Can we talk about Blizzard dying yet? Or is this gonna be removed -_-

[ReD-EyeD]

They could have gone quite a bit deeper into planned systems changes then they did during the "what's next?", but instead about the only ones we got were even more delayed flying and Heroic Warfronts being hilariously held off til 8.2

Yeah, because they can just snap their fingers and just change stuff instantly. That's not how it works.

Also, "even more delayed flying being hilariously held off" is just bullshit. I would rather them not adding flying at all, but for you it's an undisputed fact that everyone wants it and evil Blizzard just not giving it to people.

[Reinaerd]

Blizzard stopped being blizzard in 2007.

[tikcol]

And how many subscribers/active players do they have? Besides FFXIV, all those MMOs have very limited audiences at best.
So if MMOs were still popular, we would see a lot more people flock to MMOs, but instead they flock to MOBAs and carbon copy shooters.
Why? Well, because MMOs are a dying breed of games. Unfortunately.

"MMORPG is a dying breed of games"

That's the new 2018 meme of people like you that are in denial. People want to play a good MMO and there isn't one anymore.

WoW used to be, it isn't anymore. Deal with it.

[Dystemper]

Old Blizzard is Dead . Its Blizzard in Name only. Make no mistake they are now 100% Activision

[Hexme]

It's pretty funny to see people still cling to Blizzards *** sack and trying to defend how they aren't going under. BfA's has shown how low the WoW team has fallen, now you have the Diablo team joining them. This has to be thee worst Blizzcon I've ever seen, you literally had people booing @ the Diablo team.

Blizzard needs their IPs to do well cause the cost of paying a game designer/dev is retarded over priced now and days. We're talking 50k-100k a year per game dev so lets assume Blizzard has 600 employees (for WoW) and they all make the minimum 50k a year (that's around 3k a month per dev so that's $1,800,000 a month), that's $30,000,000 a year in minimum salary. I know you're gonna say well WoW alone nets them 15 mil a month alone, first off shut your face I just showed the bare minimum of a pay wage of a game dev/IT/CS. That's not even inc the cost of keeping up the servers for WoW which is gonna be costly and as someone who worked at a movie theater and seeing the electric bill for just a movie theater, I don't even wanna see that bill for a game with dozens of servers basically running 24/7.

Still in denial? you just had Activision come out and say that Black Ops 4 has failed in sales expectations...when it grabbed them 500 million dollars in sales in it's first 3 days of being out........when you got the publisher saying 500 million dollars in sales saying it didn't meet expectations, that's a problem. Let's put that in WoW subs, even if there's no less than 2 million WoW subs in a whole year and they all pay the $15 a month, WoW would net a little under 360 million A YEAR, of course that's not inc lvl boosts, server change ect ect which could net them a little more.

Are Blizzard gonna be the next TTG? probably no, but the cost of running a juggernaut that is WoW and Blizzard is not cheap. You need your products to sell well and sell often whether it's services or other stuff. The rate they are going, people are gonna look at w/e Blizzard is gonna make and brush it off cause they know the name Blizzard isn't gonna hold it's merit for much longer.

[Onikaroshi]

Yeah, because they can just snap their fingers and just change stuff instantly. That's not how it works.

Also, "even more delayed flying being hilariously held off" is just bullshit. I would rather them not adding flying at all, but for you it's an undisputed fact that everyone wants it and evil Blizzard just not giving it to people.

Nobody said change stuff instantly, they're not even trying.

They also said they waited too long for flying in legion, and then turn around and make it even longer (8.1 taking longer to come out means unless they rush every other patch 8.2 will take longer to come out) and that was HEROIC WARFRONTS being hilariously held of, they know people want them, they have the plans in place, but they're not even bothering til 8.2 which is 4-6 months off.

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It's pretty funny to see people still cling to Blizzards *** sack and trying to defend how they aren't going under. BfA's has shown how low the WoW team has fallen, now you have the Diablo team joining them. This has to be thee worst Blizzcon I've ever seen, you literally had people booing @ the Diablo team.

Blizzard needs their IPs to do well cause the cost of paying a game designer/dev is retarded over priced now and days. We're talking 50k-100k a year per game dev so lets assume Blizzard has 600 employees (for WoW) and they all make the minimum 50k a year (that's around 3k a month per dev so that's $1,800,000 a month), that's $30,000,000 a year in minimum salary. I know you're gonna say well WoW alone nets them 15 mil a month alone, first off shut your face I just showed the bare minimum of a pay wage of a game dev/IT/CS. That's not even inc the cost of keeping up the servers for WoW which is gonna be costly and as someone who worked at a movie theater and seeing the electric bill for just a movie theater, I don't even wanna see that bill for a game with dozens of servers basically running 24/7.

