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Northern Ireland24378 Posts
On April 23 2021 22:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 22:15 Harris1st wrote:On April 23 2021 22:11 Manit0u wrote:On April 23 2021 02:18 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
30+ million players and 1.9 billion in revenue indicate somebody is doing something right.
I just wanted to point out that Genshin Impact reached 1 billion in revenue in 6 months and their average monthly player counts went up from 15m to 30m during last 6 months. This is single and new IP. Compared to that ATVI looks pretty bad. Also note that the company that made and published this was founded by 3 students and employs only 2.4k people. That's hardly a fair comparison. Every now and then one game cracks the lottery (PUBG, Fortnite, Genshin, ...). But that is not something that can be expected. This type of thinking is exactly the problem though. Do you think Blizzard won the lottery a few times with their diablo, starcraft, and warcraft universes or do you think something changed at the company? At some point you stop innovating and rest on your laurels because you're printing money and Blizzard is well past that point now. There are so many games and genres that spawned out of custom maps in brood war and warcraft map editors. Can you imagine Blizzard making/progressing DotA instead of Valve? In some ways, it is for the best because the competition between HoN, DotA2, and LoL is what progressed the genre forward.
I think it is absolutely fair, if I am reading Harris correctly.
This new level of mega, mega hit perpetual money machine kind of game is a bonus, it’s not something you can actively aim for because it’s so much of a well, lottery.
There’s not much of a pattern, or sometimes even a particularly high level of quality or design genius in some of these games.
PUBG had a good core concept, but to say it wasn’t particularly well polished or optimised performance wise is probably an understatement. Fortnite threw a Battle Royale mode onto a game with interesting building mechanics that wasn’t getting much traction and it became absolutely gigantic. I mean even Flappy Bird ffs, I mean a worse reskin of an old helicopter flash game I played in the mid 2000s and it blew up hugely.
There is a level of reasonably predictable success that a studio with Blizz’s rep can aspire to with any high quality game they put out. What they can’t, or any studio can reliably do is make the next Fortnite or whatever. Either the horse has bolted with whatever new trend you’re trying to emulate by the time you bring out your game, or trying to predict where to place your bottle to capture the lightning for whatever new trend explodes is impossible.
What Blizzard could do was ‘hey MMOs are quite popular what if we do a better polished one?’ or ‘what about RTS with distinctive asymmetric races’ or ‘what if we did RTS but with heroes and RPG mechanics’?
Quality is an innovation in and of itself if you do it well enough, and Blizzard’s own ideas and tweaks further elevated many of their classic titles. Blizzard aren’t infallible of course, dropping the ball on claiming DoTA as theirs was a mystifying error.
This is where the friction in this merger is manifesting, least IMO. Activision appear to want Blizzard to solely produce mega mega hits and that’s bloody hard to do, as opposed to leaving them with their giant hit in WoW and their ‘mere’ huge commercial successes like Starcraft 2
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On April 23 2021 16:34 Harris1st wrote:
Their last big release was Overwatch back in 2016
Blizzard and the top people who've left don't make many games whether they're under ATVI or not.
On April 23 2021 23:19 WombaT wrote:
This new level of mega, mega hit perpetual money machine kind of game is a bonus, it’s not something you can actively aim for because it’s so much of a well, lottery.
There’s not much of a pattern, or sometimes even a particularly high level of quality or design genius in some of these games.
Pacman is a really bad game. Memorize 1 pattern and you can play for an hour. ZZZZzzzzzz. It is the highest grossing arcade video game of all time. Its sequel is 100X better and only made 25% of the revenue of Pacman.
Pacman was the first ever dot eating maze game and a radical departure from anything that came before it. Pacman hit the lottery. Pacman made the inflation adjusted equivalent of $4 Billion USD before people started to figure out that the game could be "solved".
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Northern Ireland24378 Posts
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
Venture capital knows to diversify to get their fingers into potentially huge projects. Or other entertainment media that have banks of stable mainstream stars but take chances for little outlay on things that may explode.
