14 ms·

Activision Blizzard staff reportedly bracing for layoffs

100 points by Reedx 8y ago

bhouston 8y ago
A lot of the air in the games industry is being sucked out by Fortnite. Indirectly this is the cause of these layouts. Fortnite directly completes against Overwatch and it is taking away time that gamers would otherwise spent on other A/B titles.
- Techonomicon 8y ago
  Damn, that's one bold statement with pretty much no proof that is the case. Activision / Blizzard obviously realizes that fortnite is doing well, and could ramp up development on some new future competitor, why would fortnite be a reason to cause layoffs? They could react in a slew of ways to combat the issue, layoffs simply put them in a position where they can't attack. There are layoffs in the game industry because there are always layoffs in the game industry. Ramp up when starting a game, hiring through building it, firing after it's out and stable and at a cadence when you don't need all those silly game makers to just keep the ball rolling.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >There are layoffs in the game industry because there are always layoffs in the game industry. Ramp up when starting a game, hiring through building it, firing after it's out and stable and at a cadence when you don't need all those silly game makers to just keep the ball rolling. If you've been paying attention then you know there is far more than ramping up and back down at play right now in Blizzard.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Fortnite is eating their (and many others') lunch, yes, but Activision/Blizzard is a very different entity than what most pre-Activision fans remember. Blizzard is still massively profitable... but it's not enough. Profits are the sole driving force now and I think we're going to see a rapid decline in quality from Blizzard (we have already to some extent.) Don't get me wrong, I get the realities at play here, but Blizzard was a better company (for consumers) before Activision and when Activision was acting more as a partner than a corporate overlord. Many of the stories coming out from ex employees are disheartening. The Diablo fiasco was disheartening, as was the swift cancellation of the competitive HoS league. Blizzard always sold themselves as a "by gamers, for gamers" company, and they were for a long time. That doesn't appear to be the case any longer.
- nerdjon 8y ago
  I feel like blaming Fortnite for this is a stretch. When there has just been a noticeable decrease in quality of Blizzard games since they have merged. - Heroes tried to to cash in on the loot box craze and from what I have seen has been very negative - Diablo has basically been ignored except for their mobile app (which went on to hurt Blizzard's reputation and just strengthen a competing game, Path of Exile) On the Activision side, there were reports that a good portion of this could be tied to support staff for Destiny 2 no longer being needed. Overwatch seems to actually be doing pretty well, and I would not be surprised if it was the only team not affected by layoffs.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Whoa there. Heroes of the Storm has, by far, hands down, the best loot box model in the industry. I'm still irritated Overwatch doesn't use it yet. And please, tell everyone you know in the game industry to steal the monetization model from Heroes. If Heroes is a failure, it's because it doesn't behave badly to try to make you spend money. Heroes hands out loot boxes like candy, I'd say you'll get three or four times as many as Overwatch. And then Heroes also adds a reroll mechanic, where for a trivial gold (currency from doing matches and in-game quests) amount, you can reroll the box up to three times. And as with Overwatch, of course, loot boxes are cosmetics only (except for the very rare hero unlock, which most people aren't getting via loot boxes anyways). I've rarely been dissatisfied with a Heroes lootbox because I can reroll it until it's good, and I've always gotten so many Heroes lootboxes I've never even felt the drive to buy any. And then in addition to the ability to use your duplicate currency to forge the exact cosmetics you want, Heroes is going to re-add direct cash purchase for all skins, so you don't need to buy loot boxes to buy skins. I've bought a number of skins over the years, but never paid for a loot box. Probably the "best" way to spend money on Heroes if you want to (though you have really no reason you have to), is you can get stim packs to increase your XP (no in-game benefit) and gold generation.
    - jrockway 8y ago
      I've never been dissatisfied by Overwatch loot boxes. If I play an average amount I usually get every item. If I don't play I don't get any items. Seems fair.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  Ironically Apex Legends just released as a direct Fortnite competitor and is doing really well post-launch, winning over a large portion of the Twitch community and attracting non-BR players to the game mode.
- zamalek 8y ago
