- Blizzards slew of beloved franchises makes it easy to entrap nostalgia addicted masses to a number of pay to win clones. Or slowly implement these types of features into existing games.
- Half of the assets are from a 10 year old prequel. This game was cheap to make and will have an insanely high profit margin. Leading to perpetuation of this model.
- Scummy mobile pay to win is already accepted as the standard for mobile. With a desktop port, Blizzard can expand that complacency to further markets.
- Pay to Win models incentivize paid content over legitimate, engaging content. I.e. story, character models and gameplay will deteriorate overtime in favor of producing content that turns profit.
I don't think its inevitable and I don't think it's a good long term monetization strategy. It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking. Maybe they do and also want to milk it today instead of tomorrow just like the C-suite. Yes, exploitative mobile gaming is profitable as hell - but in the current world is alienating your extremely loyal (and higher earning) fan-base worth it?
Either way, it's a shame and a waste of a lot of really great IP that will be buried alive when the coffin that is Blizzard is lowered into the ground.
> It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking.
I wonder if milking the company's reputation like this perhaps actually is the most optimal strategy for Blizzard. Innovation requires investment and luck, and it can create a great reputation for a brand. Once you have that reputation though, perhaps it's not rational to try your luck again. Maybe the expectation value is highest if you just sell out.
It's not just Blizzard, see e.g. the twelfth installment of Assassin's Creed or the eighteenth installment of Call of Duty. For that matter, it's not even just video games. Look at the tenth Fast & Furious movie or the fifteenth iPhone that are coming out soon, and will surely sell like crazy, even though they'll probably not be very innovative.
Of those listed I've only played Hearthstone and Clash Royale. I reached top rank in Clash Royale, and I believe I only spent 5 dollars on it to get a neat looking board to play on - so I don't think they generate quite the ill-will that a legendary PC competitive game developer like Blizzard generates when they produce something much worse than most existing (at least in the west) mobile free to play games.
My point isn't that these sorts of games aren't profitable - it's that they should have spun up a new studio with a new name instead of lighting the good will of a 25+ year IP that's held so dearly on fire.
Blizzard is close to being a zombie company, the last game with true Blizzard pedigree was probably around 15 years ago, their last decent game was almost 10 years ago, they are milking the last few drops from the geriatric cash cow that is WoW, they have completely failed to capitalize on competitive games with Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm or even WoW arena, and they are all languishing, Diablo Immortal is a mobile p2w game, while all they have to look forward to is Overwatch 2 which is a glorified patch and if Diablo 4 isn't some smash success they have nothing else.
Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.
Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game has basically been stagnant for years, waiting for Overwatch 2 (which was recently teased and didn't appear to change much) while other games like Valorant or Apex have made it largely irrelevant in that space.
All you said is true, but now you're shifting goal posts. You previously said Blizzard's last 'decent' game was 10 years ago, not the last game that was 'basically a pillar in the gaming wold'.
While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguably brought the modern hero shooter genre to mainstream popularity and caused a flood of similar games to follow it. You're right, nowadays there are more popular games in that genre, but at the time it was quite a novel concept.
Since you said 10 years since the last 'decent' game from Blizzard, I assume you referred to Diablo 3. I wonder, by what metric is Diablo 3 a decent game and Overwatch isn't?
The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.
Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.
Under the context of industry impact, yes. If you wish to be pedantic, maybe I should have been clearer in saying that I consider everything past vanilla WoW to not be of the same caliber of the games that preceded it. Regardless, the point is that they are a shadow of their former self.
I think inevitably, the labs will make something, "close enough to meat". Then corporations will strip that down to the most cost effective model of that "meat". This will be sold to consumers as "green meat" or something that gives them the impression they're saving the world. The body will struggle with the amalgamation. Probably worse than a McNugget. Because even though a McNugget is filled with junk, there's still some meat (probably?).
Some disease will arrise in society that is obviously caused by consuming X "meat". And lobbyist will make sure that the public never knows.
Then we will have a massive diseased population. That a "health" industry will thrive on "marginally" treating the diseased.
Wait a second. This sounds like what we already have. Carry on.
Every time I see a job listing with Unlimited PTO, theres always some accompanying verbiage that makes it sound a lot like that unlimited PTO will be unavailable.
I am unfamiliar with Robin Hobb, but I thoroughly enjoyed this short read. Now I see that she has books and she may have inspired me to get back into reading books.
I usually check the rating. If its 4-5 stars, then I will proceed to reading a few 5 stars, and a few 1 stars. You can usually tell if the reviews are real and this also helps you decide if the negatives matter to you.
I bought a vaccuum recently and did this process. One of the 1 star reviews was something to the effect of, "this vacuum sucks too hard. Its a workout to use". I have 2 huskies and a sea of fur to contend with, so this 1 star was a 5 star to me.
Sure can! I contributed on this project a few months ago. Hoping to use it soon on a project.
I implemented a portion of crud with a vuejs app. It's a pretty neat setup. Just authorize with OAuth2 and then if you have permissions youre good to go!
Yeah! Front end apps can skip the server and get data from the db directly. There's OAuth2 setup and you can authorize users to have crud access to tables, or even a granular as rows.
- Blizzards slew of beloved franchises makes it easy to entrap nostalgia addicted masses to a number of pay to win clones. Or slowly implement these types of features into existing games.
- Half of the assets are from a 10 year old prequel. This game was cheap to make and will have an insanely high profit margin. Leading to perpetuation of this model.
- Scummy mobile pay to win is already accepted as the standard for mobile. With a desktop port, Blizzard can expand that complacency to further markets.
- Pay to Win models incentivize paid content over legitimate, engaging content. I.e. story, character models and gameplay will deteriorate overtime in favor of producing content that turns profit.
This is inevitable though.