PSA: Do not buy Wolfenstein Youngblood.

[segara82]

-snip-

EA themselves have in one of their latest financial reports said that making and maintaining games is as cheap/expensive as it was for the last few years, it is the marketing that is getting more and more expensive. What they really need to do is getting that part under control by not mindlessly blowing so much money into it. IMO they do that to justify MTX and DLCs and to stroke their own egos when their company/game gets mentioned in the media.
Not to mention that revenue from MTX often makes 50%+ of the companies revenue should tell you what is really going on.
When those fall (and they will when more countries count lootboxes as gambling) then the companies will be forced to invest more into better games to get better sales.

[Vash The Stampede]

Inflation isn't something you really get to believe in or not. It's an economic fact. Just because inflation goes up quicker than wages doesn't: a.) mean median wages don't increase or b.) that inflation impacts the business in every other aspect besides wages. Having high paid CEO's isn't exclusive to the gaming industry. That's a corporate thing.

It's a fact, but who makes that a fact? You can believe what you want but if prices continue to rise then people will stop buying. Like AT&T when they raised prices and lost 1 million customers. Someone should have told them that inflation is an economic fact.

For starters, most games don't release modding tools, and that has been the case for the entire existence of video games. People who want to mod their games, however, have generally been able to in one way or another, with mixed success. Gamers are not entitled to have a modding suite given out for every single game. There are loads of reasons why modding isn't officially supported by most games, and money (in the way you're implying) typically isn't a big one. For starters, officially supporting modding means that dev's need to create their game from the ground up with mod support (or go back and retrofit the code), as well as potentially having to create some sort of SDK for modders (think Fallout 3's GECK). This requires a lot of man hours on top of the hours it takes to just make the game, and will be something you have to support alongside the game itself.

To be frank, the modding community doesn't need tools supplied to them. Ask Bethesda, where their tools were released much later and people had already made a plethora of mods without them. Or how RockStar went after GTA 5 OpenIV which is a tool for creating mods, not made by RockStar. The point I'm making is that you could add support for things like selecting a skin, or selecting a map. It would be cool if I could join a multiplayer game where everyone could see my skin that I made. That should only take you 5 minutes of coding.

Now, in a strictly single player game, this is generally the end of the case (unless you're Ubisoft). However, in any game that allows you to play with other people, complexities arise. A person may create a mod that total ruins other players experience or gives a player an unfair advantage. Ya, you can have staff that monitor these kinds of things day-to-day, but players far outnumber employees. So 90% of the time, players will come up with workarounds or different ways to cause problems before the staff can do anything about it. It's not as simple as just allowing you to make skins, because once you expose the core access, the more skilled out there can easily break through that tiny crack.

You mean like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the XP farm thing? But yea, you could just allow people to run mods on their servers only. Assuming players can make their own server. But we are talking about single player games here mostly, and there shouldn't be a problem with modding here.

For wolfenstein, a little research would show that people didn't find a way to get any of the MTX exclusive skins. No one was able to buy the skins that could only be purchased via MTX, just skins that you could acquire with the in game earned silver coins. So no, Bethesda didn't rush to patch it because they were "losing precious MTX dollars". They patched it because it was a vulnerability in the games code, one that would allow everyone to trivialize the game.

Seems you're right, but then again you can buy these coins in the shop so it is circumventing the micro-transaction store, just not completely. But we know that someone will hack the Gold Bars eventually, it's just inevitable. They did it to AC:O, and they did it to DMCV, so give it time. Would be hilarious if developers have to fight hackers over their micro-transactions and it just ends up bankrupting the studio. Poetic justice right there. Too bad YoungBlood sucks as a game, because people will just lose interest and so will the hackers. DEF CON would be so much more interesting.

Except they don't. It's very clear that single player gaming dominated the gaming market up until the internet started becoming more prevalent. There is a very noticeable point at which single player games started to sell less and less relative to multiplayer games.

You know it's funny because the most popular game this year is Resident Evil 2. For July it was Mario Maker 2. You still have your sports and COD, but those are like crack for their respective audience.

Minecraft is not a single player game. Being able to play a game solo =/ single player. GTA V in 2015 could no longer be considered a single player game. Everything about it by that point was GTA Online, and to think that it made it on that list because of it's campaign is choosing to see the game only as it was released two years before this list was compiled. That leaves Fallout 4 as the only single player game.