I don’t think any of the label folks earnestly would have predicted say, Billie Eilish to be one of the biggest breakout stars in the world that year, but hey they had her on the books just in case she did. They wouldn’t say to Taylor Swift hey it’s the Eilish zeitgeist now so go do some of that
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On April 23 2021 23:19 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 22:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On April 23 2021 22:15 Harris1st wrote:On April 23 2021 22:11 Manit0u wrote:On April 23 2021 02:18 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
30+ million players and 1.9 billion in revenue indicate somebody is doing something right.
I just wanted to point out that Genshin Impact reached 1 billion in revenue in 6 months and their average monthly player counts went up from 15m to 30m during last 6 months. This is single and new IP. Compared to that ATVI looks pretty bad. Also note that the company that made and published this was founded by 3 students and employs only 2.4k people. That's hardly a fair comparison. Every now and then one game cracks the lottery (PUBG, Fortnite, Genshin, ...). But that is not something that can be expected. This type of thinking is exactly the problem though. Do you think Blizzard won the lottery a few times with their diablo, starcraft, and warcraft universes or do you think something changed at the company? At some point you stop innovating and rest on your laurels because you're printing money and Blizzard is well past that point now. There are so many games and genres that spawned out of custom maps in brood war and warcraft map editors. Can you imagine Blizzard making/progressing DotA instead of Valve? In some ways, it is for the best because the competition between HoN, DotA2, and LoL is what progressed the genre forward. I think it is absolutely fair, if I am reading Harris correctly. + Show Spoiler [snip] +This new level of mega, mega hit perpetual money machine kind of game is a bonus, it’s not something you can actively aim for because it’s so much of a well, lottery.
There’s not much of a pattern, or sometimes even a particularly high level of quality or design genius in some of these games. PUBG had a good core concept, but to say it wasn’t particularly well polished or optimised performance wise is probably an understatement. Fortnite threw a Battle Royale mode onto a game with interesting building mechanics that wasn’t getting much traction and it became absolutely gigantic. I mean even Flappy Bird ffs, I mean a worse reskin of an old helicopter flash game I played in the mid 2000s and it blew up hugely. + Show Spoiler [snip] +There is a level of reasonably predictable success that a studio with Blizz’s rep can aspire to with any high quality game they put out. What they can’t, or any studio can reliably do is make the next Fortnite or whatever. Either the horse has bolted with whatever new trend you’re trying to emulate by the time you bring out your game, or trying to predict where to place your bottle to capture the lightning for whatever new trend explodes is impossible.
What Blizzard could do was ‘hey MMOs are quite popular what if we do a better polished one?’ or ‘what about RTS with distinctive asymmetric races’ or ‘what if we did RTS but with heroes and RPG mechanics’?
Quality is an innovation in and of itself if you do it well enough, and Blizzard’s own ideas and tweaks further elevated many of their classic titles. Blizzard aren’t infallible of course, dropping the ball on claiming DoTA as theirs was a mystifying error.
This is where the friction in this merger is manifesting, least IMO. Activision appear to want Blizzard to solely produce mega mega hits and that’s bloody hard to do, as opposed to leaving them with their giant hit in WoW and their ‘mere’ huge commercial successes like Starcraft 2
I think this a bad take on management. You mention Fortnite like it got lucky winning the lottery instead of copying Pubg's success. You can see a few years later that every game has a battle royale mode now. Do you think it is impossible to notice the trend/popularity of such a thing and integrate it and improve upon it in any game?
What do you think about Among Us completely shifting their development plans for the game and completely dropping Among Us 2 to focus on updating/improving the original game after it "hit the lottery"? Among Us exploded in popularity with the pandemic which they obviously didn't start, but they changed their plans to take full advantage of. That is what management should be doing.
What I expect of blizzard is to be able to recognize those trends and take advantage of them. DotA is the easy example here for blizzard since it originated in their own game.
On April 23 2021 23:45 WombaT wrote:
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
Venture capital knows to diversify to get their fingers into potentially huge projects. Or other entertainment media that have banks of stable mainstream stars but take chances for little outlay on things that may explode.