Still in denial? you just had Activision come out and say that Black Ops 4 has failed in sales expectations...when it grabbed them 500 million dollars in sales in it's first 3 days of being out........when you got the publisher saying 500 million dollars in sales saying it didn't meet expectations, that's a problem. Let's put that in WoW subs, even if there's no less than 2 million WoW subs in a whole year and they all pay the $15 a month, WoW would net a little under 360 million A YEAR, of course that's not inc lvl boosts, server change ect ect which could net them a little more.

Are Blizzard gonna be the next TTG? probably no, but the cost of running a juggernaut that is WoW and Blizzard is not cheap. You need your products to sell well and sell often whether it's services or other stuff. The rate they are going, people are gonna look at w/e Blizzard is gonna make and brush it off cause they know the name Blizzard isn't gonna hold it's merit for much longer.

You forgot king, king can single handedly keep ActiBlizz afloat, their games cost nothing to make and print money.

[Ghazan Julio]

It is dying. An adult would be able to accept it. The mods on here are not adults. They do not care about your opinion unless it's a false sense of being positive.

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They should just make all the blizzard games mobile app games at this point. Too much technology me thinks.

[munkeyinorbit]

in 10+ years...

Pretty much stopped right there. I'm Not going to read something some noob new player is having a cry about.

[Asrialol]

WoW players are at an all time high in disappointment

Source?

Inb4 "look at forums".

[Deleted]

Cant believe they announced a Mobile game for a hardcore gaming convention. lol

[varren]

Obviously financially they are nowhere near death, but their creativity has absolutely been sent to the grave after BfA and mobile diablo.

[Raven]

It is dying. An adult would be able to accept it. The mods on here are not adults. They do not care about your opinion unless it's a false sense of being positive.

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They should just make all the blizzard games mobile app games at this point. Too much technology me thinks.

Yeah it was dying in Tbc too and wotlk,Mop,Wod and of course Legion.

Keep quessing each expansion and maybe you will get lucky and be right one day.

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Cant believe they announced a Mobile game for a hardcore gaming convention. lol

Cant belive why people think they shouldnt, Blizzcon is for them to talk about their games, its still one of their games even if you dont like it.

[Kokolums]

What often happens when a company "sells out" is it betrays its core fanbase to try to capture a wider appeal, and in the short term it may make sense and even be crazy profitable. The problem is that there is no way back. Maybe that first sell-out product is a success, but the next one is lackluster or bombs. Then you have both a bad product and have driven away your core fanbase. The company has now been hollowed out and goes bankrupt. Maybe another company buys your assets for pennies on the dollar and releases trash with your name slapped on the side of the box to try to scam people.

[sopeonaroap]

Blizzrd is nowhere near dying.

blizzard literally died in 2008. when activision bought the company that owned blizzard (vivendi) and then changed their name to activision blizzard but took over everything that blizzard did, blizzard died. blizzard literally quit existing then, they're activision blizzard now. their board is not controlled by them, they don't have the "hands off" approach that vivendi always had, activision blizzard took over blizzard studios and sold you the "blizzard is still gonna get to do what they wanna do, we promise"

next thing you know, they're pushing REAL ID, social media integration in all aspects, esports identity for pvp, they're making bank on security tokens that came from an internal data breach that caused them to hire someone to specifically deal with teh situation that they never actually admitted existed (thank god daeity did all the research and found it out, well, until blizzard hit him with millions in lawsuits for knowing things they didn't want him to know)

oh don't forget, they cancelled titan and turned the assets into overwatch (activision doesn't love MMORPGs), tried the real money AH, started selling gold for money and raiding-quality BOEs went from 1/50k chance to around a 1/3k chance (more epic BOEs = more people needing gold = more people buying gold)

it's all happened exactly like a lot of folks promised it would. the peak of wow is considered BC or WOTLK (wotlk if you ask me, higher subs, more accessibility without handing you what the current game does, they wanted you to play the game because it was fun)

wow 100% will have loot boxes either late in this expansion before the last patch or all of next expansion. folks will see how different the core values of the game are when classic comes out

[MoanaLisa]

Creating games used to be about taking risks and just pouring ones heart (collectively) into something that had passion and soul and was fun.

Simply, look at how Blizzard or Bethesda, or other great game studios started out...