Minecraft and GTA V started off popular for their single player, and these games are old, like 2009 and 2013 old. Sure they maybe popular today for the multi-player, but people bought them for their single player. Hard to tell how many players are online but since May 2019 over 176 million copies had been sold across all platforms, and about 90 million are actively playing right now. Whether that's online or single player I do not know. I also really doubt that most of the people who bought GTA V did so to play online. Lets how the sales of Minecraft 2 and GTA VI multiplayer online only will play out.

Sports games were never single player, even in the early days of gaming. They were always made to be playable with player 2 locally.

On yea, I can totally see people with Madden on the Sega Genesis never playing the game unless a friend was over. No single player mode there.

Looking at just steam is not indicative of what the gaming community wants as a whole. It's perhaps what most of the PC gaming community wants, but who is exactly surprised by that? People that go out of their way to get a computer for gaming are more likely to be into games besides sports or CoD, which means they are more likely to be into single player games. There are a lot of gamers that do not have a computer for gaming, though, and just play games on consoles. You can't ignore that section of the player base. Looking at the total game sales for the year clearly shows that players by and large did not want single player games, as sad as that may be.

Not ignoring other player bases, but we all know that certain sports titles and CoD games will always sell well because that audience would if they could, smash the game disc into powder and snort it, regardless the quality of the game. And a top 10 list will of course be dominated by these sports titles and CoD games because, we are doomed as a species. At least with Steam and having a list that goes up to 20, we can filter out those games and see what other gamers want to play.

You say you see it as a consumer, but so do I.

No you don't. You're either a game dev or someone who works for one, because I can't understand how you defend this anti-consumer business practice. I can usually see both sides, but nope not here.

Everyone who buys a game looks at it from the lens of a consumer. Your seem to believe that DLC is generally something taken away from consumers, where as I believe it's generally something offered to us to compliment the main course.

The way I see it is that a DLC is nothing more than a quick cash grab that takes very few man hours to complete, but has high return. An entire game is $60, but a crappy DLC is $20. A season pass is nearly as much as the game itself. I'd rather the devs work a sequel or something new than to make DLC.

Gaming will continue to evolve. MTX might be totally different in the near future with multiple world governments making efforts to say, prohibit loot box style transactions. I look forward to seeing how it evolves, and hopefully that evolution results and more real quality content.

I believe that studios will continue to push what gamers will allow with micro-transactions and eventually cause another E.T. moment where the industry crashes. Something like Half Life 3 with the worst micro-transactions and DLC possible. That would do it.

[Dhrizzle]

First off Activision Own's Blizzard, The company is literally called Activision-Blizzard. Why do you think when Activision fired a lot of people most was within blizzard. They have full control over everything they do and its been that way since around 2014.

The same applies to MachineGames, Bethesda (and Zenimax due to owning Bethedsa) has full control over MachineGames. Youngblood is the way it is because Daddy Bethesda made it that way.

Activision-Blizzard owns both Activision and Blizzard, they're two subsidiaries of the same holding company

[Fencers]

I actually really enjoy Youngblood. The 'city' scape felt a little more Dishonored than Wolfenstien, but I welcomed the change of pace from the last couple of Wolfenstein games. I also thought the two chicks were really cool and the game made me laugh out loud pretty often. Which is saying a lot for me.

[Jtbrig7390]

Finished the game up a moment ago.

Literally the same ending as NC, It hits the exact same story beats...

Overall my rating for it is a 5 out of 10. A average game that has a poor leveling system, bland characters and shitty level design.

Also holy fuck the AI is as dumb as a bag of bricks, This is by far the worse AI I have seen in a game for quite sometime.

Only pros was the voice acting was solid and the only decent characters was the FBI lady, The two main Nazi characters and BJ. The shooting as always was solid as well even if its stripped down cause of the shit leveling system.

[Seramore]

No shit that's kinda my point since you said.



If you don't think Activision has a hand in what happens with Wow you must also think the sun is cold..

No, I don't think Activision has a hand in what happens in WoW. Blizzard has done a ton of dumbass shit before they were even merged with Activision, the merger has nothing to do with the state of the game. Especially since they've talked about wanting to try various things that didn't work out or that are controversial (yearly expansion model, store items, "rushed" content) before Activision happened.

