5 ms·

I think this is more of the enthusiasts vs. causal user conundrum. Gaming has made the transition to a mature industry where mass market appeal is more profita

I think this is more of the enthusiasts vs. causal user conundrum. Gaming has made the transition to a mature industry where mass market appeal is more profitable than a great product aimed at enthusiasts. I can't really blame either side. It sucks for enthusiasts who want games that are complex, to be offered a watered down experience full of MTX. But it sucks for studios when they sink a 10xs the money into producing a complex PC game and earn maybe half the revenue.

freshair 6y ago
Brands have value insofar as the consuming public recognize those brands, right? I'd wager that Diablo is most famous for the first two games which both came out 20 years ago, and that the enthusiast segment of the market recognizes this brand more than the casual segment (who, by nature of being casual, know less about historic games.) In the enthusiast/pc segment of the market, Diablo may still be a valuable brand. But in the casual/mobile segment of the market, the Diablo brand is relatively unknown and relatively worthless. Trying to sell games to mobile/casual gamers is fine, but they probably should have invented a new brand for the purpose (like they did with Hearthstone) instead of burning an old brand for little gain.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You'd be surprised at the cache that old IPs have with young people who've never played them before. Young people have still heard about the legendary games from places like YouTube but may not have the capability to play them.
  - ramblerman 6y ago
    > You'd be surprised at the cache that old IPs have with young people who've never played them before. This is obviously what the bliz heads thought, but I doubt it's true tbh. That legendary status lives in our head, and isn't necessarily translated because people hear about it. You can't inject nostalgia by describing it.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Precisely; when consumers think of Diablo, what images conjure up? I expect segments: 1. What's Diablo? 2. Diablo 2 was great! 3. I played Diablo 3 but tired of it...
015a 6y ago
I tend to think that; if you look at the landscape of ultra-successful triple-A game studios, they almost all started with Passion before Money. This seems obvious, but there are examples to the contrary (Zynga, etc). Assassins Creed was a legitimate artistic experience long before Ubisoft began milking it for everything its worth. Stories out of Bungie during the Halo trilogy era paint a picture of a college dorm, filled 24 hours a day with people working because they loved the product; a far cry from the billion dollar delayed outsourced forced-overtime disaster of Infinite (though, to be clear, nothing is all roses). Near every franchise that is worth anything nowadays started in raw, true passion. Its difficult to simply say "Money shouldn't matter", because it absolutely does matter, but when it starts entering into the equation guiding development decisions, the quality of the product will decrease, and over the long term the company will begin making less money from their games. Call of Duty is a great example, which has seen reducing sales every year, until the Modern Warfare remake (also a bad sign; when a company has to reach back to their glory days to reignite the playerbase). Warzone captured a zeitgeist, but Cold War met with poor reception; the passion is gone, and players recognize that. More applicable to the article; WoW as well, where every expansion released since Wrath has seen a decline in player-count (except spikes when they first release, and Legion saw a small uptick, which per the previous parenthesis was mostly just a "hey remember Burning Crusade" expansion); its not a coincidence (though certainly not the whole reason) that Wrath introduced Dungeon LFG late in its cycle, and Cataclysm introduced Raid LFG soon after. I don't know how companies can engineer an environment which helps maintain this flame of passion for the decades a franchise can last, except to say that the business should absolutely be firewalled as much as possible from anyone implementing the artistry. No talk of revenue; no metrics targets. That's a trust fall; businesses don't tend to like trust falls, but on the other side of the coin, this is more-or-less the model Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo all follow with their first-party titles, and the general high quality shows. Its a luxury for them, but seemingly a necessary one. Centralizing artistic power in an individual also seems to help; many incredible games, despite being the work of many, tend to have names predominately associated with them (The Last of Us? Neil Druckmann. Mario? Miyamoto), whereas bad games tend to be associated with a company (which may point to less artistic agency in any individual and more design-by-committee). The world would benefit from learning about what makes some game companies so insanely successful (Nintendo being a big one); but, I also suspect, companies which have nailed the culture & process necessary to make it happen aren't keen to share, as its a serious, serious moat. One thing is for sure; I would not jump at the chance to emulate whatever Activision-Blizzard is doing right now.
ladyattis 6y ago
I think the problem is that big corporations always demand big returns in gaming not realizing for every smash hit there's usually many flops to middling successes. If they would stop trying to make just one product for one class of consumer and actually diversify their products then they'd have more reliable income rather than chasing fads like fools. It's been frustrating to see the likes of Activision, Ubisoft, and etc just constantly fail on something that doesn't really take much innovation nor really any 'vision' to achieve.