  > Indirectly this is the cause of these layouts. "Don't you have phones?" Blizzard has been struggling to connect with fans for longer than Fortnite co-op has been a thing. There are some prior employees who have been quite vocal about the situation: they simply don't know to continue printing money without upsetting their fans. The merger with Activision was a very strong signal: how does it make any sense that a beloved publisher that is known for innovative games team up with a publisher who pushes out the same games every year? The straw is a mobile game while everyone was waiting for the next PC (and potentially console) launch. "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes." Then consider EA, everyone's pet hate (for good reason). Here's a company that has been testing gamers in terms of micro-transactions for years. With Apex, not only have they earned a lot of trust by following Epic's lead, they have put out a title that is genuinely fun and innovative [in the space]. They are listening to the market. > A lot of the air in the games industry is being sucked out by Fortnite. There are currently 317K viewers of Apex on Twitch and 108K Fortnite. This clearly isn't true. There's plenty of air to be had. I'm venturing off-topic here, but the problem with Overwatch is that it's team-based competitive; that attracts a certain type of player-base. If you don't play the ladder (in a year I had about 6 hours total in that toxic hell hole), good luck finding games without quitters. If Blizzard put out a decent Diablo 4, or Starcraft 3, I can almost guarantee they'd find a lot of room to breathe, but a mobile ARPG/HnS was printing money in Asia, so we have that.
- hnick 8y ago
  Fortnite has funded my free copies of Subnautica and Axiom Verge from the Epic store so that's a win for me.
coding123 8y ago
I play ESO. Seems like I am constantly chatting with people how to do things and how it's different than WoW. I think the big thing that changed over the 4/5 years it took to finally break into that audience was stability and content and the sharding system. With how ESO places everyone in a megaserver, a lot of WoW fans actually had to back step from time to time from their originally chosen shard because they would be the only one online. And on top of all that, it's free to play after you buy the base game.
- ___alt 8y ago
  From what I see, Blizzard is slowly rolling out everything they need to eventually get rid of realms entirely as separate technical entities. Cross-realms features are everywhere, the concept of PvP servers is no more, and if they manage to upgrade the auction house system to something more global, realms will be mere namespaces and players will be able to seamlessly play with all other players from their region.
  - MrMember 8y ago
    Cross-realm guilds would be a big one. I was in a mythic progression raiding guild during Legion and recruiting was always a mess. I didn't play on one of the "top" servers for raiding and there just weren't enough quality players to go around. You'd have a handful of solid guilds at the top and everyone else would struggle to complete a tier before the next tier came out. And then in the middle of the expansion when player counts drop it got even more difficult to recruit. If you made the mistake of creating all your characters on a "dead" server you'd be looking at several hundred dollars at least to transfer them all. Cross-realm guilds are a long time coming.
    - ___alt 8y ago
      Yes, I didn't mention it in my post because I think the auction house and the underlying economy issues are going to be the hardest part in making everything cross-realm, but cross-realms guilds are highly desirable. Your arguments are on point.
- 8y ago
lapnitnelav 8y ago
Looks like being / going "mobile" is the new thing @ Blizzard.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  I mean... don't you guy have phones?
  - Shivetya 8y ago
    Many of us know the meme, the important take from it is how tone deaf Activision and Blizzard have been with regards to their fans across different franchises and platforms. The don't you guys have phones meme is direct response to the Blizzcon announcement that the next Diablo was going to be a mobile game not even produced by Blizzard. The reaction of the product team at Blizzard really came off as aghast followed by incredulous that the fans reacted so negatively and harshly as a whole. They so missed the boat with what the fans were expecting it makes you wonder, just who were they listening too? Activision's problem was taking the loot box and in game transaction model too far and embedding too deeply into franchises that were not accustomed to it if not openly hostile to it. that many of the purchases looked like or were portrayed as pay to win did not help. Where is the industry going? I certainly don't know and not knowing I don't have an opinion to offer on that subject. The opinion I do offer is that perhaps it doesn't know where its fans think it should be going and some franchises are at cult levels of fandom
    - duskwuff 8y ago