[Jtbrig7390]

No, I don't think Activision has a hand in what happens in WoW. Blizzard has done a ton of dumbass shit before they were even merged with Activision, the merger has nothing to do with the state of the game. Especially since they've talked about wanting to try various things that didn't work out or that are controversial (yearly expansion model, store items, "rushed" content) before Activision happened.

Yes blizzard has done a ton of shit before the merger, Doesn't change the fact Activision has their hand up blizzards ass now.

What they did 10 years ago doesn't matter in what they do now.

You seem to take me as someone who thinks Blizzard didn't "go bad" until Activision, No they have always been this way and Activision having control now doesn't make any of it better.

I'm done talking about Activision-Blizzard seeing how its unrelated to the topic at hand.

[themaster24]

EA themselves have in one of their latest financial reports said that making and maintaining games is as cheap/expensive as it was for the last few years, it is the marketing that is getting more and more expensive. What they really need to do is getting that part under control by not mindlessly blowing so much money into it. IMO they do that to justify MTX and DLCs and to stroke their own egos when their company/game gets mentioned in the media.
Not to mention that revenue from MTX often makes 50%+ of the companies revenue should tell you what is really going on.
When those fall (and they will when more countries count lootboxes as gambling) then the companies will be forced to invest more into better games to get better sales.

Generally, I'm talking about the long term increase, not necessarily the year over year. But even year over year, costs go up somewhere, it's just a matter of what and how much. You are right though, there is a lot of money being spent on marketing, possibly too much sometimes. Does CoD need, say, $50 Million on marketing, when everyone who is going to buy it doesn't care about any of the marketing? I certainly don't think so, but, at the end of the day, I don't have any real relevant data to compare. Maybe we're all wrong, and they have hard data that shows a massive increase in sales when they spend however much on marketing.

I do not think they do it solely because they want a justified reason to sell MTX and DLC. Marketing cost certainly does impact a potential need for post launch content, since it's just that much more it cost to get the game out. It is sad, though, that for some games, MTX is how they make their money. I would rather a more reliable source of revenue for games, since if you push a studio to be dependent on MTX sales, it can be catastrophic not just for the game, but for the studio itself. A hugely popular, well made game, can be hamstrung by some publishers if it's MTX sales aren't good enough for them. This isn't a unilateral case, but it is a risk that I don't like. I know I advocate that MTX isn't inherently bad, and I genuinely don't believe it is, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer an alternative. I've just accepted it as something that is just going to be for now, and it does me no good to act as if every instance is the devil. As I said, I would like to see MTX done away with in general, and replaced with a better alternative.

It's a fact, but who makes that a fact? You can believe what you want but if prices continue to rise then people will stop buying. Like AT&T when they raised prices and lost 1 million customers. Someone should have told them that inflation is an economic fact.

What makes it a fact is literally math and science. TV (and internet for that matter) being overpriced to being with doesn't matter. Most companies don't choose to just not raise prices because they are still making profits. At the end of the day, a company is there to make profits, and if an increase in labor, supplies, outsourcing, or whatever it may be, cuts too deeply into their profits, prices go up. It's one of what I believe to be the major flaws in old style Capitalism (that revenue/profits are literally the only thing that matter). AT&T and their cohorts are prime examples of old style Capitalism, and I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever.

However, if you notice, what happened was people followed a growing trend of cutting TV in favor of just having internet. In fact, AT&T saw an increase in their internet customer base. This is a good example of when people feel a service is no longer worth what they pay.

To be frank, the modding community doesn't need tools supplied to them. Ask Bethesda, where their tools were released much later and people had already made a plethora of mods without them. Or how RockStar went after GTA 5 OpenIV which is a tool for creating mods, not made by RockStar. The point I'm making is that you could add support for things like selecting a skin, or selecting a map. It would be cool if I could join a multiplayer game where everyone could see my skin that I made. That should only take you 5 minutes of coding.

I never said the modding community NEEDS tools. I even said they find a way regardless of if a dev officially supports it or not. If they do want to officially support it though, that means properly setting up the game for that. That's what official mod support is.

Programming is not that simple. I know it's easy to think "It can't be more than a few lines of code", but it's far more complex than that. Even something like you said, where you could perhaps store skins/maps in a different area and then have a built in interface that associates the selected file with whatever asset, would take a good amount of time of development and testing. They have to make sure that the code they put in doesn't interfere with anything else in the game. Things that could make the game crash or perform different than expected.

