EPT
It's crashing. They failed to meet quarterly goals by 10%, blatantly lied to their investors on a recorded conference call this week, the entire diablo fanbase has turned against the company and fans are doing everything within their power to make it fail. Blizzard/acti lost well over 5 billion dollars in less than a week. Blizzard(a company that specializes and sells PC games) also removed all their top software developers from PC titles to mobile titles. This means all of their future PC games are going to be of lower standard and lower quality resulting in weaker sales overall. Get out now.
Blizzard has been a company that started on a few guys who really loved their craft and made some games when they were in their early 20s (i literally live like 6 miles from MacArthur/Harbor) . Then they expanded and those guys were spent.
They cashed in on MMORPGs 15 years ago and have been trying to milk their dwindling fanbase since. The game is outdated as fuck now and they keep making expansions for it because of some hardcore sunk cost fallacy shit.
Starcraft pretty much died slowly since 2010 because of poor handling of all aspects of the game and esports. Not to mention other esports took over. RTS has never really been a popular genre but because of KESPA and WCG (and all the korean gaming channels and shit) it stuck around. We got remastered but it should have come out before sc2 because now its too little and too late, not to mention the playerbase is nonexistent and there are still issues over a year later.
HOTS is too complicated and not the same enough as other MOBAs. The game makes you relearn everything and changes everything and adds new characters and new maps all the time. Its like its been constantly in alpha or beta forever. I don't know about everyone else, but one of the main things that sold me on HOTS over DOTA/clones was not having to memorize all the items and shit all the time, this is even worse.
WC3 RTS has been gone since like 05 or whenever DOTA took over the game (not to mention the game was never really balanced well since it had 4 races). I heard rumor about a WC4 in dev, good luck. They should just remaster wc2 and add some stuff and fix the UI and some hybrid of MBS and IUS. EG; not sc2 and not bw.
Diablo 3 was a shitshow since day one, never even got the battle arenas which is what sold most of the people who bought the game. And then other Action Online RPGs were way better , eg; Path of Exile, Dark Souls, Skyrim etc.
Their retro games are meh. R&R racing was maybe the only good one, they should actually do a twisted metal type game based on it. And have other racing modes or story modes as well.
Overwatch is arguably their only popular decent game anymore, and as far as shooters go, there are many other popular ones (Fortnite is free for example).
The warcraft movie was shit.
Also, ever since they merged with Activision, they went corporate sellout as fuck and cater to casuals and money, over quality and balancing and fixing issues with their rushed out games.
Honestly, they probably will make some great shitty phone games. However, as far as PC or console, nope.
Sidenote- Blizzcon was actually legit the first couple of years. Then it became complete bullshit. Anyone still wanna buy a murloc suit from 07?
I forgot about Hearthstone, the game is just a shitty copy of MTG only you cant buy or trade cards. The sets they pump out are filled with filler bullshit and the game is constantly imbalanced and buggy. Every season you have to grind everything and then it all becomes completely worthless in 3 months to a year. There are many better card games out there, they just aren't as popular because they don't have all the fanbase and money behind them. And that kinda sucks because a lot of these games these days rely on lots of players for matchmaking etc.
PS- Everything I said can also be applied to Capcom games these days. These once great companies who made good games for like 10-15 years just banked off that for the last 10-15 years and pumped out mediocre games that fanboys back because esports scene backed them and/or massive playerbases keeping them on the top.
Also. One thing that I do not like about online card games though, is that MTG for example is a game of rules at its core; changing rules, adding rules, removing rules, every turn. You have to keep track of what steps do what and when does what, and you are penalized if you miss something. All these games online are automated and the less vigilant/conscientious player is rewarded. This is like how in SC2 people were hyper skeptical about MBS and IUS. It took skill and practice to work the engine and multitask. It completely removed that aspect of a player. And then we got unit balls and injected macro in other stupid ways. There was a similar article about this on David Sirlin's site years ago about how execution and precision/timing with doing specials and combos in fighting games could easily be removed and the game could be reduced down to strategy and decision making (which he argued could improve games/create more depth with pros and cons), but then you end up exiling players who literally were good because they had consistent execution and timing.
Sirlin actually made a game on steam that literally does this, it actually looks kinda neat but I haven't played it so I can't speak on it. Fantasy Strike . There were a couple of other games of a similar vein that removed the difficulty of doing 360 motions and shit. There was also Rising Thunder, and a few other noteables. None of these games really picked up because they don't have as much depth and of course no player base.
TL;DR Great gaming companies that paved the way and created entire genres are dying and out of ideas. They are attempting to follow suit in the industry rather than lead it. Used to love Capcom and Blizzard, now they are shit. Rest In Peace.
