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I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Ov

I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps. This is not a game dev problem. This is a company that has excellent game dev talent but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers problem.

justrealist 3y ago
> but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers This is going to piss people off, but that's because people who sink huge portions of their spare time and energy into video games do not become CEOs. "Getting high on your own supply" doesn't set you up for professional exceptionalism.
- nrb 3y ago
  I’ll be charitable and grant that you’re likely talking about a very specific type of CEO who ends up at a very specific type of game studio; usually one that stopped caring about the quality of the games that it produces and instead envisions the studio as a financial engineering play. Elsewhere, there are plenty of game studios that have product-focused CEOs who are gamers and care deeply about creating memorable experiences, with the playtime to prove it.
- legosexmagic 3y ago
  thats a very complicated way to say "i dont like young people"
  - justrealist 3y ago
    I like young people a lot! Which is why I think we should massively restrict the amount of digital poison corporations are allowed to pump into their veins.
- orwin 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the Gullemot brothers still play their own games, heard that Yves played some rainbow 6 siege or something, and while I hate Ubisoft games quality and only ever bought one, he seems way more professional than whoever the Blizzard CEO is.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    Yves covered for Maxime Béland's and Serge Hascoët's sexual abuses for decades.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Rayman Legends is amazing. Such a shame that their stores / launchers / DRM have been among the worst for years...
- justaman 3y ago
  Gabe Newell
- dchftcs 3y ago
  Sales and marketing CEOs pretend they work 24x7, but they spend much of their weekends on leisure activities such as golfing, travel, playing with their children, having expensive dinners with board members and politicians and so on. If you're committed it's really not hard to replace that leisure time with gaming.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    They spend much of the working day on those leisure activities as well. I've seen execs tell the rest of the company that a four day work week isn't reasonable while working four days themselves.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Did you see Elon Musk's Elden Ring build?
tmpz22 3y ago
* Announce Overwatch 2 * Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates * Announce this is necessary for PvE rewrite * Release Overwatch 2 without PvE with f2p Battlepass monetization model - change to 5v5 instead of 6v6 * Shut down all Overwatch 1 servers with the release of OW2 * Announce PvE is cancelled
- interlinked 3y ago
  What even is the point of balance updates?
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Keeps the game fresh. If the game changes it gives people a reason to want to play again to figure out new combinations. Otherwise the meta gets set and it never changes and that gets old quickly.
    - streakfix 3y ago
      Not necessarily. For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017. If the base is solid the players can spend their time mastering what they are given and over time it grows on you. Imagine chess buffing up the pawn and nerfing the bishop.
      - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        Fair enough, though I'd suggest that rocket league has many fewer gauges to fiddle with than Overwatch. It's always symmetrical fields and 5 different car types, right?
        streakfix 3y ago
        There is steering sensitivity, car speed, ball speed, car mass, car power, boost strength, shooting power, jump height. All those variables have been finalized. What I'm saying is that balance patches are a band aid over the core problem.
nvy 3y ago
Kotick didn't go to Harvard, doesn't have an MBA, and in fact dropped out of university. It's not about MBA vs not. He's just shit.
- Rury 3y ago
  True, but this is just nitpicking over something that's not really the point being made. The argument behind the OP still stands... the decisions being made by the company aren't ultimately being made by gamers or gamedevs (the workers who make the product / customers who use the product). So everything just turns to shit from a product standpoint...
  - gretch 3y ago
    Lots of 'real gamers' developers make horrible products all the time. For example, star citizen, the game in development for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget and no game to show for it. Mighty No. 9 Biomutant The list goes on
  - nvy 3y ago
    Gamers/game devs making the business decisions isn't a panacea. Look what happened to Ion Storm with Daikatana.
    - Rury 3y ago
      Never said it was a panacea. Just that without product focused people having say in decisions, the product will inevitably turn to shit. That is not the same as saying: having them make decisions guarantees you a good product.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  I said “Harvard MBA types” not “Harvard MBAs” since you’re nitpicking
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    The "harvard mba types" brings a certain kind of distaste to my mouth. Using it to describe someone who is in fact nothing of the sort feels a little too sloppy.
ortusdux 3y ago
> Harvard MBA Types Steve Jobs: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.
  - slt2021 3y ago
    nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living" - to increase audience size/TAM to maximum)
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO. (Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
I feel you could write a book about what that games dev process must have been, it's beyond parody what they did.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
I believe in business when it's defined as a large group of people coordinating incentives to achieve huge things that can't be achieved by small groups, I understand that aligning these incentives, and fund raising, and leadership are real and important jobs. I'm in awe that we can pull off the global shipping infrastructure, and that we can build power plants, and offshore oil wells, and these AAA games with so much art and technical innovation that the mind spins. But it is inarguable that there is a ubiquitous layer of parasitical filth lying and manipulating and strategizing how to capture value out of this system while systematically destroying the health of many of these organizations and pretending they are actually making them better.
tapoxi 3y ago
The director came out and said it wasn't an MBA-types problem, but their attachment to their original vision of Overwatch. Remember that Overwatch came from Project Titan, the megaproject designed to be the MMO successor to World of Warcraft. When their design goals failed, they shipped a modified PVP portion as Overwatch, and they intended to ship the MMO in pieces, with the story mode and skills system as massive components. Overwatch 2 was them trying Titan again, and failing. https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-s-take-reflecting-on-the-future-of-overwatch-2 https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-...
aqme28 3y ago
> This is a company that has excellent game dev talent I'm inclined to believe that the incredible talent that used to be at Blizzard is long gone by now. Most of the original devs have their own studios or work at other companies by now.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  This is what I was thinking too (more or less since 2004, I was effectively blaming it on Activision and Kotick !), but Diablo 4 seems to prove the opposite ! (I'll be only sure of it only once my honeymoon phase with it is over I guess.)
SirMaster 3y ago
What I don't understand then is this. If the Harvard MBA types are so detrimental to a gaming company, why don't we see any or many widely successful gaming companies who are run by dev types rather than MBA types?
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  MBA types make the company more money quarter over quarter, dev types make the company more money decade after decade. Publicly traded companies tend to use greedy algorithms when making decisions. There are plenty of dev (or really, artist driven) type companies, some may argue with my choices, but I would say Bethesda, Epic Games, id Software, and Double Fine. Bethesda and id are now owned by Microsoft, so there is a possibility that market forces will seep in over time.
- ryathal 3y ago
  The successful companies get bought out by the giants after the make something popular eg. Mojang and Minecraft.

