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Vivendi Games bought them in the late 90s and started trading long-term quality for results. Blizzard North, Diablo creators, were laid off due to slow developm

Vivendi Games bought them in the late 90s and started trading long-term quality for results. Blizzard North, Diablo creators, were laid off due to slow development of D3 in 2005. Insiders say that the culture shifted slowly towards business and away from caring about games per se. Blizzard's big thing was that they'd innovate and build without fear of costs, famously canceling numerous games (Titan, eg) with no ROI because they felt it just wasn't right. In 2008, Activision bought Vivendi and took Blizzard along with them. For a while now we've just been seeing the long-term effects of those shorter-term profitability policies. It's sad, but it kind of happened a long time ago.

deleted 7y ago
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Fnoord 7y ago
People say the same about WoW. After WotLK (2008-2010 era being WotLK) it went downhill. ArenaNet/NCSoft's Guild Wars 2 consists of former Blizzard employees. Then there's Max Schaefer's Runic Games with Torchlight (2). They went poof a while ago though. Blizzard/Activision are still very profitable (record this year), yet what they come up with is Diablo mobile (reskin by a Chinese company, of the infamous quote "don't you guys have phones?"), and fired a lot of employees.
crummy 7y ago
For what it's worth, Blizzard still seems to be doing the build-half-a-game-then-cancel it thing. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/report-blizzard-began-making-then-canceled-a-starcraft-first-person-shooter/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/report-blizzard-began...
- vntx 7y ago
  A Battlefield-like Starcraft FPS pitting you as a Terran marine against a Zerg invasion? That would have been cool.