it must be Mike Morhaime right? Since he agreed to the deal with Activision?
am I wrong? is it a collective of former blizzard higher ups?
it must be Mike Morhaime right? Since he agreed to the deal with Activision?
am I wrong? is it a collective of former blizzard higher ups?
Milk was a bad choice.
2013 MMO-Champion User of the Year (2nd runner up)
Players. For not voting with their wallets back in old times, when they were told, that what started to happen in Cata - was slippery slope, that would lead this game to fail. Yeah, Blizzard had enough resources to make this slippery slope last for long enough. But at the end here we are.
I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.
I think this will be the only time I'd actually agree with the delusional poster above me.
The players 100%. A bunch of weak willed spineless cowards decided to play games they hate for 2 decades while happily shelling out the cash all while screaming "da blizzurd is da ded".
Instead of you know.... playing video games they enjoy. They would be happier and the people who like blizzards games would be happier not having a bunch of mentally unstable adult babies crying over every announcement.
I blame the consumer for continuing to buy Blizzard's products despite clearly disliking what they're putting out. Who does that?
Oh this thread is going to die harder than that famous sequal to a Christmas movie from 1990
But..
Why do you need someone to blame? Does it make you feel better to point at someone and say "Hey that's the bad guy"?
Even then there isn't just one person to blame. Can blame the devs sure but they are either going with the shareholders to maximize profit or following player feedback.
Hell you can technically blame Bethesda for showing "hey you can make mini downloadable things and charge like $10 for it and make a fortune".
Maybe blame China for eating up MTX like they are hotcakes and having such a huge population that 2% of them is a damned fortune
How about blaming every company who made an MMO, Digital Card Game, and Action RPG for not being able to compete with Blizzard in the long run thus letting them coast in the sea of mediocrity.
How about the gaming populace as a whole for mostly rejecting the RTS genre and letting it just kinda die out making a WC4 a non thing?
I'm sure there's more but there ya go
FWIW Morhaime didn't just agree to the Activision-Vivendi merger. He personally pushed Kotick to do it, using Blizzard's inroads with the Chinese market as incentive.
Blame Capitalism, seriously.
Either way, I think Blizzard games are still good, I am especially fine with WoW. I mean WoW SL was actually very well received in the first few months. They've only messed up their patch schedule, making people leave. But the game was otherwise good and overall very successful.
As for the poor treatment of employees, this is all to blame to capitalism and themselves. It was in fact Blizzard where it was the worst, while Activision largely isn't affected by this.
Last edited by RobertMugabe; 2021-12-22 at 07:14 AM.
The age of the game is the one big reason why.
Age of the games I should put. Because its 5 years now since last real release.
Last edited by Doffen; 2021-12-22 at 07:19 AM.
https://www.youtube.com/@DoffenGG
Gaming and WoW stuff
I don't care about Wow 11.0, if it's not solo-MMO. No half-measures - just perfect xpack.
I don't agree with the premise of this thread but since the dude asked, I gave the most honest answer I could. Obviously Blizzard has had better days in the PR department but these claims that the entire company is in shambles are greatly overstated imo, often by people who are blatant hypocrites.
At the time that Activision merged with Blizzard they looked like a decent company, with Call of Duty being a ton of fun and guitar hero still looking like a game that had not being milked to death. Mike Morhaime was seduced (like many other tech people) into thinking they needed some finance guy to run that side of the business (a good example is Steve Jobs hiring Steve Sculley then being fired by him). Of course Bobby Kotick is like so many of these other finance control freaks and Morhaime thought he could sit back and be the good guy by not getting his hands dirty with the money. The problem is that the staff that knows almost nothing about tech started running the show more and more and detested the tech people for there non-business degree attitude. This continues a downward spiral of product quality people leaving while increasing the push to monetize the customers left playing the game in more and more aggressive ways.
Last edited by khazmodan; 2021-12-22 at 08:26 AM.
As always, the suits primarily. Blizzard isn't a unique case. It's just another yet another instance of corporate cancer.
Stage 1: the golden age. Something starts out great during the early days when it's just a bunch of dudes creating great and they get a following.
Stage 2: the decline. Eventually they become super successful, which results in their operations ballooning to the point that a corporate bueracracy is required, which is how the suits start taking over. Eventually the creatives become stifled having to work within an increasingly corporate environment and yearn to return to the good old days when they made stuff they were passionate about, so they leave. (Very few entertainment companies manage to retain their original talent for decades on end, the only notable one ATM being Nintendo).
Stage 3: it's terminal. Maybe you still have some guys left who are still passionate about the IP, but they don't have sway in the company like the OGs did. The show is being run by the suits now and they don't give a damn about art. They only care about the paper in your wallet.
Stage 4: death of the IP. So the IP gets milked into the ground until the fans are driven away, and the IP dies...
Stage 5: reboot. After enough time has passed and the memories of the awful reviews are no longer fresh in people's minds, the suits decide to dig up the once beloved IP's corpse and reboot it, trying to capitalize on nostalgia and brand name recgonition to make a quick buck off of people. Repeat at stage 3.
WoW is still in the middle of stage 4. It's remarkable that WoW has remained at this stage for so long. Even more popular IPs like Star Trek didn't remain in decline this long before being killed off. A testament to the sheer addictive power of WoW. People have decades of emotional investment in their WoW characters - memories playing with friends, achievements, tons of mounts and pets, etc, that it's hard for people to walk away.
You could blame people for supporting them, but that's not interesting.
If you had to point fingers at people in the company, based on what we see externally (since we have no idea what it's like internally), I'd say upper management.
The company has been dogshit at releasing new games/updates, they're increasingly more predatory, there's a litany of harassment claims, terrible community interaction.
All things upper management is responsible for at the end of the day.
Last edited by Mojo03; 2021-12-22 at 08:06 AM.
There's a lot of uninformed commentary going on here about the merger. To keep it simple at the time that Kotick made his move to separate Blizzard and Activision from Vivendi, Vivendi was facing a lot of debt and was preparing to raid the Blizzard's and Activision's cash reserves. If they had managed to take all of it it would have left Blizzard with little or no operating capital for investment or development. The likely result of that would have been the end of both companies: Blizzard and Activision.
To wit:
Y'all may get your wish in any case. The recent stock problems have some speculating that ATVI (and Blizzard) could be a target for a takeover. I'm sure y'all would love a Disney-fied version of Diablo. Be careful what you wish for."It is a substantial and gutsy move by Activision but also an eminently sensible one given the alternatives Activision faced," said Nick Gibson, an analyst with Games Investor Consulting. "Vivendi's majority stake combined with its own balance sheet difficulties could have resulted in raids on Activision's cash reserves – by forcing Activision to pay out large-scale special dividends – or other actions that might have jeopardized Activision's ability to operate.
I do think that the blame for a lot of this falls to Morhaime and the corporate culture he largely created. That has led to a lot of the recent lawsuits etc. Kotick needs to go as well. I do not think that a takeover by someone like Netflix or Disney would make the situation better; likely much worse. I have always believed that the way the companies were separated from Vivendi and the potential damage that Vivendi could have done to them was the best of a lot of bad alternatives.
EDIT: Source for quote - https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...splits-vivendi
Last edited by MoanaLisa; 2021-12-22 at 08:08 AM.
"...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."