justrealist 3y ago

> but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers This is going to piss people off, but that's because people who sink huge portions of their spare time and energy into video games do not become CEOs. "Getting high on your own supply" doesn't set you up for professional exceptionalism.

nrb 3y ago
I’ll be charitable and grant that you’re likely talking about a very specific type of CEO who ends up at a very specific type of game studio; usually one that stopped caring about the quality of the games that it produces and instead envisions the studio as a financial engineering play. Elsewhere, there are plenty of game studios that have product-focused CEOs who are gamers and care deeply about creating memorable experiences, with the playtime to prove it.
legosexmagic 3y ago
thats a very complicated way to say "i dont like young people"
- justrealist 3y ago
  I like young people a lot! Which is why I think we should massively restrict the amount of digital poison corporations are allowed to pump into their veins.
orwin 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the Gullemot brothers still play their own games, heard that Yves played some rainbow 6 siege or something, and while I hate Ubisoft games quality and only ever bought one, he seems way more professional than whoever the Blizzard CEO is.
- morelisp 3y ago
  Yves covered for Maxime Béland's and Serge Hascoët's sexual abuses for decades.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Rayman Legends is amazing. Such a shame that their stores / launchers / DRM have been among the worst for years...
justaman 3y ago
Gabe Newell
dchftcs 3y ago
Sales and marketing CEOs pretend they work 24x7, but they spend much of their weekends on leisure activities such as golfing, travel, playing with their children, having expensive dinners with board members and politicians and so on. If you're committed it's really not hard to replace that leisure time with gaming.
- Jochim 3y ago
  They spend much of the working day on those leisure activities as well. I've seen execs tell the rest of the company that a four day work week isn't reasonable while working four days themselves.
bigbillheck 3y ago
Did you see Elon Musk's Elden Ring build?

