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Nope, it started waaay before that. * The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was publ

• portaouflop 2y ago
  Shutting down Blizzard North was when it began to get real shitty
• realusername 2y ago
  I kind of forgot but it's true that Starcraft 2 used to be a joke in itself somewhat similar to Duke Nukem Forever at its time.
  • celdon25 2y ago
    I thought Starcraft 2 was fine, even if it isn't Brood War. Not really a fair comparison with Duke Nukem Forever. Diablo 3 on the other hand...
    • 0dayz 2y ago
      The issue is effectively that Blizzard released Starcraft 2 during a time where RTS was seen as a forgotten genre entirely, the best you had was the Company of Heroes & Dawn of War. If they had released it 5 years earlier it might have allowed the genre to stick to the huge cultural legacy it had, at least in Korea. Let alone the fact that the story of Starcraft 2 was... white-washed entirely compared to the OG & Brood Wars.
    • sirwhinesalot 2y ago
      SC2 plays pretty great but the plot really went off the rails. Brood War was already worse than base SC plot wise but at least it was still rather dark. SC2's plot feels like garbage fanfic.
• bluescrn 2y ago
  > Spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump Was worth it though. SC2 was the last of the old, great Blizzard
  • BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Nah, as you can see with its online-only requirement (and ActiBlizz being greedy about custom made maps), it was already the new Blizzard, after merging with Activision and the changes that WoW brought.
  • krageon 2y ago
    starcraft 2 was really cool when it came out, but it is not good now. And you can't play an old patch because it's always online
• YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  “Do you guys not have phones?”
• Fokamul 2y ago
  * Releasing Diablo II Resurrected and striping multiplayer option to host own server, because some modder, made a patch to play with old D2 Lod version on modded server in Alpha version. Years later they patched stripped multiplayer back and now modders are working on D2R multiplayer modded servers, Blizzard people are so smart...
  • 0dayz 2y ago
    To be fair this list is only mostly during or at the time when Blizzard was still semi-independent i.e. not merged with Activision yet.
• Etherlord87 2y ago
  Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close. I have no idea why you put it on the list. Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005. So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger. I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extremely polished products, but LoL already was polished and well established. Project Titan's assets were used in Overwatch, but yeah, spending so much time on a big project to abandon it really shows poor management skills and overall bad design of the project.
  • 0dayz 2y ago
    The problem was the timing, Starcraft 2 mechanics wise is fine even if they made some really whimsical balance changes that plagued the esport scene until it was almost pulled off life support (similar to how Overwatch couldn't balance itself to the point where the developers gave up). If like HotS and Diablo 3 it came out much earlier it would've kept the RTS genre most likely alive (only revived interest in AoE 2 started to get the ball rolling for RTS again). Not only that but Blizzard had since WC3 tried to create their own MOBA and stalled time and time again, they announced Blizzard All-star while announcing SC2, only for HotS to be announce after Dota 2 had left beta & LoL was already moving away from static MOBA design to the more "skill based" design they currently got. Especially if the rumor that icefrog (last dev of Dota) approached Blizzard and Blizzard said no, it's the most obvious act of stupidity Blizzard did. By the time HotS was out it was dead in the water because it had no competing feature setting it apart from the competition: * if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2 * If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite * If you wanted a "skill based" dynamic and more casual MOBA: LoL HotS tried to mimic LoL which meant an already watered down MOBA being further watered down. Hearthstone is a good example of how Blizzard's games could have looked have they timed their releases better and stopped with "fold it 3000 times", since you can only do this if the game's budget is a typical 90s game budget or you've got alternative income sources & isn't publicly owned i.e. Valve.
    • invalidOrTaken 2y ago
      The goofy thing about all this is that HotS is really good if you judge it on its own merits. I played DotA for a long time, switched to HotS, and never looked back.
• stavrus 2y ago
  This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms. At times, it practically sets them. It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different. Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi. Polygon [1] covered the Starcraft: Ghost game. Long story short, it got canned because it was in development hell for too long. Originally under development by a studio in the Bay area, there apparently wasn't a dedicated Blizzard producer to the game for the longest time, and the idea of what it should be kept changing as new games came out and HQ wanted them to copy those ideas. At some point, Blizzard shifted development to a different studio just miles away from them because they wanted multiplayer, but the same issues persisted. And then they released WoW, which consumed all of their attention. With the release of the gen 7 consoles around the corner, requiring further investment, they made the sensible choice to shelve it so they could focus their time and money on their new cash-printing machine instead. Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft. [1] https://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-what-went-wrong https://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-wh...
• Majromax 2y ago
  I hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail. The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes: * World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and * "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management. My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope. Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.
  • montagg 2y ago
    As someone who’s seen the inside of a game company, this thesis reads true. Success really warps expectations, and warped expectations create perverse incentives that are different than make this particular game good.
  • cogman10 2y ago
    So interestingly you see this sort of thing play out in online media. - Youtuber X has a runaway successful video/s. - Seeing the cashflow from that video, they think "Hey, I could probably duplicate this!" - When that duplication fails, they decide "You know what, maybe I just need to make a lot of videos" - When that doesn't bring in the expected income and/or leads to burnout they think "You know what, I think I need some outside help to make me see my blindspots". And, of course, invariably when that outside help comes in, so does the slop. The outside help does not care about quality, they care about getting money in through the door. That often involves hack and slashing all efforts at quality, shilling out endlessly, and some real questionable decisions when it comes to employment. Now, of course, the creator is still responsible for what their company becomes. But, money is money and a creator/owner is just more likely to like easymode income (for themselves) vs duplicating the efforts of a prior period.
    • mnky9800n 2y ago
• Thaxll 2y ago
  This is just a bad take on Blizzard. - x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled Overwatch came out of that and it was one of the biggest game in the last 15years. It sold over 50m copies, an insane number.
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    And somehow modern Blizzard managed to convert even that success into a debacle.
  • 0dayz 2y ago
    Which was pure and utter luck from scrapping a 10-ish year old project which who knows much much money they threw in. What if Overwatch would've been a huge failure? Would we still vindicate Blizzard's failed 2nd MMO?
    • Thaxll 2y ago
      What if what if? Reality is that OW was huge success that you rarely see.
• hhjinks 2y ago
  I'm confused, you say it started before the merger, and go on to list a bunch of events that happened years after the merger.
  • 0dayz 2y ago
    Nope, all of these things happened before the merger, the fact that Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, etc. was released after the merger doesn't change the fact that Blizzard was dragging their feet on those IPs.
• schmookeeg 2y ago
  The Warcraft Adventure was terrible. I was working at Bliz at the time. Imagine the worst LucasArts-style fan art with no real story behind it. The true believers would have loved it and anything else released in the Warcraft universe, but.. it was very very "not good" No argument with your other points though :)
  • 0dayz 2y ago
    Oh totally, I think that if you guys had somehow manage to get LucasArt to make it or some other notoriously good Point'n Click studio and not... the makers of such classics like: Zelda games for the Philips CD-i or IM ME'EN.