I’m pretty sure is right there with them
They lost me before this line, but I will never forgive and never forget:
“What you guys don’t own phones?”
It was evident that they had completely lost touch with their player base at that point
“You think you do, but you don’t!”
unpopular opinion: this phrase is right, sometimes. In that context, at that conference, bad call. But sometimes… people think they want something until they get it, and then they realize they don’t want it.
Makes me think of that Reddit post where the guy thought he was into shitting and ordered an escort to shit on him, only to realise he was in fact not into shitting
How you phrase things is also important. Never having played WoW, but they came across as arrogant and out of touch. Something that’s only been reinforced by their further actions. The “Do you guys not have phones?” comment is just the sequel. The issues only be more and more serious since then.
They made me sad with Diablo 3. But they lost me at StarCraft 2.
D3 got better after years of updates. StarCraft 2’s story was hot garbage and they turned a single full game into three smaller games.
Seeing Blizzard fuck over Overwatch fans was not a surprise to me.
SC2’s esport and competitive scene was incredibly successful. We got 14 years of incredible tournaments, content, personalities, streamers, etc… Seems like you are just a casual player that just missed the boat.
The story was absolute crap, but the campaign levels were still really fun.
Also, each campaign did feel like a full fledged game from a content perspective. I can give blizzard shit for a lot, but how they handled sc2 (beyond dropping it completely) is low on the list.
Blizz was salty about not being able to sue their way into a cut of all of the professional Brood War revenue in Korea, which is why SC2 didn’t launch with LAN support (except when played at an Official Blizzard Event).
It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.
It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.
Unfortunately every other RTS only tries to copy the sweaty multiplayer 1v1 experience. Like playing guitar hero on expert mode on your mouse and keyboard while also doing strategy at the same time.
Even more unfortunately no one seems to be able to execute even that part half as well as Blizzard did.
Since we’re talking RTS, do you have time to talk about my shameless plug for http://beyondallreason.info?
This style of RTS appeals much more to me in recent years. Feels less like you need to perform like a speedrunner.
So much QOL compared to the APM spamfests other RTS can become.
Blizzard died quite a while ago. Even if the same dudes are still making decisions at the head of the studio after the Activision buyout, clearly they have dementia or some other cognitive defects.
Firing Nethaera was a bullet in their brain.
I think the execs were always somewhat shit, even when they were making good games. It’s just their creative team miraculously managed to make good games despite the shitty execs.
Yeah, they used to have a Caste System in Blizzard HQ where badge color decided your importance. And get this, their tech guys, security guys, and hardware guys (not firmware) were all the lower caste lmao.
Ever since they banned that StarCraft II pro for protesting china in Hong Kong, I’ve uninstalled battle.net and didn’t look back.
I rather buy a game from EA.
Sometimes Blizzard says things but it just sounds like Winnie the Pooh’s jizz gurgling out their mouth.
Same, down with the CCP
Same dude. They had been on the downhill for a bit but I sold my stock and was done
Let me introduce you to Wizards of the Coast
IMO the issue isn’t WotC, it’s Hasbro. WotC is their golden goose and they’re squeezing it for everything. I haven’t checked their recent earnings calls but I wouldn’t be surprised if WotC is still their only subsidiary where the revenue isn’t declining.
It’s a cultural issue.
People at Larian had one objective the entire time - making a genuinely good D&D based game. If the money comes, that’s incredible. And it did come.
People at blizzard make games with the goal of making money. The era of making something fun has been long over in this studio
It seems that publicly traded game companies simply can’t help themselves from becoming this (e.g. Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA).
It’s very sad, but at least there are still a few private AAA companies and indies who seem to make fun games for the sake of fun games.
Not even just game companies. Publicly traded companies are a curse on humanity.
That’s what happens when MBAs start making too many product decisions at a tech company, and game companies are no exception.
Once you go public, you’ve practically forced yourself into aiming for infinite growth. “Just enough” revenue is not in the vocabulary of these people
I don’t buy or play their trash any more. It ain’t the 90s or 00s any more. Blizzard is ass.
