested while you finish your next title.
Now they are long term commitments. Which result on them being more expensive to make, longer time to make, and a much bigger price tag.
But the thing is. People do not have time for several long term commitments. Only one maybe two. So in this new business model competition will kill you.
if old blizzard had so many problems, why are they the only blizzard that actually made good games
Less scope and a requirement that games actually ship immediately come to mind.
Happy accidents are still accidents. Sobering realities forced them to focus too hard on money and it resulted in the death of their company.
Times were simpler back in that era. Games had less, thus they succeeded with less. It was easier to get stuff out the door without screwing up. That's not so much the case anymore.
because they werent afraid to have some fun like the new generation is
@@scaper12123 Um, Wow (as an example) up through Wotlk, had a game design that respected the player, gave them the tools to create the gaming experience they wanted to have, rather than forcing them down a rail on a theme park ride, holding hands the whole time, like it is now.
I had the fortune of meeting Morhaime in 2017 at E3. I was standing in the VIP/Invited Guest line at the XBOX Showcase (Microsoft Theater) and Mike walked up behind me in line. He saw my shirt (former military unit) and asked about it. We had such a lovely conversation. I knew who he was and he was just there in a $45 polo and Levis lol. He later offered me a tour of the campus. I also have friends that worked for Blizz for over 15 years who would tell me that Mike would come down from his office and just sit in the Customer Service rooms and answer tickets and handle calls. He also would invite staff over to dinner at his home so he can just talk with them and get to know them.
I met Mike at a charity dinner. My wife is a big Rush fan, and he is too, so they had a chat about that and he was quite pleasant. Frank Pearce, Metzen and Samwise were all cool dudes too. I think the success of WoW really ran away with them and they made mistakes selling to Activision and accepting so much outside control. They've all moved on... but for Metzen who came back. I'd like to think he's designing for cool and not for shareholders now.
My issue with all these news curation services is in the operative word “curation,” ie, the selective inclusion or omission based on certain criteria.
So, since I’m not the one doing the curating and can’t see what isn’t shown me by the curation software, what am I *not* being shown?
It’s an open door to any entity with an agenda, and I don’t like that invading how I stay informed.
"Mainstream media" is exactly the same thing.
Wake up!
The statement about cliques forming based on working overtime rings so true where i work. Has me self reflecting
"If anybody's going to kill WoW, it's going to be us."
*Careful what you wish for.. You just might get it.*
When I hear certain stories about certain managers being unable to make decisions I can kinda feel for those people. I think we are going to hear more and more stories like that as the cost for making games gets higher and higher. At my job if I make a mistake or if im a day late on a deadline I might cost my company maybe 5000 to 10,000 bucks. These managers in gaming are seeing these multi-million dollar projects that if they fail will cost their company hundreds of millions of dollars. Now you might say "Well if they can't handle it they shouldn't have taken the job." And you would be absolutely right for sure but you also won't know if someone can do a job until they try. At my job managers are never outside hires. Our managers come from within the company that way it's never someone that we don't already know and haven't worked with for several years already. Some of them can handle it, some of them can't. It's really just a coin toss.
bellular we know your channel and content are pure when theres no bots commenting when video isn't even out for 10 min
to be fair, that's not always the channel owner. RUclips in general has a bot comment problem
@@mythicalsyn4598 those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It doesn't matter if content is "pure" or not, it only needs a bot to target it
Yhe internet is dead. Most everything is a bot now. Perhaps even you.
After having occasion to hear such wonderful news let me sum up the situation by a famous quote..."Stop,stop...he is already dead!"
It's interesting how much of Blizzard North is left out of the history of Blizzard now. Feels a bit revisionist on their part, but I don't know what would motivate it really. Just something I've noticed taken hold over the years.
This whole video, and book, is cringe historical revisionism.
@@Pers0n97 how?
Really loving these deep dives. Feels like your content has really evolved and gone from strength to strength ❤ Happy to be along for the ride ..