freshair 6y ago

Brands have value insofar as the consuming public recognize those brands, right? I'd wager that Diablo is most famous for the first two games which both came out 20 years ago, and that the enthusiast segment of the market recognizes this brand more than the casual segment (who, by nature of being casual, know less about historic games.) In the enthusiast/pc segment of the market, Diablo may still be a valuable brand. But in the casual/mobile segment of the market, the Diablo brand is relatively unknown and relatively worthless. Trying to sell games to mobile/casual gamers is fine, but they probably should have invented a new brand for the purpose (like they did with Hearthstone) instead of burning an old brand for little gain.

mywittyname 6y ago
You'd be surprised at the cache that old IPs have with young people who've never played them before. Young people have still heard about the legendary games from places like YouTube but may not have the capability to play them.
- ramblerman 6y ago
  > You'd be surprised at the cache that old IPs have with young people who've never played them before. This is obviously what the bliz heads thought, but I doubt it's true tbh. That legendary status lives in our head, and isn't necessarily translated because people hear about it. You can't inject nostalgia by describing it.
dleslie 6y ago
Precisely; when consumers think of Diablo, what images conjure up? I expect segments: 1. What's Diablo? 2. Diablo 2 was great! 3. I played Diablo 3 but tired of it...

015a 6y ago

I tend to think that; if you look at the landscape of ultra-successful triple-A game studios, they almost all started with Passion before Money. This seems obvious, but there are examples to the contrary (Zynga, etc). Assassins Creed was a legitimate artistic experience long before Ubisoft began milking it for everything its worth. Stories out of Bungie during the Halo trilogy era paint a picture of a college dorm, filled 24 hours a day with people working because they loved the product; a far cry from the billion dollar delayed outsourced forced-overtime disaster of Infinite (though, to be clear, nothing is all roses). Near every franchise that is worth anything nowadays started in raw, true passion. Its difficult to simply say "Money shouldn't matter", because it absolutely does matter, but when it starts entering into the equation guiding development decisions, the quality of the product will decrease, and over the long term the company will begin making less money from their games. Call of Duty is a great example, which has seen reducing sales every year, until the Modern Warfare remake (also a bad sign; when a company has to reach back to their glory days to reignite the playerbase). Warzone captured a zeitgeist, but Cold War met with poor reception; the passion is gone, and players recognize that. More applicable to the article; WoW as well, where every expansion released since Wrath has seen a decline in player-count (except spikes when they first release, and Legion saw a small uptick, which per the previous parenthesis was mostly just a "hey remember Burning Crusade" expansion); its not a coincidence (though certainly not the whole reason) that Wrath introduced Dungeon LFG late in its cycle, and Cataclysm introduced Raid LFG soon after. I don't know how companies can engineer an environment which helps maintain this flame of passion for the decades a franchise can last, except to say that the business should absolutely be firewalled as much as possible from anyone implementing the artistry. No talk of revenue; no metrics targets. That's a trust fall; businesses don't tend to like trust falls, but on the other side of the coin, this is more-or-less the model Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo all follow with their first-party titles, and the general high quality shows. Its a luxury for them, but seemingly a necessary one. Centralizing artistic power in an individual also seems to help; many incredible games, despite being the work of many, tend to have names predominately associated with them (The Last of Us? Neil Druckmann. Mario? Miyamoto), whereas bad games tend to be associated with a company (which may point to less artistic agency in any individual and more design-by-committee). The world would benefit from learning about what makes some game companies so insanely successful (Nintendo being a big one); but, I also suspect, companies which have nailed the culture & process necessary to make it happen aren't keen to share, as its a serious, serious moat. One thing is for sure; I would not jump at the chance to emulate whatever Activision-Blizzard is doing right now.

ladyattis 6y ago

I think the problem is that big corporations always demand big returns in gaming not realizing for every smash hit there's usually many flops to middling successes. If they would stop trying to make just one product for one class of consumer and actually diversify their products then they'd have more reliable income rather than chasing fads like fools. It's been frustrating to see the likes of Activision, Ubisoft, and etc just constantly fail on something that doesn't really take much innovation nor really any 'vision' to achieve.