tmpz22 3y ago

* Announce Overwatch 2 * Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates * Announce this is necessary for PvE rewrite * Release Overwatch 2 without PvE with f2p Battlepass monetization model - change to 5v5 instead of 6v6 * Shut down all Overwatch 1 servers with the release of OW2 * Announce PvE is cancelled

interlinked 3y ago
What even is the point of balance updates?
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Keeps the game fresh. If the game changes it gives people a reason to want to play again to figure out new combinations. Otherwise the meta gets set and it never changes and that gets old quickly.
  - streakfix 3y ago
    Not necessarily. For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017. If the base is solid the players can spend their time mastering what they are given and over time it grows on you. Imagine chess buffing up the pawn and nerfing the bishop.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Fair enough, though I'd suggest that rocket league has many fewer gauges to fiddle with than Overwatch. It's always symmetrical fields and 5 different car types, right?
      - streakfix 3y ago
        There is steering sensitivity, car speed, ball speed, car mass, car power, boost strength, shooting power, jump height. All those variables have been finalized. What I'm saying is that balance patches are a band aid over the core problem.

nvy 3y ago

Kotick didn't go to Harvard, doesn't have an MBA, and in fact dropped out of university. It's not about MBA vs not. He's just shit.

Rury 3y ago
True, but this is just nitpicking over something that's not really the point being made. The argument behind the OP still stands... the decisions being made by the company aren't ultimately being made by gamers or gamedevs (the workers who make the product / customers who use the product). So everything just turns to shit from a product standpoint...
- gretch 3y ago
  Lots of 'real gamers' developers make horrible products all the time. For example, star citizen, the game in development for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget and no game to show for it. Mighty No. 9 Biomutant The list goes on
- nvy 3y ago
  Gamers/game devs making the business decisions isn't a panacea. Look what happened to Ion Storm with Daikatana.
  - Rury 3y ago
    Never said it was a panacea. Just that without product focused people having say in decisions, the product will inevitably turn to shit. That is not the same as saying: having them make decisions guarantees you a good product.
darth_avocado 3y ago
I said “Harvard MBA types” not “Harvard MBAs” since you’re nitpicking
- ifyoubuildit 3y ago
  The "harvard mba types" brings a certain kind of distaste to my mouth. Using it to describe someone who is in fact nothing of the sort feels a little too sloppy.

ortusdux 3y ago

> Harvard MBA Types Steve Jobs: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

LaundroMat 3y ago
That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.
- slt2021 3y ago
  nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living" - to increase audience size/TAM to maximum)
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric. Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO. (Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

I feel you could write a book about what that games dev process must have been, it's beyond parody what they did.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

I believe in business when it's defined as a large group of people coordinating incentives to achieve huge things that can't be achieved by small groups, I understand that aligning these incentives, and fund raising, and leadership are real and important jobs. I'm in awe that we can pull off the global shipping infrastructure, and that we can build power plants, and offshore oil wells, and these AAA games with so much art and technical innovation that the mind spins. But it is inarguable that there is a ubiquitous layer of parasitical filth lying and manipulating and strategizing how to capture value out of this system while systematically destroying the health of many of these organizations and pretending they are actually making them better.

tapoxi 3y ago

The director came out and said it wasn't an MBA-types problem, but their attachment to their original vision of Overwatch. Remember that Overwatch came from Project Titan, the megaproject designed to be the MMO successor to World of Warcraft. When their design goals failed, they shipped a modified PVP portion as Overwatch, and they intended to ship the MMO in pieces, with the story mode and skills system as massive components. Overwatch 2 was them trying Titan again, and failing. https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-s-take-reflecting-on-the-future-of-overwatch-2 https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-...

aqme28 3y ago

> This is a company that has excellent game dev talent I'm inclined to believe that the incredible talent that used to be at Blizzard is long gone by now. Most of the original devs have their own studios or work at other companies by now.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
This is what I was thinking too (more or less since 2004, I was effectively blaming it on Activision and Kotick !), but Diablo 4 seems to prove the opposite ! (I'll be only sure of it only once my honeymoon phase with it is over I guess.)

SirMaster 3y ago

What I don't understand then is this. If the Harvard MBA types are so detrimental to a gaming company, why don't we see any or many widely successful gaming companies who are run by dev types rather than MBA types?

bick_nyers 3y ago
MBA types make the company more money quarter over quarter, dev types make the company more money decade after decade. Publicly traded companies tend to use greedy algorithms when making decisions. There are plenty of dev (or really, artist driven) type companies, some may argue with my choices, but I would say Bethesda, Epic Games, id Software, and Double Fine. Bethesda and id are now owned by Microsoft, so there is a possibility that market forces will seep in over time.
ryathal 3y ago
The successful companies get bought out by the giants after the make something popular eg. Mojang and Minecraft.