Is Blizzard on suicide watch yet?

[FIXXX]

It does seem that Blizzard shifted from being a dev and consumer friendly company with a point of making great games - into a profit-oriented business with zero fraks to give about the long term viability and a focus on MAKE MORE MONEY THIS QUARTER. SHAREHOLDERS WANT MORE GROWTH. MORE!

It's like the husband that has to sell cocaine on the side to supplement his lower-than-usual income. Doesn't end well for anobody.

[minibois]

Um, don't forget they are Activision Blizzard. Activision, the company behind Call of Duty; aka the "shovel a shittier and shittier game out every year" - company. One of the companies that has loot boxes and DLC that give you different guns which are very often stronger than the base game stuff.

The execs behind that surely would poison Blizzard fully at some point.

[FIXXX]

1 minute ago, Minibois said:

Um, don't forget they are Activision Blizzard. Activision, the company behind Call of Duty; aka the "shovel a shittier and shittier game out every year" - company. One of the companies that has loot boxes and DLC that give you different guns which are very often stronger than the base game stuff.

The execs behind that surely would poison Blizzard fully at some point.

You would think that Activision would bank on the name of Blizzard, like a worse-off student learning from the good one. But it's vice versa - the good student becomes a shitty teenager that huffs glue under the desk.

[dizmo]

You seem to be missing a key point here. That they make insane money because people like their games. Where do you think the money comes from?

 

[Fasauceome]

8 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Where do you think the money comes from?

The mindless masses being manipulated by the thrill of opening loot boxes

[dizmo]

12 hours ago, fasauceome said:

The mindless masses being manipulated by the thrill of opening loot boxes

I don't see it that way at all. For example, Hearthstone. You don't have to buy in, but you can if you like the expansion. The game's free to play, so if you put in a lot of hours, it makes sense to support what you enjoy playing by purchasing packs.

[Fasauceome]

9 hours ago, dizmo said:

I don't see it that way at all. For example, Hearthstone. You don't have to buy in, but you can if you like the expansion. The game's free to play, so if you put in a lot of hours, it makes sense to support what you enjoy playing by purchasing packs.

I think that's true, but I'm speaking more to the overwatch side of things, where there's a huge impetus to get loot boxes by the hundreds

[LogicalDrm]

What was your trigger? Because you are pretty late to party. WoW in general (whole vanilla server controversy while back), Diablo 3 auction controversy. I had another, but lost it. In short, they aren't any better than the rest. They have some understanding on how to treat community, but thats about it. They have really good writing team, but that isn't enough. Since (I've been into HS and now OW) they know how to squeeze money. HS is free, but to keep yourself into game you either need to spend a game worth of money in a year for it or quit. I did that when they went for 4 expansions in year to way more. With OW they have great background story going on. But since its only being used to sell game and accessories to game, they are gonna keep it going like it was cheap soap opera.

[Lord Cluttermonkey]

That's how capitalism works, companies exist to make money and they therefore do what makes them the most money. They're hardly on suicide watch, they're still very profitable. Just because their products don't really cater to you anymore doesn't mean the company is suddenly unsuccesful.

[FIXXX]

38 minutes ago, Lord Cluttermonkey said:

That's how capitalism works, companies exist to make money and they therefore do what makes them the most money. They're hardly on suicide watch, they're still very profitable. Just because their products don't really cater to you anymore doesn't mean the company is suddenly unsuccesful.

It's not exclusively about short-term profitability? Isn't it?

Game studios, even those with initially good releases - are disappearing, and that's not a rare occurrence.

But if you make a name for yourself (in a good way, of course) - that name itself will be enough advertising. But it's a stick with two edges. Once you start screwing up - that name can just as easily crucify projects if you don't keep the level of quality.

So suicide may not mean the imminent death of a game studio, but the consequences of the Activision purchase sure indicate a seriously low will to live and thrive in the long term.

[dizmo]

2 hours ago, fasauceome said:

I think that's true, but I'm speaking more to the overwatch side of things, where there's a huge impetus to get loot boxes by the hundreds

IIRC you don't have to buy the loot boxes to get anything useful in the game though, isn't it all cosmetic?

[Fasauceome]

13 minutes ago, dizmo said:

IIRC you don't have to buy the loot boxes to get anything useful in the game though, isn't it all cosmetic?

It's all cosmetic and it still has the same effect. And yes, you can earn loot boxes by playing. It still hasn't kept them from making a killing off them.

[Terryv]

19 minutes ago, dizmo said:

IIRC you don't have to buy the loot boxes to get anything useful in the game though, isn't it all cosmetic?

It is all cosmetic.

[dizmo]

2 hours ago, fasauceome said:

It's all cosmetic and it still has the same effect. And yes, you can earn loot boxes by playing. It still hasn't kept them from making a killing off them.

Ohhh I see. So you feel that you have the right to judge others by how they choose to spend their money. I see.

2 hours ago, Terryv said:

It is all cosmetic.

That's what I thought.

[Fasauceome]

8 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Ohhh I see. So you feel that you have the right to judge others by how they choose to spend their money. I see.

Well what I was getting at was that it's manipulative to sell loot boxes the way game corporations do, but sure, frame it like I'm blaming the consumer.

[dizmo]

4 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

Well what I was getting at was that it's manipulative to sell loot boxes the way game corporations do, but sure, frame it like I'm blaming the consumer.

It's not really manipulative at all. You don't need the cosmetic items. If people feel they do, that's a personal problem.

You are blaming the consumer by calling them "mindless masses."

They have minds. They choose to use those minds to spend money on loot boxes. Just because you don't see the value, doesn't mean it's wrong.