If we're talking about multiplayer, let's say Fortnite, what's to stop someone from using a skin that makes obstacles clear, or changes other players in a way that makes them easier to find. What if someone designs skins that give them a distinct advantage in the game.

You mean like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the XP farm thing? But yea, you could just allow people to run mods on their servers only. Assuming players can make their own server. But we are talking about single player games here mostly, and there shouldn't be a problem with modding here.

Most games that allow private servers typically have no issue with mods, at least in my experience. This part was about MP though, and I already talked about both anyway in the last part.

Seems you're right, but then again you can buy these coins in the shop so it is circumventing the micro-transaction store, just not completely. But we know that someone will hack the Gold Bars eventually, it's just inevitable. They did it to AC:O, and they did it to DMCV, so give it time. Would be hilarious if developers have to fight hackers over their micro-transactions and it just ends up bankrupting the studio. Poetic justice right there. Too bad YoungBlood sucks as a game, because people will just lose interest and so will the hackers. DEF CON would be so much more interesting.

You cannot buy silver coins for money, you can only buy gold bars. There were some skins that could be bought with gold bars or coins, some that could only be bought with gold bars, and some only with silver coins. So yes, to a small degree, the MTX system was circumvented, but not in any real sense, since people would more than likely be buying gold bars to buy the skins they could only buy with gold bars.

Let's be clear here, if people want to hack a game, they will hack a game. So many things have been tried over the year to stop hacking, and it's never worked. Workarounds always come, one way or another. It's more a matter of how complex it is to create workarounds every time it gets patched.

You know it's funny because the most popular game this year is Resident Evil 2. For July it was Mario Maker 2. You still have your sports and COD, but those are like crack for their respective audience.

While RE 2 has been extremely popular this year, it's only 5th on the list YTD. July hasn't had any results posted yet, but I presume you are talking about June, where Mario Maker 2 took top honors for the month. You can also expect the chart to change since Madden 20 just released, CoD is coming out soon, etc. Their sales, no matter how crack addled their fans may be, are still relevant.

Minecraft and GTA V started off popular for their single player, and these games are old, like 2009 and 2013 old. Sure they maybe popular today for the multi-player, but people bought them for their single player. Hard to tell how many players are online but since May 2019 over 176 million copies had been sold across all platforms, and about 90 million are actively playing right now. Whether that's online or single player I do not know. I also really doubt that most of the people who bought GTA V did so to play online. Lets how the sales of Minecraft 2 and GTA VI multiplayer online only will play out.

We aren't talking about when the games came out, though. We're talking about their sales well after the launched. People GTA V with the single player experience being their chief desire it first came out. GTA Online launched at the end of 2013, and by the end of 2015, it was still selling mega numbers. Any level of research will show this was a result of the popularity of GTA Online and not it's campaign. People were buying it in 2015 to play online with their friends, or because they saw all the wild and crazy stuff people were doing online.

While the Minecraft still has some people that purchase it and never touch MP, it is still widely popular because of the capabilities of their MP. Heck, Minecraft even technically started the Battle Royal genre. Point is, in 2015, you could not really consider Minecraft a single player game. It was a game you could play single player, but not a single player game like GTA V was when it launched in 2013, or a single player game like ME 3 or DA:I was.

On yea, I can totally see people with Madden on the Sega Genesis never playing the game unless a friend was over. No single player mode there.

I mean, I never said no one ever played them without someone else. I simply said they were made to be playable with a player 2. These games were huge multiplayer games back in the day. But back then, you were limited to having someone with you to play multiplayer, hence why single player components were so dense in early shooters. Just because a game has the ability to play by yourself doesn't inherently make it a single player game. I can go buy Madden 20 and play only play career mode, but that doesn't mean the game isn't a multiplayer game at its heart.

Not ignoring other player bases, but we all know that certain sports titles and CoD games will always sell well because that audience would if they could, smash the game disc into powder and snort it, regardless the quality of the game. And a top 10 list will of course be dominated by these sports titles and CoD games because, we are doomed as a species. At least with Steam and having a list that goes up to 20, we can filter out those games and see what other gamers want to play.

