What happened to blizzard?

[ringpriest]

Put under the thumb of Robert "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games" Kotick. The ever-growing tendency to treat the game like a cash-cow, and the natural evolution of any business that sees old devs leave and new devs with new ideas come in affected things too, but I think it's fair to place the blame at the door of Mr. "there will continue to be opportunities for us to exploit the PC platform in ways that we haven't yet."

Exploitative and fun-less describes modern-WoW pretty well, imnsho.

[Lolvanish]

Bought by Activision..could be worse...coulda been bought by EA..then we'd have to pay for every raid tier and pvp season

You do pay for every raid tier and pvp season.................................................................................... ......................

[Mojo03]

Activision happened. Period.

[Mormolyce]

They also weren't bought by Activision.

Vivendi bought Activision and merged it with Vivendi Games, which was Blizzard's previous parent company. Vivendi Games was then renamed Activision Blizzard. And Activision Blizzard recently bought themselves out from Vivendi.

Activision Publishing and Blizzard Entertainment are still seperate companies, albeit subsidiaries of Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard is just as beholden to its stock holders as it ever was.

Yeah. I've been playing Blizzard games since the 90s and whether you like their decisions or not, 99% of what they do they do because they think it's the right thing for the game.

I remember seeing a short documentary about the forming of the company and their original investors were going to forbid them from calling themselves Chaos Studios because it sounded too evil for a company that makes games for kids (double whammy of wrongness there). As it turned out they'd already changed their mind and decided on "Blizzard" so it never came to a head. But they have clearly always been opposed to shareholders/executives/whatever meddling in their games.

Anyone else remember back when they were Silicone & Synapse?

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Put under the thumb of Robert "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games" Kotick.

I love how this quote from the quarterly earnings report is their very first quote:

"First, right now we are ahead of our plans to realize the benefits of the combined company, especially our key profit and profit margin objectives."

OH NO! You mean the CEO went into the earnings call meeting and claimed the company was meeting its profit projections? The evil capitalist bastard! What's next, sacrificing babies to the dark lord Mammon?

[aerosyne]

You know, if I wanted to read wild, uneducated theories that are bordering on the conspiracies, I'd just go to InfoWars.

What's even more amazing is how much armchair science-ing/business-ing/theorizing is going on in here as to why Blizzard is 'turrible'. It's frankly depressing because this amount of thought and motivation would cure diseases, send us back into space and do other wonderful things in the proper hands instead of simply being wasted electro-neural impulses driven by people who either refuse to mature or who are simply mad and cannot get over it.

[Awe]

Just drop the case. All such threads always inevitably ends with a clash between rabid haters ready to piss at anything even remotely related to Blizzard and mouth foaming fanboys who will sell their own mothers to defend Blizzard. I am not claiming that all posters belong to one of those two groups but they have propensity to crawl out from their pits quite often. In fact I already see both in this thread. So again, just drop it.

[ringpriest]

Yeah. I've been playing Blizzard games since the 90s and whether you like their decisions or not, 99% of what they do they do because they think it's the right thing for the game.
...
I love how this quote from the quarterly earnings report is their very first quote:

"First, right now we are ahead of our plans to realize the benefits of the combined company, especially our key profit and profit margin objectives."

OH NO! You mean the CEO went into the earnings call meeting and claimed the company was meeting its profit projections? The evil capitalist bastard! What's next, sacrificing babies to the dark lord Mammon?

I love how you just ignore the quotes from the CEO of Activision-Blizzard that explicitly contradict your claim. It's just... wow. You're taking a completely different quote as justification for ignoring the very real, "fuck the game, just make money" shit the guy has said. Is there anything Activision-Blizzard could do that you wouldn't defend? Simply because the man has, on occasion, uttered statements that don't grind the idea of providing a quality gaming experience to his customers into dust which he can sieve for money does not somehow change the way WoW has been turned into a naked cash grab with awful gameplay. But hey, if you want to encourage behavior like this:

just keep giving Blizzard your money.