Blizzard was doom befor activision. They got greedy and they fuck up when they accept activision to buy them
Blizzard didn't have a choice in the matter. They were wholly owned by Vivendi already. Selling themselves to Vivendi was the original sin in this case.
@@jackinthebox301 We need to bare in mind the 90s was a very different time in gaming. I mean, look at Square Enix, they were forced to merge due to how turbulent the 90s were. 90% of video game studios went bankrupt or bust after just making one or two games, while giants of the 80s were also going belly up, the climate was very different back then and the only studios which appeared to have any actual success were successful because they were in bed with some big publisher with the financial capitol to advertise the hell out of their games. All the successful title of the late 90s were successful because of advertising and this felt like a safety net worth risking being controlled by corporate interests to protect the jobs of the people working at the development studio.
These were the days before we had digital media, everything was still physical back then, these were the days before the internet had social media or wide spread cheap advertising or algorithmic recommendations of content, if no one advertised your game or covered it in a magazine, no one knew it even existed. Worse still, when a company was successful and their success outstripped their financial means to meet fan expectations when rapidly expanding or trying to approach a project which is more expensive than they anticipated, they will need some big sugar daddy company to provide the money to realise their game, so they sell themselves to a big publisher in return for achieving their dream, such as the case with Blizzard and with Bungie, Bungie went with Microsoft and Blizzard with Vivendi.
Some companies being the absolute chads they were, refused to sign a deal with the devil and because of it had to languish in commissioned hell, living paycheck to paycheck until by a miracle, fan funding and digital media became a reality and then decided to make their dream game, such as with Digital Extremes and Warframe. While others were lucky enough to be located in a country which adopted the concept of government grants early on, such as the case with CCP and EVE Online and GGG with Path of Exile. So, yeah basically many developers we loved as kids now suck because they were forced to sell their souls to the devil in the first place to make the games we loved as kids, now the devil is making good on the deal...
Blizzard was bought by Vivendi in 1998 There is no way to know if the Blizzard timeline of great games in the 2000s would have unfolded in the same way that it hadn't sold. Yeah, staying independent might've been great for them... Who knows, maybe they wouldnt have the resourcing and scale to do a project like developing an MMO...
@@foxdavion6865 It's wrong to say that Starcraft at the time wasn't successful. It held the record for highest week 1 PC game sales for over a decade. It was in the Guiness book of records.
Blizzard (then Chaos Studios) was bought by Davidson & Associates in 1994.
D&A was bought by CUC international in 1996.
D&A was sold to Havas in 1998.
Havas was bought by Vivendi in 1998
Vivendi merged it's game publishing with Activision in 2008
What a cool series of journalism. Thanks for making this Bellular.
Mikes problem was owning small % of shares. Not sure but he should have bought adham’s and Pearce’s ownership when they left if he could afford it. Him losing his grasp on the company is his own fault.
Excellent coverage. So interesting and enlightening. Thanks for all your hard work.
Ahh yes, Blizzard Entertainment. The employer I once had that crushed my dreams, destroyed all of my motivation for the rest of my life and started the trend where every time I drive through an intersection I hope someone t-bones me at 100 mph.
The things working at Blizzard taught me is hard work doesn't matter, doing what you're told doesn't matter, and it's not what you know or what you can do, but rather. It's who you know, that's the only thing that matters. If you don't have the right friends, you don't matter.
As terrible as that sounds, it's true. That's simply the world we live in.
I just wish I would have been into carpentry or something growing up. Pursuing a career in game development ruined my life.
Not to be mean but if the quality of current devs at blizzard is any telltale sign, its not that you need to know the right person but rather you are a legitimately C tier programmer with a D tier curriculum. The game is so trash that barely any changes have been programmed from the glory days of old and somehow they manage to make it worse.
Have you really taken a look at yourself and compared to other real programmers (not game dev) and could you hold a candle to them?