That's just changing goal posts though. You can't just ignore that the impact of CoD's and Madden's of the world. They are just as much a part of the gaming world as something as obscure as Doki Doki Literature Club. The point about all this was sales, and those are the games that bring in insane sales numbers. It's just an unfortunate fact that SP no longer bring in the share of the gaming world they once did. If a major publisher was forced to choose between funding a CoD or a new Bioshock today, they would almost always choose CoD.

No you don't. You're either a game dev or someone who works for one, because I can't understand how you defend this anti-consumer business practice. I can usually see both sides, but nope not here.

Outside of when I taught myself programming in HS and created a game to enter into a state competition, I've never done anything relating to games for work. In fact, I work in IT.

The way I see it is that a DLC is nothing more than a quick cash grab that takes very few man hours to complete, but has high return. An entire game is $60, but a crappy DLC is $20. A season pass is nearly as much as the game itself. I'd rather the devs work a sequel or something new than to make DLC.

DLC can be something low effort, like just a hat, which was maybe popped out in a few days between the various departments. It can also be something that did take a lot of time and effort. Thousands of art assets, new code that the base game had to be retrofit with, new animation rigs, map design, weapons, story, voice over work. It is certainly not an inherent cash grab, but you can typically tell the difference between DLC that is and isn't. One DLC is not like the other, and to act as if they are the same kind of thing is disingenuous at best.

[TaurenNinja]

I have finished it playing co-op with a friend. It was fun. Pros and cons from my perspective:

+ It's a fun, decent co-op shooter. Probably boring when playing it alone
+ RPG elements are nice here because you get to upgrade your character and your weapons. Upgrading stuff feels nice, and RPG elements are in almost every game these days, including shooters, because they enrich the game
+ Microtransactions exist, but are not necessary at all. In fact I didn't even know that microtransactions exist until 6 hours+ into the game. We did not need them at all, despite playing on "Challenging". If you are decent players, this game is not hard at all
+ Level design is nice (many options to approach things, good vertical options, many collectibles and "secrets", and so on)
+ It's not a full price game (i.e. not 60 bucks but 30). If it cost 60, it would not be worth the price. At 30, it is

- Story and characters are bad. Like, real bad.
- Not much content, which is partly offset by the fact that a) you're revisting areas and b) it's not a full price game. Still, it's a negative
- Respawning enemies sometimes directly near you is bad for immersion and creates gameplay problems (you think you're safe, but you aren't)
(- The Sturmgewehr had only a medium range when using it as a sniper rifle (not long range as you'd expect)... but apparently they fixed this like a couple of days in)

In conclusion I think that this is one of these examples in that if the game isn't near perfect and has some obvious flaws, the internet hate machine will exaggerate and downvote it to oblivion. It's just that... exaggerated. The flaws of this game are obvious as stated above, but it's not fair to downvote this to oblivion. It's a solid co-op shooter, I would give this a 7/10. The critic reviews giving it like ~70/100 are reasonable. It's not reasonable to give this 0/10 or 2/10 or whatever. Those are not objective reviews. If you like decent shooters, don't care if it has a good story or not, and just want to have some 10-20 hours of fun with a friend, then it's worth your money and time. But don't expect a true sequel to Wolfenstein. View this as a spin-off.

[Jtbrig7390]

and just want to have some 10-20 hours of fun with a friend,

Where did the other 4-14hours of content come from? Because it only took me around 6hrs to finish it.

the internet hate machine will exaggerate and downvote it to oblivion. It's just that... exaggerated.

Has nothing to do with the "internet hate machine", Its a bad game period and the review scores from both actual users and reviewer's reflects that.

Its fine to like something that is bad, Rubber is a bad movie. Doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.

The game lacks everything the original 2 and even the first spin-off had. The excuse of "its a spin-off and its not a full priced game" is bullshit excuses.

This came from a two "AAA" company's and to have this much of a lackluster product is sad. Their has been $30 indie titles that offered more than this.

Liking the game is fine, dismissing the very valid criticisms against it because you like it isn't.

[Halicia]

Where did the other 4-14hours of content come from? Because it only took me around 6hrs to finish it.

Not singling you out particularly, so much as this argument.

Whether I enjoy a game or not, I usually average less than 6 hours in an individual title, so if I can complete it in that time, and get the full and entertaining experience, than its probably more of a selling point for me than a game that offers an amazing ending and 500 hours of gameplay..... that I will never get to see.