Ea, ubisoft, Blizzard. The games aren’t even that good
Yeah, pretty much. A lot of their games appear on a 80% sale half the time, and even then it’s still not worth it. It’s not even about the money, it’s about being disrespected by the dogshit they continue to release.
I would rather give my time to a passionate indie studio, where the people put together a genuinely unique experience
It’s an ownership issue.
Larian is privately owned by Swen Vincke. They can concentrate on making good games because they don’t answer to anyone but Swen.
Blizzard is publicly owned. It has to answer to greedy and short-sighted shareholders.
If you think that’s bad, wait 'till you hear about the working conditions.
It’s hard to make a good game when you’re too busy trying to rape your coworkers.
In their defense their just keeping up with the standard in other publicity owned companies. Don’t wanna rock the boat you know.
(This is a joke, please join a union in your field. Union strong motherfuckers!)
I miss the Warcraft II and StarCraft days. You could tell they were serious by their cutscenes, but also knew they were having fun, and wanted the player to as well, by the gameplay and Easter eggs. “Line must go up” took over, now it’s all cash grabs. I will not buy a game from them at full price again.
Their cutscenes still go hard honestly
Meh, they are what I expect from a company that is that profit centric. Looking good is top priority for selling, after all.
It hasn’t been the same company that delivered that gaming magic in the 90s since, well, the 90s.
It’s a shame, I liked OW1, even with the tired meta and 6v6 more than I liked OW2.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory, allowing unlocking of skins and content without spending anything extra was a nice balance in my opinion that I wish more games did.
They took OW1 and bastardized it, it deserves the rating it has. It used to be that new versions of games were better.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory
Ehhh, they were basically the same thing as a slot machine. The battlepass is certainly worse, as it just encourages rampant (not so) microtransactions, but just because the current battlepass system is really predatory, doesn’t mean the old loot box system wasn’t predatory at all. It was just less predatory.
Well I guess what I mean by that is that loot boxes were free to obtain AND open through leveling and weren’t exclusive to forking over money.
No lootboxes at all is the ultimate goal, but I’d take OW1 lootbox style over nearly any others.
It used to be that new versions of games were better.
I for one am very interested to see the quality differences between worker owned game studios and corporate studios. But last I heard they had only just started unionizing.
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
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Tech workers in general have been finally making baby steps with unions trying to form at goog and maybe a couple others. I think kickstarter got a union a couple years ago as well… There are some other examples too which is a big change from just a few years ago
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World of warcrafts team and Bethesda recently unionized.
unions are a harder sell in an industry like tech where it’s common to have a diverse skill set spanning work that could arguable each be it’s own union. does a full stack dev have to join the database admin union before they can write sql queries?
those diverse skill sets also make the individual value of workers fluctuate a lot more as well.
I still like the idea of unions but I just don’t know how you can make them work for tech;if anyone has any good resources on the subject I’d love to read more about it
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
I also had a programmer friend that was anti-union. He was like “If the place I’m working at sucks, I’ll just find another place.” Very short sighted and optimistic.
It really is a shame. I played so much OW1, and then suddenly it changed to be like all the other modern games with sleazy monetization that I avoid.
Yeah but they’ll never learn because tons off people keep shoveling money at them.
I think Activision might be on the way out, they’ve had playercounts decline pretty much every quarter and even though their SEC filings show an increase in revenue thats only because they get filed alongside the rest of Activision, now.
Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
I’m seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is currently a good company so I am happy to support it. If it enshittifies then I will stop using it and sail the high seas if need be.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there’s no actual law requiring that. It’s just an excuse they use to be greedy.
It’s more complicated than just one law that says “you must be a bastard” I admit, but fiduciary responsibility is a core requirement of any publicly traded company and very much is legally enforceable (this parenthetical aside stands in for about three pages of niche caveats and overly wordy exceptions that I’m just going to shamelessly handwave away). At best a CEO might be found to be civilly liable, but
peasantsnon-C-suite employees are criminally charged for neglecting their fiduciary duty every day in the US.Absolutely, but fiduciary responsibility, has never and was never intended to mean absolutely maximizing profits and especially at the long term expense.