Yes I do see that it may seem mean, but here is the bright side. You are either a really good programmer, and you just need to start sending applications or you are not really a good programmer and you can simply accept that truth and start studying again to get where you need to be. The good side of programming career is that since its always changing, you can always update yourself and break through barriers through plain good studying and effort.
@@trueandfact I worked there during what you call "the glory days". I worked there during the Wrath of the Lich King years. At the beginning of the transition to Activision when they brought in all the Activision people that made that place hell in the first place. I was let go after my boss found out I was friends with the girl he had been trying to hook up with for the 3 months before I moved to his team. He saw me as competition and worked out a transfer for me as a "promotion" to the then, brand new Austin TX offices. I was told I had 3 weeks to get to TX, that I wouldn't be getting a raise because at the time it was "like a raise" because it was cheaper to move there. I also wouldn't be getting any moving assistance.
Also Blizzard has more than 1000 positions that aren't programming. I can tell you've never actually worked in the industry. I hope that never changes. Your reply says you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
@@trueandfactyeah no, he even accounts the allegations and frat boy scene and everything. I think you’re the one who’s ignorant here.
@@Alex-j8m7j right so if he is so good a programmer, why can't he land another job? hint: he is not that good. Blizz only recruits the lowest of the low, hence the quality of their games are so trash for the last decade.
@@trueandfact "not to be mean but let me fantasize about a scenario in my head that justifies everything bad that happened to you with absolutely nothing to prove it solely to be an asshole" mission failed brother youre a c tier human with d tier social awareness, when you get your first job you're gonna be shocked by the concept of office politics existing
Bro I've been on such a huge binge of your videos!! You and the team are making fantastic content, keep it up!
While the corporate environment is rarely a fertile bed for creativity, this story goes to show you that some rigidity - some kind of organizational framework that strictly defines individual spheres of influence - is absolutely necessary, even in game development. These people with all these poorly-established roles and way too much power and influence brought this whole thing down. Everyone - from top to bottom - needs to have 'a' job. They cannot wear 10 hats - they need to have a role, and to have that role *restricted,* featuring clearly-enumerated objectives and benchmarks. Anything that deviates from this is chaos. And while chaos CAN occasionally result in brilliance, the lesson from Blizzard is that chaos is not a sustainable formula for massive success. Chaos eats itself.
This seems brutally obvious to those of us who work "real" jobs-one can instantly tell from my job title (Accounts Payable Specialist) what I do from nine to five, and even if I didn't work for a fairly small company with a short ladder, even someone in a completely unrelated division would know why they pay me.
Game companies are notorious for not doing this. It's like watching a game of American football where all 11 players on offense are trying to be the quarterback.
It's because becoming too corporate makes the games more obviously soulless. We can see this in all of the output of modern AAA companies. That Blizzard was unconventional was no small part in why their games were so special.
If anything they just needed tighter leashes on how much freedom the top talent were given. Seemed like things were delayed for way too many years before they were able to resolve their issues.
Great video guys. Can tell alot of hard work went into it. Appreciate the effort.
6:45 A game for everybody, is a game for nobody.
Blizzard should have done what they were already doing. Keep the same ways of when they produced WC3 and WOW. Same management style, same team sizes, same type of employees. Then, with the money, create more teams like that working of other projects.
What I wouldn't do to just see Blizzard make smaller teams and let them COOK and SHIP games despite it not going to be a multi trillion billion dollar game. You can't make anything successful with the framework of "if it's not going to be the next WoW, don't make it", it's such flawed and hopeless logic.
It's the deathblow for most studios. They get this big and they become AAA content farms now. The small teams cooking and shipping games without a corporate checklist are the indie folks now, for the most part.
I knew someone that was good friends with the lead programmer of Diablo 2. He told us what the bonus structure was. This was back in the mid 2000s when he told of this. Every employee got $10k for each year they worked for Blizzard, paid out every December. His bonus that year would be $100K since he had worked for the company for 10 years. He ended up leaving Blizzard after the game was done so he could travel around the world with his GF.
