Activision didn't ruin Blizzard, Mike Morhaime did.

[Kaykay]

Your words would make sense were it not for the fact that Blizzard employees under Activision are getting underpaid. They are actually worse off due to the deal.

Not the people who were blizzard pre-activision, they got the payout. Everybody since then has been part of the profit machine. It's only right that the people who created the success reap the most benefits while those who ride on the success reap less. (Although i agree their recent behavior is disgusting, but expected from a profit driven entity that is acti-blizz, compared to the game studio it was before corporate.)

[kappalol]

He was the one who made the deal with Activision, he was the captain of the ship, he alone is responsible for Blizzard's demise.


Personally I don't have a lot of hope with Dreamhaven.

Such a nice example of having no clue what you are talking about.

[Beefhammer]

He was the one who made the deal with Activision, he was the captain of the ship, he alone is responsible for Blizzard's demise.


Personally I don't have a lot of hope with Dreamhaven.

Please tell us how Mike, the CEO of Blizzard at the time, which was owned by Vivendi, was able to convince its owner to merge with activision, create a new parent company called ActivisionBlizzard and put both studios under it?

Or are still under the impression that Activision bought Blizzard despite that not happening?

[Gaidax]

Well..this is where ppl get easy posting bait....just scream "Activison ruined it because moneyZ"

At the end of the day...a company wants and needs to make money. But ofc making a new game also costs a ton and is rather risky.

I would love to know how much "New World" is costing Amazon. And does it look promising? Would you bet it makes a ton of dollars? Or look at SWtoR and LotRO. Massive franchises behind these games, yet they fizzle in the face of the WoW Juggernaut.

The WoW Juggernaut and the company behind it trying to make the next big thing with Titan, yet it crashed and burned.

It all doesn't seem to be so easy....as games like Rift or Wildstar seem to prove where devs thought, all you need to do is "listen to players"

Any evil corporation wants growth, you don't get growth when you don't release anything new. It's just that.

I also think it's silly to claim Activision would force Blizzard to not make games because it costs money - Blizzard is given all the funds in the world to make games, they have resources allocated to that, that would make your average publisher/studio execs mouths water. Heck, I'd imagine for the $$ they plopped on making the bloody CGI movies for BFA alone, other studios could probably make a good 1/3 of a decent game there of it, if not all of it, if Indie.

The amount of $$ Blizzard spent at Titan that ended up dead is staggering, they still got it. It's really, REALLY, not a $$ problem. They have the money and they are allowed to spend it.

It's a case of creative bankruptcy, lack of direction and toothless management at Blizzard that ended up with Blizzard not making games for years now and with a murky roadmap of Diablo sometime ~2022 and little else aside from WoW/HS milking and Overwatch expansion repackaged as a new game.

A clear case of mismanagement at Blizzard itself.

[Mysterymask]

Do ya'll just wake up one day have an epiphany on why wow is bad for you then get the weird urge to post it on MMO Champion because you are right

or are you just a *see's who posted*

yep troll

[Toybox]

None of this really matters. The guy was the boss for a while, he stopped, and now he's the boss of some other company. I fail to see why that would be interesting in any way to me. I'm not interested in some other random games, nor am I gonna fanboy over new games just cause they are made by people involved in WoW at some point.

Nail on the head. I've been playing Blizzard games for 20 years at this point, but I'll not give a damn about anything Dreamhaven does until it comes out & I find it interesting. Until then, it's just another company I expect little to nothing from.

[Amariw]

Milking franchises is good as long as you actually make new big games out of it. You have bajillion of good franchises pumping new big games every several years. Blizzard is an outlier there - they have their golden goose of Diablo and Starcraft and they simply aren't doing shit with it for years.

Doom Eternal, new FF - they are all actual new games and good ones at that. Blizzard should have long done this with Starcraft and years ago with Diablo, instead they just sat on their asses letting WoW and HS expansions carry them.

FIFA really is the only bad apple in the bunch there seeing they basically repackage what amounts to expansion into a "new" game. But then it's EA, what you gonna do.

And that state of thing is certainly not the evil Activision doing, unless they are some sort of publisher that believes that not making games is how you do business. All Morhaime and Blizz, that one.

They did try with sc2. It's a big well designed game with lots of thought put into it. Its mediocre or even lackluster success is, in my eyes, mostly a result of the gaming crowd moving away from competitive 1v1 rts, which can be an increadibly taxing and frustrating (if rewarding) experience. And going into other games with similar feel but that are more team based like mobas. I prefer starcraft, but i still stopped laddering from the stress of it after some peak.

The coop mode of the game seemed to be gaining a ton of popularity, perhaps because of the above (unlike ladder, its cooperative, its still definitely an rts, its vs the ai, and it has tough difficulties for challenge but also very lenient difficulties if you just wanna chill. Most of all, you get to feel overpowered with awesome heroes which almost feels like a fair cheat).

However, the attenttion its getting is too late and too little imo, when sc2 development budgets are already low. If some other company choose to expand on it, i think it might really become a big hit, but can't tell for now.

[Gaidax]

They did try with sc2. It's a big well designed game with lots of thought put into it. Its mediocre or even lackluster success is, in my eyes, mostly a result of the gaming crowd moving away from competitive 1v1 rts, which can be an increadibly taxing and frustrating (if rewarding) experience. And going into other games with similar feel but that are more team based like mobas. I prefer starcraft, but i still stopped laddering from the stress of it after some peak.