      > The don't you guys have phones meme is direct response to the Blizzcon announcement that the next Diablo was going to be a mobile game not even produced by Blizzard. I mean, it isn't just a meme. A Blizzard representative literally said "Do you guys not have phones?" during a Q&A session, after someone asked whether the new Diablo game would be available on PC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QRgpjfarY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QRgpjfarY Fans were going to be disappointed either way, but this dismissive response is what really set off the reaction.
  - 8y ago
notTyler 8y ago
I don't really know if it's rose colored glasses but as a lifelong gamer it really sucks to see gaming as an industry become more and more focused around ROI rather than shipping quality games. The latest Call of Duty and Red Dead games both shipped without microtransactions so it wouldn't affect their review scores. Call of Duty in particular has an absurd amount of them, pay to win mechanics (in Zombies), and the battle pass is so grindy that you either have to no-life or pay (more) money to get to the end. This is from a game that shipped with a 50 dollar season pass. All of this on top of the fact that since CoD is a yearly franchise anything you purchase basically disappears if you get next year's iteration. It's like, no sane game developer that loves making games enough to put up with the industry would ship a game like this. Someone ran the numbers and said we can make x$ more if we make the grind harder. I don't want to get into the narrative that the bean counters are ruining Blizzard because I honestly don't know if it's the case. All the restructured staff from Heroes have been rumored to be working on D4. Hearthstone is hearthstone. WoW, I don't know. Overwatch is still getting regular content updates and I would expect it to go F2P soon. I think some gamers have been a tad chicken little about changes at Blizzard, but Activision is so far gone that I refuse to buy any of their games.
- sl1ck731 8y ago
  I think they just lost the ability to be innovative. They had some real creative minds at the helm that got replaced by "business" people. Kind of like Steve Jobs being replaced. Blizzard was based on this cool innovative stuff and when the people who lived for it were gone they had no connection to their community anymore. In terms of calculating grind, that was the big thing with WoW when I left a month after the latest expansion dropped. It was just so clear that the rails of the theme park ride you were on were designed to milk you. I mean all games by anyone not releasing them freely are intended to make some kind of money, but once I purchase it you better be very subtle about it. Basically all they are doing is rehashing old games now as well.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Grind is really difficult to get right, outside of how long it takes. They stopped publishing subscription numbers, but it’s clear WoW subscriptions have fallen dramatically over time. Personally, the Warlords of Draenor mission grind was interesting for a little while, but completely killed my interest in the franchise. Which I think is a central issue for long running games, you can drive people away vastly easier than you can pull them back. The long term economics of video games is therefore tough, as surviving to tomorrow often means driving people away forever.
ilovecaching 8y ago
Question for game developers, has innovation been stifled by the the bar being raised for making a AAA game? I assume making a game like Spyro or Diablo took a lot of time and effort, but I'm wondering if the increasing demand for high end graphics and extremely rich environments has raised the bar too high?
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  Yes, and it's a linear effort that compounds making asset development in particular much more expensive. For instance, if you have 300 major assets in a game, and one of them takes a sizable percentage of time more to create, this compounds for the entire collection of assets, making your development that much more expensive.
- szggzs27 8y ago
  Yes, graphics may hamper the gameplay experience, but only if you don't have a good enough machine to run the game. If you mean that gaming companies only focus on the `looks` and not the actual gameplay, then I agree. Games are designed to grab as much cash from kids and adults alike, with things like loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes. There is little focus on developing a community, and diminishing focus on shipping an actually good product. Today's games by Blizzard can not even hold a candle to names like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 or even Starcraft.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