Asmongold will make a video on this
“True! …true” - asmongold
"I agree with what he's saying"
“Yup! YUP! There it is. There it is boys”
"make a video"
More like record himself having a shitchat with his cult following and putting it out for ez ad rev. Oh gee
and then the top comment is some crazy culture war garbage thats not even related
The fact that moorheim had to carry the projects and was so well known and beloved even by low level staff shows that the system was rotten all the way up.
People wonder why businesses and schools have things like uniform requirements. There's a point where you just start letting everything slide, held to no standards, and everyone just starts doing whatever they want. It sounds like a slippery slope argument, but generally if you give people free will to do whatever, most will, and most people's free will doesn't include "I should also be considerate of my neighbor" while meeting their own desires.
Where compliments are due. Thanks to your reporting and Jason's new book. Much appreciated in Asmon's midlife crisis. He made me aware of your channel.
I'll read this book. That's right. I read again since gaming has gotten so bad.
I'm down for reading this too. It sounds like it'll be a great book. But I also have to finish "The City We Became" by N.K. Jemisin first (seriously, if you like sci-fi/fantasy, check her out)
I was like "man I miss reading"
then I read
oh man, mild tinnitus really makes that less enjoyable
Very well done video my friend!
Blizzard has been dead sice the release of BFA.
We just keep poking it's corpse.
Id say after wotlk 😅
Seems to be doing just fine.
@@ShadowsOfThePast
And you wouldn't be wrong, If I said it's not making money. Blizzard is making money.
That doesn't change the fact that the old Blizzard, that used to make quality games is dead. Why the F would I care if their investors are happy or not? :D
@@0ne0fmany Well I can't speak for all the games but the biggest and most important product they have (WoW) is doing just fine and there's also speculation it might be on its all time high. At least it is doing very well atm and there's a good chance it will only get better with the 2 upcoming expansions..
@@ShadowsOfThePast sure thing
I love this channel. So much great information. I stopped playing WoW after Mists of Pandaria, and other Blizzard titles shortly after that. I could feel something was amiss, maybe the quality going down, but could not put my finger on it. This shines a lot of light. Sounds like the Titan debacle caused a lot more internal damage than they initially let on. Keep up the good work.
What are you listening to in those earbuds?
Screams of tortured game devs working on live service games? 💀
Phorne obviously
Chris Metzen.
Collective grand appeal can be the enemy of individuality. And it's overwatch's individuality that drew me in.
This was not where I was expecting to learn that Julian Assange is free...
So 1 C-level guy downed the whole project? Really? Company structures are built like KGB - circle of accountability.
That pink and blue argument is pure Goblin Diplomacy quest from Runescape.
Pardo was also responsible for Diablo 3's miserable state at launch. People tend to only blame Jay Wilson, but Pardo had a leading role in design and was the executive producer. This stays relevant up to today because the upcoming D4 expansion will turn the game into 3.5.
Not gonna lie, I despise Schrier after his stint at Kotaku. But there is no doubt he puts his time into finding things out. It's just his personal opinions and the things he bullshitted about early on that gets me.
I see it differently; Schreier was too good for that cesspit so he went out and started working for real media outlets.
Pardo and Kaplan are legends of the gaming industry. Both of those guys have been in the online gaming world since the birth. Hopefully we see them reunite or do something again in the future.
I see BellularNews is going through his 2010 corporate rebranding phase with his thumbnails.
this is single handedly the best video that just makes all of world of warcraft make sense.... now we get it
You know I actually respect the fact that at the point were they couldnt verbally solve the dispute, it would literally come down to a fist fight.🤣
👊🤛🤕 "Okay this guy is done, like I was saying..."
Diplomacy by any other means.
A physical fight can be pretty healthy in moderation. As long as you don't hit below the belt and shake hands after the fight it's all good! :P
@remoyesman Mak'gora in it's purest form.
(Wiping blood off his face and breathing heavy)
"OK.... FINE.... we can (spits out a tooth) call the Intellect and Stamina gear... "of the eagle"... instead of... "of the wyvern"... But It's going to be a cold day in hell... when I let you name a dragon... after your stupid deathwing terminator miniatures.... I think I have a concussion..."