The coop mode of the game seemed to be gaining a ton of popularity, perhaps because of the above (unlike ladder, its cooperative, its still definitely an rts, its vs the ai, and it has tough difficulties for challenge but also very lenient difficulties if you just wanna chill. Most of all, you get to feel overpowered with awesome heroes which almost feels like a fair cheat).

However, the attenttion its getting is too late and too little imo, when sc2 development budgets are already low. If some other company choose to expand on it, i think it might really become a big hit, but can't tell for now.

Blizzard let Starcraft as a franchise wither away for no good reason.

Starcraft 2 series was a success, the revenues they got from it are measured by hundreds millions of dollars. They absolutely could already be well into development of Starcraft 3 or/and a spin off game based on it with all the free ideas they got from the community with mods and maps there.

They did not try shit with Starcraft for years, they did some mode or two for SC2 there, put some skeleton crew on it and that's it.

That's not what I'm talking about. They should have already announced Starcraft 3 with release 2021/22 or some spin off game like Starcraft FPS/RPG which would be amazing, but instead they just let that glorious franchise sit there and wither on life support.

---

And Diablo? It's been 6 years from RoS release... what were they doing all this time? Yes Diablo 4 looks good, but by all right they should have been releasing it next year already, instead of sitting on their asses all these years or making a joke of themselves with outsourced "don't you have phones?".

---

That's why, I, am not buying all these Activision bad subjugating poor Blizzard and our patron saint Mike fighting the corporate machine stories. It's just pure nonsense, frankly, from basic logic standpoint.

[Huntaer]

Personally i think a big sack of money and a lot of pressure got him to do it.

[Gaidax]

I am actually not sure. I mean..if Blizzard and Activision are so evil and money hungry and it is all mismanagement....we should see heads rolling and investors selling stock in panic.

Mike Morhaime's head rolled in the end. Oh right, he "retired".

[Rageonit]

He was the CEO at the time? Seriously, Nazi Germany 2.0 could have bought them and he would still be obligated to go out in public and state that it was the best damn thing since ice cream. It was literally his job. His own personal feelings have absolutely nothing to do with what he said.

I'm sorry, but why should I be concerned with that? It's not my job to decipher his corporate talk. I'm going to take anything he says at face value - and if he lies, then he is no different than the corporate monster that pays him to spout those things. If you have any work ethic left, you can always step down from your position. So either he did mean what he was saying, or he wasn't concerned about saying things he didn't mean (but in this case, I don't understand why I should have any sympathy for the man).

[Zogarth]

I'm sorry, but why should I be concerned with that? It's not my job to decipher his corporate talk. I'm going to take anything he says at face value - and if he lies, then he is no different than the corporate monster that pays him to spout those things. If you have any work ethic left, you can always step down from your position. So either he did mean what he was saying, or he wasn't concerned about saying things he didn't mean (but in this case, I don't understand why I should have any sympathy for the man).

I am sorry about your lack of understanding how the world works. I am sure you also consider public defenders people who thinks doing crime it totally okay, and the defender of a serial killer to support murder.

[Zeta333]

Why are you people incapable of accepting that blizzard fucked shit up all on thier own, Why must you place blame on other companies.

[Cerus]

Since we know they're capable (they made the company that it was, before activision came in) so why wouldn't they be able to repeat that?

Because this is 2020 and the majority of the playerbase are grown adults who keep playing because they’ve played for so long.

There will never be another WoW type success.

It’s easy to blame activision because they’re the big bad owner but blizzard hasn’t been it’s own company for over 25 years.

[Rageonit]

I am sorry about your lack of understanding how the world works. I am sure you also consider public defenders people who thinks doing crime it totally okay, and the defender of a serial killer to support murder.

Oh, so now I should feel bad for Mike Morhaime, because that's how the world works?
Wonder if he was bothered by how the world works when he cashed it out.
Newsflash: I don't have anything against Mike Morhaime - but I see no reason to make him the hero some people want him to be. He should be not absolved of the blame. For all we know, Blizzard accepted the deal. There's a different article out there if you care to look for it, that states Mike Morhaime was actually pushing for the deal by advertising the moves they were making in Korea and China at that time. But I guess he was also forced to say that?

[Onikaroshi]

I'm still surprised after all these years that people STILL think Blizzard had any say in the matter.

Look at the history of Blizzard, they haven't had a say in their own shit since they've been called Blizzard.

[Rageonit]

I'm still surprised after all these years that people STILL think Blizzard had any say in the matter.
Look at the history of Blizzard, they haven't had a say in their own shit since they've been called Blizzard.

Yes, they were only toys in the hands of the evil overlords. Nobody cared about anything they had to say, and they didn't have a say in anything. That's supposedly how the world works.
Oh, and BTW, Covenants is Bobby Kotick's idea.

[Onikaroshi]

Yes, they were only toys in the hands of the evil overlords. Nobody cared about anything they had to say, and they didn't have a say in anything. That's supposedly how the world works.

I'm talking business wise, as blizzard they were owned by Davidson and Associates who sold them to Vivendi, who merged with Activision.

[Xilurm]

So easy for people to ignore the fact that Blizzard was owned by Vivendi. They were never an independant company.

[Aggrophobic]

He was the one who made the deal with Activision, he was the captain of the ship, he alone is responsible for Blizzard's demise.


Personally I don't have a lot of hope with Dreamhaven.

No, he did not. Go away.