  Absolutely. Graphics get gamers. The lesson learned by Nintendo with the Wii’s prev-gen graphics has not been forgotten by the games industry. When crispy photorealistic graphics set the standard, you either have to expensively match the industry or go cartoonish to smooth over the rough edges. The golden era of gaming was during the PS2. Not only did it have unprecedented market penetration, but the hardware was both advanced enough to make decent 3D games while not being so powerful that a few deep-pocketed studios could make stunning graphics that blew the completion out of the water. Those days are long gone. On one end of the spectrum you have the indie market, which uses retro designs to make up for the lack of asset designers (think Rogue Legacy or Shovel Knight), or you have the massive AAA developers that dominate ad-spaces. Anything in between (~PS2 graphics) isn’t taken seriously. So it’s either indie or AAA. No middle ground anymore.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
It sucks that hard working people lose their job due to decisions made by the money people. Micro transactions are destroying the industry. Unfinished games being shipped are destroying the industry. Shitty online play is destroying the industry. These things are not up to a developer. I havnt bought a brand new game in the last few years. Instead I just wait and buy the finished version a year later for half the price that included all the DLC on steam. If the game shipped in a good state and DLC became a thing of the past I might think about buying games at full price again. But it doesnt look like that's going to happen anytime soon.
izzydata 8y ago
This might have been inevitable despite their mistakes. I get the feeling that giant AAA titles are becoming less economical compared to the cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy indie titles that come out every single day. There will always be a place for massive games, but gambling with 100 million dollars is much more difficult than 100 thousand dollars. Smaller studios can much more quickly try out new ideas without potential losses.
ashelmire 8y ago
They mention the poor sales of the latest Destiny 2 expansion. I enjoyed Destiny 2. It's a great game. But I didn't have much reason to keep playing after finishing the storyline. I did, for a time, continue playing and beating the various events and multiplayer variants. But once you run through each event once, there's not much point to grinding. It's not like grinding crucible is really that interesting, compared to Overwatch where there's far more variety in gameplay. And the first expansion felt pretty... empty. It had what, a few hours of (very repetitive) gameplay for $35? That feels like a bad deal. I get it, there's a lot of visual and aesthetic content. But that doesn't keep gamers coming back. Buying a second expansion would just feel bad after that.
protoster 8y ago
I feel like I'm the only one who made peace with Blizzard dying as we knew it shortly after Activision acquisition. They sold out, this happens all the time. Everyone else seems to be clinging on to "old Blizzard" like it's an ex they can't leave behind.
- wsc981 8y ago
  I’m with you, but at the same time happy Blizzard will release WoW Classic this summer. Some good old quality gaming.
  - protoster 8y ago
    Activision will release WoW classic, not Blizzard.
sadris 8y ago
Turns out hiring people based on things other than merit results in your quality of product dropping as the quality of employees drop. It's a shame.
wpdev_63 8y ago
Blizzard is one of the most competent developers out there. They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly polished. Right now the game market is getting eaten by these f2p games(fortnite, lol, etc) and they haven't found a space to expand into. If there's one place I feel blizzard could innovate in would be in a star citizen like game. Imagine an epic mmo game that had the expanse of no man's sky, the economy of eve online, and the shooter mechanics of overwatch. It would be an massive undertaking but there's definitely a massive market there as you can see with star citizen.
- ianleeclark 8y ago
  > They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly You and I know two completely different companies then. World of Warcraft BFA is, anecdotally, causing players to hemorrhage, and the only reason I have to report this anecdotally is because Blizzard stopped reporting their subscriber numbers after hemorrhaging players for boring and bad content. BFA was incredibly buggy and not even a half-finished game when released. Their development process feels spreadsheet-driven and concerned primarily with keeping their subcount high through tedious content which takes long amounts of time, rather than keeping their subcount high with quality content that keeps the playerbase engaged.
PopsiclePete 8y ago
Here I was, eagerly ready to drop $60 on a new Diablo, but no, I have to endure cartoony multiplayer "Battle Royale" crap, because all gamers are spastic high schoolers I guess? The only way Blizzard can sink lower is if their next game is a multi-player only zombie survival + shooter + crafting DayZ wanna be. Because it's what all the kids are raving about on twitch? Screw it, I'll give my money to indie studios, they can still deliver.