It was a bunch of nerds with big ideas making amazing games

Nowadays, it's exactly as you're saying... based on analytics and things made-to-sell and appeal to a broad audience.

Small indy studios with a bright idea have little to lose. Once a studio has some success and gets beyond that with other people to answer to--investors, a large staff depending on the company's success to take care of their families--besides the people sharing the office there's a lot more at stake; a lot more to lose.

This isn't just a Blizzard thing. It's everything.

I'll make what is bound to be an unpopular proposal though about Blizzard and risk:

Blizzard took a big risk with D3. The safe path was to stick with the standard ARPG setup of skills and the rest and make a bigger hi-res version of D2. Personally I would have been OK with that. Better than OK although if you think about it it's largely playing safe and pretty lazy. So what did they do? They redefined what an ARPG could look like by turning everything on its head. It's still an ARPG but it doesn't work like the standard tropes that you can see in Grim Dawn, Diablo II, PoE and others. So that was a risk, a pretty big one. One that paid off for them in terms of business done but I think was traumatic for them in terms of ever trying to be that creative ever again. I suspect the same was true with Titan which they cancelled and mined for Overwatch, a fairly safe FPS title, which they didn't have in their stable of game tropes.

So no. They likely won't take huge risks going forward.

To be clear, unlike others I'm not a fan of Blizzard per se. I don't automatically buy all their titles and don't play any of them very much these days. I never much liked OverWatch, don't play card games, think that HotS is OK for what it is but isn't what I play either and that RTS games have seen their day. That makes the WC3R thing interesting but it's a relatively small investment to test the market to see if a WC4 would be worth doing.

The smart way to be a gamer is to ignore corporate culture, large or small, hunt down the games you like (big or small, corporate or indy) and then play and support them.

[n7stormreaver]

blizzard literally died in 2008. when activision bought the company that owned blizzard (vivendi) and then changed their name to activision blizzard but took over everything that blizzard did, blizzard died.

I mean if Blizzard made Reaper of Souls, Legion, Overwatch and Legacy of the Void while being Activision Blizzard then literally who cares. Only time people scream "muh blezard dieded its aktiwision now" is when they do something they don't like.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Dying isn't the right word. They're the opposite of dying, they're setting themselves up to survive for a long time. But that means risk analysis, and making unpopular decisions based on them. It's not the best experiences ever now, it's the best experiences for the price now.

[Somnium]

blizzard literally died in 2008. when activision bought the company that owned blizzard (vivendi) and then changed their name to activision blizzard but took over everything that blizzard did,

This is hilariously wrong.

Vivendi is many times larger than Activision.

Vivendi owned both Activision and Blizzard, they created an umbrella company (Activision Blizzard) and both Activision and Blizzard are separate companies but both owned by Activision Blizzard.

[Kynario]

Small indy studios with a bright idea have little to lose. Once a studio has some success and gets beyond that with other people to answer to--investors, a large staff depending on the company's success to take care of their families--besides the people sharing the office there's a lot more at stake; a lot more to lose.

This isn't just a Blizzard thing. It's everything.

I'll make what is bound to be an unpopular proposal though about Blizzard and risk:

Blizzard took a big risk with D3. The safe path was to stick with the standard ARPG setup of skills and the rest and make a bigger hi-res version of D2. Personally I would have been OK with that. Better than OK although if you think about it it's largely playing safe and pretty lazy. So what did they do? They redefined what an ARPG could look like by turning everything on its head. It's still an ARPG but it doesn't work like the standard tropes that you can see in Grim Dawn, Diablo II, PoE and others. So that was a risk, a pretty big one. One that paid off for them in terms of business done but I think was traumatic for them in terms of ever trying to be that creative ever again. I suspect the same was true with Titan which they cancelled and mined for Overwatch, a fairly safe FPS title, which they didn't have in their stable of game tropes.

So no. They likely won't take huge risks going forward.

To be clear, unlike others I'm not a fan of Blizzard per se. I don't automatically buy all their titles and don't play any of them very much these days. I never much liked OverWatch, don't play card games, think that HotS is OK for what it is but isn't what I play either and that RTS games have seen their day. That makes the WC3R thing interesting but it's a relatively small investment to test the market to see if a WC4 would be worth doing.

The smart way to be a gamer is to ignore corporate culture, large or small, hunt down the games you like (big or small, corporate or indy) and then play and support them.

Eloquently put as always. Very true points.

[InsightTimer]

MMO-Champion is on Blizzard's pay role. Don't expect a thread like this to go unpunished.