That was a twisted idea that was put forward in the late 70s early 80s as a means to justify destroying companies for short term gain.
Oh, then yes I agree completely!
…
So anyways you coming to Steve’s “eat the rich” party? I hear he’s got a new barbecue.
If you breach fiduciary duty the best thing you can hope for is to be fired. Executives have been criminally charged for it as well though. And while it has to be an intentional act of malfeasance, that gets pretty blurry when the shareholders hire thousand dollar an hour lawyers to come after you.
So while yes, the root cause is greed, the system itself is setup to feed that.
Ugh, the thought of some generic investment company swooping in and running Valve hurts my heart.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don’t think I’ve bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don’t play a lot of games nowadays.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen mouse. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Perhaps one encased in a giant stone bust of himself. With lasers.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
Because most of these MBA fucks don’t understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Yeah, the thing about Steam is that buying your game at Steam feels better than downloading it for free somehow.
Like the 28. Streaming service, so that I can’t find what I want anymore.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
The thing that pisses me off if that my comp only goes up by 3% but that is failure to a corp.
because they don’t understand why it’s printing money
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because they could make it print even more money, and make the line go more up for a very short time!
That looks good on the CV you know.
Need someone to track videogame piracy rates and if steam gets enshittified make a graph and mark each of their bad decisions against it
it’s a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
You hope. It wouldn’t be the first time.
example? /genq
Oh geez there’s so many people tend to write articles about the general phenomenon rather than specific examples.
One of the biggest recent examples though has got to be Boeing. While they’re a publicly traded company, they resisted the call of greed above all until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and the MD executives won the battle for control of the merged company. Things went on a decades long slide after that which resulted in hundreds of deaths and a chain of high profile mechanical failures we’re still not sure is over.
For privately held corporations it’s all about that new leadership. In fact around 70 percent of family run ones fail in the second generation. But any generation can run the business into the ground or change it up. Bancroft and Barings are great examples of that. Barings was 232 years old when it went bankrupt under mismanagement.
Blizzard is dead. At the time they were Activision. Now they are Microsoft. The blizzard that existed to make StarCraft, warcraft and diablo only exists in name.
I don’t know, the World of Warcraft dev team recently unionized and got Chris Metzen to return as creative director. And, personally, as a current WoW player (War Within is great so far btw) the whole feel of the studio is so much better than during Shadowlands when things were bad and I quit the game. I think that Warcraft at least is having a bit of a comeback now.
Overwatch 2 is awful tho
Chris Metzen
I don’t really know details about who does what at Blizzard, but isn’t he the guy responsible for the utter train wreck of Diablo3’s writing? Whoever wrote and approved “How tastes your fear, Nephalem?” did a bad job.
He wrote the setting for Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft. He developed the story for Diablo 1 - 3 as well as most of the lore for the first 3 Warcraft games I believe.
There was no story for Diablo 1. At exile con the creators of Diablo talk about how there was no story and the execs at Blizzard tacked one on. Chris Metzen had nothing to do with it.
What? I played Diablo 1, it literally had a story? Chris Metzen co-created the setting for the franchise with David Brevik and Bill Roper in 1996. The changes Blizzard wanted made from the original concept of Diablo was to make it real-time rather than turn based and to add multiplayer as part of the publishing agreement. I don’t see anything about a storyline being “forced” on the developers.
https://youtu.be/0coFsOfLcPg?si=1JRdDva77SivwKN6
This is the interview. I don’t have a timestamp but the whole thing is compelling.
Basically David brevik said that there was no story and the cut scene on the end was added by blizzard south. They had no intent to add that.
I stand corrected though. Metzen is credited as a writer on Diablo. But not Diablo 2.
I suspect Metzen wrote the ending that was tacked on according to Brevik, since at that time blizzard north was a completely different team at the time.
One game was all it took for Big Red to turn from an epic “Not even death can save you from me” into a cartoon villain. Fucker wouldn’t shut up throughout Act 4…
Right?? “Not even death can save you from me” is a little corny but on the whole solid. All the shit he says in the 3 is just bad.
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
Death to ActivisionBlizzard. Company of shitty games and sexual harassment.