100 points by Reedx 8y ago

A lot of the air in the games industry is being sucked out by Fortnite. Indirectly this is the cause of these layouts. Fortnite directly completes against Overwatch and it is taking away time that gamers would otherwise spent on other A/B titles.

Techonomicon 8y ago
Damn, that's one bold statement with pretty much no proof that is the case. Activision / Blizzard obviously realizes that fortnite is doing well, and could ramp up development on some new future competitor, why would fortnite be a reason to cause layoffs? They could react in a slew of ways to combat the issue, layoffs simply put them in a position where they can't attack. There are layoffs in the game industry because there are always layoffs in the game industry. Ramp up when starting a game, hiring through building it, firing after it's out and stable and at a cadence when you don't need all those silly game makers to just keep the ball rolling.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >There are layoffs in the game industry because there are always layoffs in the game industry. Ramp up when starting a game, hiring through building it, firing after it's out and stable and at a cadence when you don't need all those silly game makers to just keep the ball rolling. If you've been paying attention then you know there is far more than ramping up and back down at play right now in Blizzard.
EpicEng 8y ago
Fortnite is eating their (and many others') lunch, yes, but Activision/Blizzard is a very different entity than what most pre-Activision fans remember. Blizzard is still massively profitable... but it's not enough. Profits are the sole driving force now and I think we're going to see a rapid decline in quality from Blizzard (we have already to some extent.) Don't get me wrong, I get the realities at play here, but Blizzard was a better company (for consumers) before Activision and when Activision was acting more as a partner than a corporate overlord. Many of the stories coming out from ex employees are disheartening. The Diablo fiasco was disheartening, as was the swift cancellation of the competitive HoS league. Blizzard always sold themselves as a "by gamers, for gamers" company, and they were for a long time. That doesn't appear to be the case any longer.
nerdjon 8y ago
I feel like blaming Fortnite for this is a stretch. When there has just been a noticeable decrease in quality of Blizzard games since they have merged. - Heroes tried to to cash in on the loot box craze and from what I have seen has been very negative - Diablo has basically been ignored except for their mobile app (which went on to hurt Blizzard's reputation and just strengthen a competing game, Path of Exile) On the Activision side, there were reports that a good portion of this could be tied to support staff for Destiny 2 no longer being needed. Overwatch seems to actually be doing pretty well, and I would not be surprised if it was the only team not affected by layoffs.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Whoa there. Heroes of the Storm has, by far, hands down, the best loot box model in the industry. I'm still irritated Overwatch doesn't use it yet. And please, tell everyone you know in the game industry to steal the monetization model from Heroes. If Heroes is a failure, it's because it doesn't behave badly to try to make you spend money. Heroes hands out loot boxes like candy, I'd say you'll get three or four times as many as Overwatch. And then Heroes also adds a reroll mechanic, where for a trivial gold (currency from doing matches and in-game quests) amount, you can reroll the box up to three times. And as with Overwatch, of course, loot boxes are cosmetics only (except for the very rare hero unlock, which most people aren't getting via loot boxes anyways). I've rarely been dissatisfied with a Heroes lootbox because I can reroll it until it's good, and I've always gotten so many Heroes lootboxes I've never even felt the drive to buy any. And then in addition to the ability to use your duplicate currency to forge the exact cosmetics you want, Heroes is going to re-add direct cash purchase for all skins, so you don't need to buy loot boxes to buy skins. I've bought a number of skins over the years, but never paid for a loot box. Probably the "best" way to spend money on Heroes if you want to (though you have really no reason you have to), is you can get stim packs to increase your XP (no in-game benefit) and gold generation.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    I've never been dissatisfied by Overwatch loot boxes. If I play an average amount I usually get every item. If I don't play I don't get any items. Seems fair.
ben_jones 8y ago
Ironically Apex Legends just released as a direct Fortnite competitor and is doing really well post-launch, winning over a large portion of the Twitch community and attracting non-BR players to the game mode.
zamalek 8y ago
> Indirectly this is the cause of these layouts. "Don't you have phones?" Blizzard has been struggling to connect with fans for longer than Fortnite co-op has been a thing. There are some prior employees who have been quite vocal about the situation: they simply don't know to continue printing money without upsetting their fans. The merger with Activision was a very strong signal: how does it make any sense that a beloved publisher that is known for innovative games team up with a publisher who pushes out the same games every year? The straw is a mobile game while everyone was waiting for the next PC (and potentially console) launch. "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes." Then consider EA, everyone's pet hate (for good reason). Here's a company that has been testing gamers in terms of micro-transactions for years. With Apex, not only have they earned a lot of trust by following Epic's lead, they have put out a title that is genuinely fun and innovative [in the space]. They are listening to the market. > A lot of the air in the games industry is being sucked out by Fortnite. There are currently 317K viewers of Apex on Twitch and 108K Fortnite. This clearly isn't true. There's plenty of air to be had. I'm venturing off-topic here, but the problem with Overwatch is that it's team-based competitive; that attracts a certain type of player-base. If you don't play the ladder (in a year I had about 6 hours total in that toxic hell hole), good luck finding games without quitters. If Blizzard put out a decent Diablo 4, or Starcraft 3, I can almost guarantee they'd find a lot of room to breathe, but a mobile ARPG/HnS was printing money in Asia, so we have that.
hnick 8y ago
Fortnite has funded my free copies of Subnautica and Axiom Verge from the Epic store so that's a win for me.