[Fasauceome]

Just now, dizmo said:

It's not really manipulative at all. You don't need the cosmetic items. If people feel they do, that's a personal problem.

You are blaming the consumer by calling them "mindless masses."

They have minds. They choose to use those minds to spend money on loot boxes. Just because you don't see the value, doesn't mean it's wrong.

There are reasons that loot boxes are getting banned in various countries. They truly are downright manipulative

[Giganthrax]

Here's a frank talk with a previous high-ranking Blizz employe, Mike Kerr, who openly called out Blizz on Twitter after the D:Immortal debacle. 

 

TLDListen: Blizz is doing badly atm because WoW isn't the ultimate cash cow it used to be, Overwatch is bleeding players to Fortnite, Heroes of the Storm wasn't the financial success they'd hoped it would be, and Activision is now using this to their fullest to do as much corporate takeover of Blizz as they can. Blizz higher-ups are completely separated from the rank & file, 3 out of 5 people (Pardo, Morrhaime, and Metzen) who were the cornerstones of Blizz from the beginning of the company are gone, and the company is exploiting fans-turned-workers even worse than is usual for the industry. Activision is essentially enforcing a "business over value" policy on them. 

 

As someone who's been a fan of Blizz for about 25 years now (starting with WarCraft 1), I wish all the old crew + the best of the new fans would team up in a new, smaller company, and just start making quality-focused games again. 

[Giganthrax]

On 11/26/2018 at 4:37 PM, fasauceome said:

I think that's true, but I'm speaking more to the overwatch side of things, where there's a huge impetus to get loot boxes by the hundreds

What are you talking about? What impetus? It's just cosmetics in those lootboxes. 

 

It's the best of both worlds for the regular player, tbh. Idiots buy tons of cosmetic lootboxes, which have no effect on your game whatsoever, yet their money funds the game that you play and enjoy. Why would you be against that?

[Fasauceome]

2 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

What are you talking about? What impetus? It's just cosmetics in those lootboxes. 

 

It's the best of both worlds for the regular player, tbh. Idiots buy tons of cosmetic lootboxes, which have no effect on your game whatsoever, yet their money funds the game that you play and enjoy. Why would you be against that?

The impetus is created by the trill of the opening. They give you loot boxes for normal play and advertise new skins on the main menu, and hook you on the excitement, same as gambling. It's the exact same as advertising for real world products. Although I truly believe that if there must be loot boxes, at least they're not gameplay changing. Not that I think blizzard doesn't work for their money, but loot boxes make such immense amounts of money for such a throwaway, basic practice.

[FIXXX]

If you make easy money there's little impetus to be better at what you do creatively.

And if you're pushed by shareholders to do more money next quarter - would you do creative work - the same work you avoided doing? Or would you double-down on the same cash cows?.

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, FIXXX said:

If you make easy money there's little impetus to be better at what you do creatively.

Kind of, at least I definitely see that with call of duty, a passionless franchise made out of microtransactions will other blizzard properties follow suit? Time will tell.

[Giganthrax]

2 hours ago, fasauceome said:

The impetus is created by the trill of the opening. They give you loot boxes for normal play and advertise new skins on the main menu, and hook you on the excitement, same as gambling. It's the exact same as advertising for real world products. Although I truly believe that if there must be loot boxes, at least they're not gameplay changing. Not that I think blizzard doesn't work for their money, but loot boxes make such immense amounts of money for such a throwaway, basic practice.

A fool and his money are easily separated. That's how it's supposed to be. 

 

Also, the only thing Overwatch lootboxes and gambling have in common is that they're both based on RNG. Actual gambling hooks you in by dangling extremely lucrative rewards in front of your nose. Overwatch lootboxes give you some skins and voice lines that you can get by normal play anyway.

 

Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm are free to play, and they still enable you to get everything without paying a dime. Lootboxes there are fine because the devs have to make money somehow. 

 

It's not the company's fault if someone's parents haven't taught them impulse control. 

[Guest]

It’s like you don’t know that world of Warcraft is a subscription game with micro transactions and top on twitch. 

 

Blizzard is fine. Not to mention overwatch going strong still & everyone playing hearthstone on the toilet. As someone mentioned, activision and blizzard are the same company and activision not only makes call of duty but also candy crush: everyone over 35 years old’s favourite game. 

 

Whatever drama you heard about and want to amp up is redicilous. Diablo immortals isn’t the end of the company. Black ops not having campaign is not the end of the company. These are Fortune 500 companies. They know how to run a stable business and take several sizeable hits. (Of which they hadn’t experienced.)

[J.b091]

To be honest I never liked them. From their games I was playing only Hearthstone which is free & liked it very much, but that game doesn't support 21:9 aspect ratio. I messaged them on Facebook several times about this issue. They completely ignored it. They didn't even bother to respond. However they were (probably still are) quite active there, posting new posts. I posted comment there too on their new posts, but again ignore. Checked their forum about 21:9 aspect ratio support request & not a single word about it from devs. After giving up on this & accepting that there won't be support for it, several months ago, I decided to request feature option: to permanently disable emotes. Game only had (and probably still has) ability to disable them manually on every match starting. Why I wanted to disable them? Because there are some kind of players in game where they mock on you with those emotes, they do it especially before winning with stupid emote like "hello". It's very frustrating sometimes when you lost 3-4 matches and on the top you get mocking. All I wanted just to disable this feature permanently. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be so hard for them to add it in options. Again I tried to reach Blizzard about this feature request and guess what - again complete IGNORING! Not even a single answer. So Blizzard are one of those companies who ignore people, doesn't bother to even answer. I have no respect to such company. I quit playing that game & currently enjoying other games from better developers, who at least answer to your replies.