Just like a 3 hour movie, when I only have an hour free, or an all you can eat buffet for $20, when all I'm really hungry for is a $5 appetizer.

That's why I like to read customer reviews with bullet points... when they list a lot of pros about how great the experience is, but list short gameplay as a con, that makes me want to buy it more.

I'm not saying this applies to Youngblood, its not the sort of game I'd typically buy, even at $20-30, but there's always the possibility that certain keywords might perk my ears up and make me decide that this sounds like a fun afternoon or two of gaming. That hasn't happened, though.

[Vineri]

All good, thanks for the PSA. I won't buy this game, or any Bethesda games, actually.

They might not have realized it yet but they lost me as a customer when they tried to sue that EBay person for selling their unwanted brand new copy of one of their games.

They need to keep their games and never sell them.

[Orby]

I saw a lot of people hating on the two girls, Jess or Soph.... unpopular opinion but I found them quite funny.

the rest of the game sucks though, but through it all the only light were the two girls. But even those girls alone couldn't save this disaster

[Jtbrig7390]

I saw a lot of people hating on the two girls, Jess or Soph.... unpopular opinion but I found them quite funny.

the rest of the game sucks though, but through it all the only light were the two girls. But even those girls alone couldn't save this disaster

Jess and Soph was ok.

My main issue with them was hearing the same couple lines over and over and then the Arthur Jokes they kept doing. They could have been so much better.

[Tenjen]

Jess and Soph was ok.

My main issue with them was hearing the same couple lines over and over and then the Arthur Jokes they kept doing. They could have been so much better.

When putting such characters into a game they need to counter balance each other personality wise with the occasional subversion where the not-serious one gets serious and the responsible one has fun. It helps both endear them to players and avoids them becoming annoying.

Unfortunately they didnt do any of thay. They girls had and still have a lot of potential as chars but this new game format they warped Wolfenstein with just isnt good for that sort of thing. The repetition especially made it bad. They could have been so much more like you said.

[Orby]

Jess and Soph was ok.

My main issue with them was hearing the same couple lines over and over and then the Arthur Jokes they kept doing. They could have been so much better.

yes, that was a problem

I am more talking during cut scenes and story progression, anything that involved them during the game play was annoying. The story around them did them no favors. But for what they were when they were focused on, I really liked. I did chuckle a few times. :P

It's good characters around a shitty game. I draw comparisons to Dragon Age 2, a game I go to bat for I like Draogn Age 2. I think the game is under rated and gets way too much hate, if it wasnt for the strong characters I would probably hate that game though. The problem with Wolfenstien Youngblood is even as much as I like Jess and Soph they cannot make me say I like the game. :P

[justandulas]

i was talked out of buying it by Shill Up

[Alteiry]

That's just redundant, because Activision is Blizzard, and Blizzard is Activision. They're the same company now.

Yes but actually no, Activision Blizzard was the merger between Activision and Vivendi, Blizzard's former owners. Activision just took Blizzard's name for the sake of marketing, Blizzard Entertainment is still a separate company owned by the new corporate entity known as Activision Blizzard.

[Jtbrig7390]

Yes but actually no, Activision Blizzard was the merger between Activision and Vivendi, Blizzard's former owners. Activision just took Blizzard's name for the sake of marketing, Blizzard Entertainment is still a separate company owned by the new corporate entity known as Activision Blizzard.

No it isn't and hasn't been for quite awhile, Why do you think the company is called Activision-Blizzard has its one stock. When Activision bought themselves out from Vivendi they bought blizzard as well.

They fully own Blizzard and blizzard has only had one time in its life where it was a separate company and they wasn't even called blizzard at that time.

[Alteiry]

No it isn't and hasn't been for quite awhile, Why do you think the company is called Activision-Blizzard has its one stock. When Activision bought themselves out from Vivendi they bought blizzard as well.

Nope, you are 100% wrong.

Activision merged with Vivendi, which transferred Vivendi's ownership of Blizzard Entertainment over to the new merger entity Activision-Vivendi which then promptly changed name to Activision-Blizzard because Blizzard is a better known brand name than Vivendi. Blizzard Entertainment still exists, as they always have, as a separate subsidiary company under Activision-Blizzard's umbrella, just as they did before under Vivendi's umbrella.