coding123 8y ago

I play ESO. Seems like I am constantly chatting with people how to do things and how it's different than WoW. I think the big thing that changed over the 4/5 years it took to finally break into that audience was stability and content and the sharding system. With how ESO places everyone in a megaserver, a lot of WoW fans actually had to back step from time to time from their originally chosen shard because they would be the only one online. And on top of all that, it's free to play after you buy the base game.

___alt 8y ago
From what I see, Blizzard is slowly rolling out everything they need to eventually get rid of realms entirely as separate technical entities. Cross-realms features are everywhere, the concept of PvP servers is no more, and if they manage to upgrade the auction house system to something more global, realms will be mere namespaces and players will be able to seamlessly play with all other players from their region.
- MrMember 8y ago
  Cross-realm guilds would be a big one. I was in a mythic progression raiding guild during Legion and recruiting was always a mess. I didn't play on one of the "top" servers for raiding and there just weren't enough quality players to go around. You'd have a handful of solid guilds at the top and everyone else would struggle to complete a tier before the next tier came out. And then in the middle of the expansion when player counts drop it got even more difficult to recruit. If you made the mistake of creating all your characters on a "dead" server you'd be looking at several hundred dollars at least to transfer them all. Cross-realm guilds are a long time coming.
  - ___alt 8y ago
    Yes, I didn't mention it in my post because I think the auction house and the underlying economy issues are going to be the hardest part in making everything cross-realm, but cross-realms guilds are highly desirable. Your arguments are on point.
8y ago

lapnitnelav 8y ago

Looks like being / going "mobile" is the new thing @ Blizzard.

seattle_spring 8y ago
I mean... don't you guy have phones?
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Many of us know the meme, the important take from it is how tone deaf Activision and Blizzard have been with regards to their fans across different franchises and platforms. The don't you guys have phones meme is direct response to the Blizzcon announcement that the next Diablo was going to be a mobile game not even produced by Blizzard. The reaction of the product team at Blizzard really came off as aghast followed by incredulous that the fans reacted so negatively and harshly as a whole. They so missed the boat with what the fans were expecting it makes you wonder, just who were they listening too? Activision's problem was taking the loot box and in game transaction model too far and embedding too deeply into franchises that were not accustomed to it if not openly hostile to it. that many of the purchases looked like or were portrayed as pay to win did not help. Where is the industry going? I certainly don't know and not knowing I don't have an opinion to offer on that subject. The opinion I do offer is that perhaps it doesn't know where its fans think it should be going and some franchises are at cult levels of fandom
  - duskwuff 8y ago
    > The don't you guys have phones meme is direct response to the Blizzcon announcement that the next Diablo was going to be a mobile game not even produced by Blizzard. I mean, it isn't just a meme. A Blizzard representative literally said "Do you guys not have phones?" during a Q&A session, after someone asked whether the new Diablo game would be available on PC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QRgpjfarY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5QRgpjfarY Fans were going to be disappointed either way, but this dismissive response is what really set off the reaction.
- 8y ago

