"Do you guys not have phones?" -Blizzard staff in 2018, in response to booing fans upset that Blizzard wouldn't make a PC version of a game those same fans obviously wanted to play.
This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have been able to foresee, the old customers were indeed alienated and the new customers never materialized.
The thing with most companies optimizing addiction (user engagement) is that they use these weird optimization loops that improve metrics one by one (+x% then +y%) but then end up with a product so far from the long-term equilibrium.
There's no context as to what each player wants. The loop just works across the whole player base, not really aimed towards any context of the player.
Something like how gradient descent may be able to find a local maximum but unable to find superior global maximums. Or, how if you add one more ad to your website you may increase revenue, but if you keep doing that you will eventually destroy the site's usability, drive off your traffic, and, perhaps irreversibly, crater your revenue.
This is so true, and most people in these spaces will still defend the metrics they're using. I've encountered this a lot when trying to suggest how advertising could be a social good.
Yeah, JAB (who the quote is attributed to) is now the President of the company, too... To be fair to him, however, he did admit his failure on that one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like it's relevant to mention how huge Hearthstone is, and that's a mobile first game (at its best on iPad which is rare) that I feel is totally Blizzard tier quality with expected polish and substance to it, and both satisfied a lot of Blizzard fans + successfully tapped into that 10x market.
There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it like the MMO genre with WoW.
I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess just that between Overwatch and Hearthstone I actually mostly enjoyed this recent era of Blizzard and I'm more hopeful for what's next. I didn't feel contempt from them playing these games, I felt that old Blizzard spark.
Both of those were fine in the beginning. HS became impossible to play without endless grinding or spending money. Overwatch became tedious and toxic, due to both the players and how the developers responded (spamming in-game voicelines is now "toxic").
I think people just got fed up with online trading card games and the grind/monetization that they have. At least with MTG I can resell the cards... In fact MTG online with cockatrice is way more fun than HS or any of the other clones.
Hardcore gamers love to trash ATVI/Blizz but they are without a doubt dominant gaming developer/publisher in the business, and it's really not even close unless you count Tencent.
Ask people on HN if they like CoD and they'd laugh at you but the games are IMMENSELY popular every release and they print cash for ATVI.
When people bash Blizzard, they aren't bashing them based on their revenue or market penetration. A bad opinion of Blizzard does not translate into also believing they are failing to generate revenue or attract players. They have plenty of other reasons to bash Blizzard.
The feature downgrades of 'bnet 2.0' or whatever they called it that they announced when Starcraft 2 came out was the beginning of the end. SC2 as a game was fine (not amazing for me but plenty liked it) but everything around it was a mess. D3 solidified this trend of them losing the plot.
Blizzard bailed, valve bailed, who's left, really? But then again, a PC game has to compete with not only other PC titles but the entire history of Windows games via Steam/etc. You can make a brilliant RTS experience but will people play it when Starcraft exists?
you're presenting this a little bit disingenuously. expectations were high that diablo 4 would be announced in 2018, and instead there was the announcement of a partnership to develop a mobile version of diablo. folks were upset and the presenter reacted poorly.
the following year diablo 4 was announced and much was forgiven. the mobile game is still not out (in closed beta rn) and early reports are good.
you can fault blizzard for thinking its core fans at blizzcon would be excited about a mobile game, but if you are a game developer with a popular IP you're making a huge mistake not developing for mobile, as it will be the majority of the global gaming market for the foreseeable future.
They probably picked a poor audience for the announcement. By nature, those present were never going to be all that receptive to a new mobile-first game. Slightly better venues would have been either E3 or PAX, where the audience doesn't consist almost exclusively of hardcore fans of their more traditional offerings.
Was it 2018? Wow that was fast. It must suck for them since that fiasco, losing online players during pandemic when we're all stuck at homes, doubles the pain at least.
This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have been able to foresee, the old customers were indeed alienated and the new customers never materialized.