-Pardo, a creative discussion with Metzen
If i remember correctly I contacted Mike when MoP came out and he posted how it wasnt true about people getting into MoP beta before the preorders. I told him that I preordered the game and my friend who didnt and didnt even have a sub got into the beta. What I remember was a reply that said something along the lines of that was what he was told and he was sorry. It didnt change anything or what was going on but it did make me not hate the company as much as I would later.
Creatives arguing and fighting created some of the greatest games and IPs ever.
There's no way that will EVER happen today. In fact, today you're not even allowed to have valid criticism or else you're considered "toxic".
It's a joke, and the majority of the gaming industry is going to burn as a result and I hate it, smfh.
@BasementPepperoni The industry has already been burning. It started when companies moved away from making art to making money.
Glad I quit Blizzard entirely during Shadowlands, it allows me to watch Blizz burn to the ground without losing anything and even toast the marshmellows on the flames.
Damn i think most of the gaming industry is screwed
- Ubisoft is failing hard
- Activision Blizzard employees is getting laid off by microsoft
- Bethesda is failing
- Xbox is getting ignored by devs on to developing for the platform
- Sony is failing both on games and hardware (Wii-U still have more games than PS5 and concord)
- EA is somehow riding on the red line between failing and on the verge of failing
- Game Journos all worshiping DEI like its the second coming of Jesus.
- Annapurna's eulogy
- Bungie still can't get their shit together despite celebrating seperation with Activision.
except for nintendo, most fans are awaiting its upcoming console early next year. (palworld situation aside, thats their legal department, not their gaming department, we talking their gaming department here.)
Eh, Nintendo and Gamefreak are not delivering their A-game with pokemon, but otherwise yeah, Nintendo is in it's own bubble as usual.
@@BlazeBluetm35 well not delivering quality-wise i really really hope the next pokemon game which is legends Z, is good. they actually didn't release a pokemon game this year unlike every other year so im hopeful the quality will be better.
What I've learned is that - at any scale - perfectionism is just a form of procrastination and is rarely indicative of actually having such high standards. Things become better through practice and iteration, perfectionism keeps you from getting enough completed projects to count as practice and keeps you from iterating far enough to see what it could be in practice while you keep dreaming. Deadlines or separate goals & milestones that follow a certain process help with that.
Great video, love the story telling.
Blaming one person for the negligence of the entire company is getting old. Scapegoats dont work. They all suck, the entirety of them.
The hook of Titan sounds really like Moonlighter, an Indie Game I really enjoyed
1:10 as if that was a bad thing. What the soyboys of this age don't understand is that this is how greatness is achieved. You work with people that have differing ways of doing things but are still working towards the same vision. It was this way that Blizzard achieved it's greatness and it's this new estrogen filled way of doing things that is destroying Blizzard today.
This sounds like an interesting book, might have to pick it up.
Bro if that's you, get off the juice. I did. It's going to kill you or make you have other effects. Not even trt is safe.
"We were really excited about appealing to a broad audience. Gamers, non-gamers, young, old, men, women, everything.." - Says no successful company ever.
I have no friggin idea how they were going to have broader audience than WoW. Seems technically impossible. I mean mobile games nowadays can do that. But Titan was like a decade before that. Why no one stopped them like after a year?
One thing I think you missed is that in the early 90s, most successful software companies operated like that unless they had been around a while. There’s a book about Microsoft employees from even before then sliding pizzas under office doors so people didn’t starve while working so many hours. Looking back, being in it felt good at the time, but it was not sustainable. I was a hacker turned recruited for a company. It legitimized us. We bonded with everyone else in the exact same boat. I never worked for blizzard but I worked for other companies. The one big difference in blizzard was the extremely low pay.