notTyler 8y ago

I don't really know if it's rose colored glasses but as a lifelong gamer it really sucks to see gaming as an industry become more and more focused around ROI rather than shipping quality games. The latest Call of Duty and Red Dead games both shipped without microtransactions so it wouldn't affect their review scores. Call of Duty in particular has an absurd amount of them, pay to win mechanics (in Zombies), and the battle pass is so grindy that you either have to no-life or pay (more) money to get to the end. This is from a game that shipped with a 50 dollar season pass. All of this on top of the fact that since CoD is a yearly franchise anything you purchase basically disappears if you get next year's iteration. It's like, no sane game developer that loves making games enough to put up with the industry would ship a game like this. Someone ran the numbers and said we can make x$ more if we make the grind harder. I don't want to get into the narrative that the bean counters are ruining Blizzard because I honestly don't know if it's the case. All the restructured staff from Heroes have been rumored to be working on D4. Hearthstone is hearthstone. WoW, I don't know. Overwatch is still getting regular content updates and I would expect it to go F2P soon. I think some gamers have been a tad chicken little about changes at Blizzard, but Activision is so far gone that I refuse to buy any of their games.

sl1ck731 8y ago
I think they just lost the ability to be innovative. They had some real creative minds at the helm that got replaced by "business" people. Kind of like Steve Jobs being replaced. Blizzard was based on this cool innovative stuff and when the people who lived for it were gone they had no connection to their community anymore. In terms of calculating grind, that was the big thing with WoW when I left a month after the latest expansion dropped. It was just so clear that the rails of the theme park ride you were on were designed to milk you. I mean all games by anyone not releasing them freely are intended to make some kind of money, but once I purchase it you better be very subtle about it. Basically all they are doing is rehashing old games now as well.
- Retric 8y ago
  Grind is really difficult to get right, outside of how long it takes. They stopped publishing subscription numbers, but it’s clear WoW subscriptions have fallen dramatically over time. Personally, the Warlords of Draenor mission grind was interesting for a little while, but completely killed my interest in the franchise. Which I think is a central issue for long running games, you can drive people away vastly easier than you can pull them back. The long term economics of video games is therefore tough, as surviving to tomorrow often means driving people away forever.

ilovecaching 8y ago

Question for game developers, has innovation been stifled by the the bar being raised for making a AAA game? I assume making a game like Spyro or Diablo took a lot of time and effort, but I'm wondering if the increasing demand for high end graphics and extremely rich environments has raised the bar too high?

andrewmcwatters 8y ago
Yes, and it's a linear effort that compounds making asset development in particular much more expensive. For instance, if you have 300 major assets in a game, and one of them takes a sizable percentage of time more to create, this compounds for the entire collection of assets, making your development that much more expensive.
szggzs27 8y ago
Yes, graphics may hamper the gameplay experience, but only if you don't have a good enough machine to run the game. If you mean that gaming companies only focus on the `looks` and not the actual gameplay, then I agree. Games are designed to grab as much cash from kids and adults alike, with things like loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes. There is little focus on developing a community, and diminishing focus on shipping an actually good product. Today's games by Blizzard can not even hold a candle to names like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 or even Starcraft.
rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
Absolutely. Graphics get gamers. The lesson learned by Nintendo with the Wii’s prev-gen graphics has not been forgotten by the games industry. When crispy photorealistic graphics set the standard, you either have to expensively match the industry or go cartoonish to smooth over the rough edges. The golden era of gaming was during the PS2. Not only did it have unprecedented market penetration, but the hardware was both advanced enough to make decent 3D games while not being so powerful that a few deep-pocketed studios could make stunning graphics that blew the completion out of the water. Those days are long gone. On one end of the spectrum you have the indie market, which uses retro designs to make up for the lack of asset designers (think Rogue Legacy or Shovel Knight), or you have the massive AAA developers that dominate ad-spaces. Anything in between (~PS2 graphics) isn’t taken seriously. So it’s either indie or AAA. No middle ground anymore.

