Oh no acquisition strategy stopped working. Wait until they realize if they won’t make enough new good games their subscriptions will start to fade out because game industry is not the same as video or music.
They should do the typical thing and shut down Activision.
All that Modern Warfare 2019 talent can finally go do something worthwhile again, and not just pump out slop.
Plus the Blizzard name has cashed in all of its previous good reputation, at least from my point of view.
Most fond things I see said about them are from people still playing their older games, other than a friend that is still playing wow classic.
I almost bought Diablo 4 a few times but remembered who the company was. The Overwatch 2 fiasco made me avoid joining in. WC3 Remake was a disaster …
After hearing about Bobby Kotick (sp?) the prick CEO who destroyed the company to completely enrich himself and hearing stories from Thor (PirateSoftware) about Blizzard it makes me never want to support them ever.
Makes me sad because I remember a time where I was such a champion of Blizzard. I just knew any game they had was solid back then.
Oh yeah, 90s and 00s Blizzard was great. I had fallen in love with RTS after playing a demo for Dune 2000 (I think it was) and after mentioning it to a friend, he loaned me his copy of Warcraft II. From there, my top games were Blizzard games for over a decade. WC2, SC, found out that cool Diablo game another friend had shown me was also Blizzard as they were marketing D2, then WC3, then WoW was my peak Blizzard obsession. But they still had some more good ones: SC2, Hearthstone, HotS, then the first Overwatch.
I think all that WoW money ruined them. Line must go up, even if they were on a massive mountain that would naturally eventually wane as people grew bored of the game and the niche it fit in grew more crowded. They started chasing dollars instead of chasing great games and making dollars in the process.
That Diablo phone app game being announced as if their audience gave a fuck about mobile games showed how out of touch they were with what used to make them great. And the follow up “don’t you all have phones?” just cemented how blind they were, not even considering that the people making mobile games so much money didn’t have much overlap with their current fan base, most of whom built a relatively expensive gaming PC to game on despite how much cheaper phones already were.
And there were other questionable things, like that WC3 remaster that no one asked for replacing the more capable original.
The D3 auction house, though to be fair to that one, I liked the idea going in and it was only after experiencing it that I understood it was a bad idea that would make most runs boring because most drops couldn’t compare to items I could get cheap on the AH.
Then the China thing and trying to defraud a tournament winner out of their prize because he said something in support of Hong Kong. Then finding out that it was a workplace dripping with toxic masculinity (which was the case even when they were doing great).
And then they did a WC3 remaster on Overwatch, replacing the game that was originally purchased at AAA price with a free to play one that also wasn’t finished, with features promised to make the replacement easier to swallow just dropped.
By the time Microsoft came to buy them, I didn’t care what happened to them anymore. Activision had already been business major enough, with their only credit being that they didn’t immediately enshitify Blizzard when they acquired them.