Regarding the shouting matches and arguments: A tight team will have them, and they will be better for it. If you haven't worked in an environment where you can blurt out the absolute most blunt critique and have it quickly shot down, you have never worked in an effective team. I did work in such an environment once - we all had known each other for years, and we could get into really heated arguments about - what outsiders would think were details, but that actually were foundational to the design direction of the software we were building. Outsiders would be unable to understand the consequences of those 'details' since they weren't living and breathing the software.
Orrrr you're just working in an awful, toxic work environment.
A team functions DESPITE the shouting matches and arguments, not BECAUSE of them. Those companies always crash and burn.
@@TheStephaneAdam Microsoft did it for decades. Gates was well known for putting 3 or four adversaries in a room (adversaries w each other, not him) and letting them scream/shout it out. Microsoft seems to have grown just fine. Office culture was brutal and rife with politics, but it drove action. By today's standards...toxic? But successful.
But we're not talking about "outsiders", are we? We're talking about the Blizzard devs who were forced to sit in on these "meetings" and witness these arguments firsthand.
@@OhNoTwisted Hot take here, but maybe its possible for businesses to reap extraordinary profit from doing shitty awful things? Maybe the "success" of those decisions isn't actually a justification for them. It's extra rich that you would choose Bill Gates and Microsoft as your example of this process "working". Lol. Lmao, even. I'm sure the people who's lives were destroyed are ecstatic that Microsoft is now one of the richest companies on the planet.
@@OhNoTwisted What action? Microsoft hasn't been at the forefront of innovation for decades. At best it's been chasing the same hype train as every other big tech company, these day's it's AI. Before that was trying to get into the smart phone market.
These days the whole windows thing is a sideshow. What's actually making money is providing solid, reliable and unexciting services to companies. Solid business plan, not sometthing done by fisticuffs in the boardroom.
What you lionize is the good old "Bioware magic" or the old "Blizzard touch", bad management saved by low-;evel employees doing ungodly amounts of overtime to cover their bosses' ass. And of course said bosses getting al the credit.
It's bad management. It goes nowhere. Companies that do it inevitably crash and burn.
If you allow me to present a bit of criticism. Not about the contents of the video, but about the video itself, in the "meta" sense if you will.
I appreciate the amount of effort and work that you put into the video, scriptwriting it, filming it, editing it. I really do. However, I think that 23 minutes is a bit too long for this kind of topic. When we put so much effort into a project we sometimes get blindsided by all that work and want to show it, so that all that work doesn't go to "waste". Why put so much effort into something and not show it off, not include it?
Problem is, 23 minutes is a bit too long for the topic. I'm somewhat certain that many viewers will doze off, start skipping, or even outright stop watching after a while because the actual point, the actual interesting content, takes so long to get into. I honestly think that this kind of video could benefit from more summarization. Even if you have some kind of intro, some kind of background story about the company etc. it can be summarized to be much shorter, so that you can get to the actual meat of the topic much sooner. I think this video could have been 10 minutes long, even less, without significant loss of information.
blizzard banned me from d3 for no reason. i still hate them and wish they would go away. They stole $60 from me and time.
My WoW account was frozen for no reason. I called their customer service and it was horrible. They told me it wasn't my account. I said fine, cancel the subscription then. That was 2012 haven't given them any money since.
Stay bitter, folks.
The conclusion is:
Blizzard was the best place to be at in the 90s and early 2000s, when a group of passionate people were creating something big, to be proud of.
Any details like fights are just what happens in all start up ideas when they are born.
Exactly, they were not businessmen or management so they handled things like normal people without experience would ..
Fast forward, their creation is a huge success and the businessmen come in.
The great product is slowly transformed into a strictly profit based product.
World of Warcraft ended a handful of years ago, and classic was a beautiful farewell gift.
Since then, this new wow is rolling... Keeping the name but it's simply not wow.