Taylor_OD 8y ago

It sucks that hard working people lose their job due to decisions made by the money people. Micro transactions are destroying the industry. Unfinished games being shipped are destroying the industry. Shitty online play is destroying the industry. These things are not up to a developer. I havnt bought a brand new game in the last few years. Instead I just wait and buy the finished version a year later for half the price that included all the DLC on steam. If the game shipped in a good state and DLC became a thing of the past I might think about buying games at full price again. But it doesnt look like that's going to happen anytime soon.

izzydata 8y ago

This might have been inevitable despite their mistakes. I get the feeling that giant AAA titles are becoming less economical compared to the cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy indie titles that come out every single day. There will always be a place for massive games, but gambling with 100 million dollars is much more difficult than 100 thousand dollars. Smaller studios can much more quickly try out new ideas without potential losses.

ashelmire 8y ago

They mention the poor sales of the latest Destiny 2 expansion. I enjoyed Destiny 2. It's a great game. But I didn't have much reason to keep playing after finishing the storyline. I did, for a time, continue playing and beating the various events and multiplayer variants. But once you run through each event once, there's not much point to grinding. It's not like grinding crucible is really that interesting, compared to Overwatch where there's far more variety in gameplay. And the first expansion felt pretty... empty. It had what, a few hours of (very repetitive) gameplay for $35? That feels like a bad deal. I get it, there's a lot of visual and aesthetic content. But that doesn't keep gamers coming back. Buying a second expansion would just feel bad after that.

protoster 8y ago

I feel like I'm the only one who made peace with Blizzard dying as we knew it shortly after Activision acquisition. They sold out, this happens all the time. Everyone else seems to be clinging on to "old Blizzard" like it's an ex they can't leave behind.

wsc981 8y ago
I’m with you, but at the same time happy Blizzard will release WoW Classic this summer. Some good old quality gaming.
- protoster 8y ago
  Activision will release WoW classic, not Blizzard.

sadris 8y ago

Turns out hiring people based on things other than merit results in your quality of product dropping as the quality of employees drop. It's a shame.

wpdev_63 8y ago

Blizzard is one of the most competent developers out there. They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly polished. Right now the game market is getting eaten by these f2p games(fortnite, lol, etc) and they haven't found a space to expand into. If there's one place I feel blizzard could innovate in would be in a star citizen like game. Imagine an epic mmo game that had the expanse of no man's sky, the economy of eve online, and the shooter mechanics of overwatch. It would be an massive undertaking but there's definitely a massive market there as you can see with star citizen.

ianleeclark 8y ago
> They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly You and I know two completely different companies then. World of Warcraft BFA is, anecdotally, causing players to hemorrhage, and the only reason I have to report this anecdotally is because Blizzard stopped reporting their subscriber numbers after hemorrhaging players for boring and bad content. BFA was incredibly buggy and not even a half-finished game when released. Their development process feels spreadsheet-driven and concerned primarily with keeping their subcount high through tedious content which takes long amounts of time, rather than keeping their subcount high with quality content that keeps the playerbase engaged.

PopsiclePete 8y ago

Here I was, eagerly ready to drop $60 on a new Diablo, but no, I have to endure cartoony multiplayer "Battle Royale" crap, because all gamers are spastic high schoolers I guess? The only way Blizzard can sink lower is if their next game is a multi-player only zombie survival + shooter + crafting DayZ wanna be. Because it's what all the kids are raving about on twitch? Screw it, I'll give my money to indie studios, they can still deliver.