The shit are people smoking?
Blizzard fuckups are their own. If you ask me Mike Morehaime should have been tossed couple years earlier, because he did shit job. Blizzard has no new IP and no new games for years, if not WoW cash cow that allows them to release "new game" every 2 years with expansions and Activision backing they'd be in shit by now. Game development studio that releases no new games? What kind of joke is that?
It's like some guy previously said here - people claim this investor pleasing and Activision bullshit? What, you mean when game studio stagnates and does not release new games or new IP it is somehow pleasing investors? What kind of silly goose talk is that?
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I mean seriously, take Starcraft for example... literally dead for years now, such a huge IP and all they do there is release some commander crap once in a year? They could have done so much with it, new trilogy or new spin-off game like some shooter or rpg. What new games Blizzard released last 2 years? Nothing. Just feeding on the corpses with remasters.
What new games Blizzard will release next 2 years? Overwatch 2? Which is basically Overwatch expansion. Thanks god for that at least, because except for that it will be "don't you guys have phones?".
That's bullshit plain and simple. "Investors" want gaming studios to release games, stagnation is much worse than an odd underwhelming title.
Sitting on your ass and doing nothing except expansions for dwindling playerbase is not a plan "investors" are happy with, no matter how much you want to believe that. It's only by sheer luck Blizzard has WoW, so it sort of has the breathing room there.
Problem is squarely Blizzard, it is Blizzard who are terrified of making bold moves, that's why they ended up in this situation where you will have a good 5 years gap between new games like it looks now. If it would be any other studio under any other publisher, they'd get whole management heads lopped off by now.
It does seem irrational at times to see people correlate all Blizzard's issues with their merging with Activision. At what point does Blizzard take responsibility and say "it's internal problems at our own company, not some external company to blame." That would be the day...
Over 80% of ATVI's investors are pension funds and institutional in nature and don't know anything about Blizzard's games. Quit acting as if Blizzard is all of ATVI. The people that run those funds are about 10X more interested in how Candy Crush is doing than anything to do with Blizzard or World of Warcraft. That's even if they know anything whatsoever about video games. ATVI is just a 4-letter code in a bundle of stocks and securities. Even if they were interested they would wonder why Blizzard hasn't released anything in over three years.
"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
It's something that's happened over the entire industry. You get this weird situation where employees are attracted to companies for what they once were and have affinity with the IP, they live and breath this stuff, while at the top you have a number cruncher just looking to maximize profit. Now don't get me wrong there's always this sort of tension within a company but it feels extremely skewed across the industry at the moment.
At some point something should be released period. Blizzard can't just sit there milking cow forever, it's not a plan.
They do need to be more pressured, IMO. World of Warcraft was a product of same pressure, back when they did not have the luxury to leech off some other game they can release expansions for indefinitely.
If they can't "find" themselves for years then it's their problem they need to solve internally.
Apart from Blizzard can and still do have the same control they’ve had as mentioned above - there’s simply no evidence to suggest otherwise. He’s the more likely reality and it’s that instead of people blaming every shitty thing on Activision, the actual scenario is that Blizzard is just now led by shit decision makers in comparison to whom was in-charge “back then”. Mostly all of the issues Blizzard has had recently comes to do those choices being made internally by Blizzard, rather than Activision having any part in it.