Blizzard has totally lost it. Just this D4 expansion shows they are pretty much in worse state than both Ubisoft and Bethesda. I stopped buying games from those two more than 5 years ago. And the same goes now for Blizzard. This new D4 expansion is actually totally the opposite of what I want from my ARPG experience. So hearing this Co-op only dungeon is not actually a one off but has already future content in the making... then just no thank you.
that's crazy but i dont remember asking
@@roflixo who are you
actually there is a lot of people that like the expansion - I do not have or plan to have, but my point is assuming that everyone feels the same about that product and thinking that just because you do not like it every one else feels the same is a particularly faulty starting point.
Maybe you missed that blizzard is owned by Microsoft… and news flash… Microsofts most notable games are on console and multiplayer… go cry somewhere else
@@UnderPoverP You sound like the kind who need online games to feel like you have friends and to get really any level of social engagement.
Everything from 18:20 onward I have experienced in the company I have been working at for four years. The more things devolve the more important 'just looking busy' becomes because there is a manhunt out for someone to blame. The Cliques to protect self interests, the profitable departments vs the ones struggling. Departures of talent.
the fault is on consumers side. keep eating blizzard shit
I pre-order silent hill 2 remake for 80 dollars crowd. Those people. Ugh.
I'm reminded of the Ship of Theseus argument.
Mainly, if you're in your late thirties or early forties, chances are you remember the nineties' Blizzard. The good old days of Spawn Copies, of soundtracks by Matt Uelmen that consisted mostly of MIDI trackers going "bum-bum-bum, this is a Fantasy theme song for industrious humans building an outpost as per military decree!" (e.g. The Humans' theme in Warcraft II) or of him figuring out that adding a ton of reverb to basic guitar-strumming could produce something utterly haunting (Tristram's theme as of Diablo).
Tiny devs, big ambitions, limited scope. I think that, specifically, was the recipe for Blizzard's success. Everything "old" Blizzard used to make felt like they'd designed the concept and then worked around what they *could* realistically deliver to produce a banger. Nowadays, we're at the point where the big ambitions remain, but the dev pool now numbers in the thousands - and the scope is utterly unhinged. Plus, add their self-importance and now the Microsoft-led belief that Blizzard is a AAA studio that "can do no wrong", and you realize there's just... nothing left of the passionate world-builders that had actual stories to tell. Now, all that's left is a big, heaving and bloated monetization platform. Overwatch 2 being Free-to-Play really was the death knell for me; OW the first in name felt like the last gasp of genuine passion the studio had. We weren't being bilked for cash, it only ever was a *rock-solid game*.
And they ripped it from us, tore the meta apart and demanded we fork over cash. I've had heartbreaks before, but no game had ever broken my heart. Overwatch 2 did. It felt like the devs were saying "Screw your fond memories of pre-game shenanigans on VoIP, screw your finding the perfect niche for your preferred playstyle; all we care about is what's in your wallet."
as someone who works in games and animation, this is a story as old as time, if you look into any big gaming/ animation company, there is a 90% chance it's history looks pretty much the same...
These companies would love nothing more than to have the Japanese work culture Mindset.
This is the main problem with most companies, private and public. Incompetent managers. It should be left to those who have the skills to manage but also have the people knowledge and who recognise skills and talents and place these workers in the right spots. It's sad to see this happen to companies but as long as they don;t address this it will be the downfall of these companies and the toxic environment will damage/hurt a lot of people.
I remember very first rumours of their next game being a SciFi MMO / Shooter and soon after the name 'Project Titan'. I was gutted when they scrapped it unseen and used some of the assets to create Overwatch.
Great vid Bel Team! Sad story.
I'm surprised people still care about the game company that said "We want to take the 'fun' out of making video games".
Like what quality of video games do you expect at this point?
i find it absolutely hilarious how pardo got fired for being a spineless terrible manager, immediately started his own company and 8 years later hasnt made a SINGLE game. put the fries in the bag bro 😭
But he was allowed to waste 7 years of best Blizz talents work and 100 mils. This is why Blizzard died.
I worked for Blizzard (in Europe) back when WoW was first released... it was BY FAR the worst job I ever had, with BY FAR the worst managers I ever encountered