I don’t think any of the label folks earnestly would have predicted say, Billie Eilish to be one of the biggest breakout stars in the world that year, but hey they had her on the books just in case she did. They wouldn’t say to Taylor Swift hey it’s the Eilish zeitgeist now so go do some of that
and I'm saying that Blizzard bet on nothing. You can't hit the lottery when you never play.
You can even examine a failure like Valve's Artifact. They jumped on the card game trend, took too long to develop it, went with an outdated and horrible pricing model. The game flopped horribly. Quality is a misnomer. People want things now and they'll play busted games like pubg, fortnite, cyperpunk, or whatever garbage you throw that them. You can see this trend even in the non-games industry for software. it is better to deliver a somewhat functional product and improve upon it than make a perfect product.
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I think where Blizzard dropped the ball was not really capitalizing on WoW's and Hearthstone's success. Those 2 IPs gave them a steady revenue that could go on for years. Instead of paying huge bonuses to CEOs they could've instead pump this money into developing new IPs or adding to the previous ones. And it's not really hard to look for inspiration there, you have huge fanbases for your IPs and a reputation for putting out awesome products, why drive it to the ground blindly following other people's successes? Diablo MMO which would be on the darker and more adult side would be an instant hit and wouldn't necessarily compete with WoW, Warcraft ARPG would be gobbled up immediately, Starcraft shooter/battle royale would probably sweep the floor.
I can see that, probably most of you can. How come Blizz/ATVI execs can't?
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United States12235 Posts
On April 24 2021 00:54 Manit0u wrote:
I think where Blizzard dropped the ball was not really capitalizing on WoW's and Hearthstone's success. Those 2 IPs gave them a steady revenue that could go on for years. Instead of paying huge bonuses to CEOs they could've instead pump this money into developing new IPs or adding to the previous ones. And it's not really hard to look for inspiration there, you have huge fanbases for your IPs and a reputation for putting out awesome products, why drive it to the ground blindly following other people's successes? Diablo MMO which would be on the darker and more adult side would be an instant hit and wouldn't necessarily compete with WoW, Warcraft ARPG would be gobbled up immediately, Starcraft shooter/battle royale would probably sweep the floor.
I can see that, probably most of you can. How come Blizz/ATVI execs can't?
I have no doubt that the incubation pods responsible for prototyping games iterated on numerous game concepts, including a Diablo MMO and a Starcraft shooter. The internal prototyping process is what gave us Overwatch, which was built from the ruins of the shelved MMO codenamed Titan. Whether it actually makes it past the prototype phase is another matter and something that is much more difficult to gauge, because games that are canceled are usually canceled for good reason.
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On April 23 2021 23:45 WombaT wrote:
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
it seems you can make a lousy product that is innovative and hit the lottery. Pacman is not a good game.
Starcraft1 was very innovative. As you've noted ... 3 race diverse race RTS. First ever that then became the defacto standard. Wyatt and Fitch have commented at great length and in very nice sugar coated ways what a frankenstein monster piece of software SC1 was.
Morhaime publicly acknowledged his management team fucked up the Starcraft project. Crunch was far too long. etc.
This is why I'm not too angry about ambitious projects that fail. If you are swinging for a home run... sometimes you strike out. Destiny2 recently included larger scale levels of combat. It was a bug ridden mess for about 4 weeks. However, once they nailed it down... man.. it was awesome. You get a little bit of a Planetside2 type of vibe from the biggest battles. Its really cool. It was a horrible bug ridden mess when it released.
Kudos to the people at Namco and Blizzard for having a balls to make these kinds of innovative games.
Destiny clearly isn't the financial success Bungie wanted. However, its a good innovative game. Kudos to Bungie for swinging for the fences.
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On April 24 2021 02:18 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 23:45 WombaT wrote:
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
.... Kudos to the people at Namco and Blizzard for having a balls to make these kinds of innovative games. Destiny clearly isn't the financial success Bungie wanted. However, its a good innovative game. Kudos to Bungie for swinging for the fences.
An innovative game and a good game however aren't necessarily the same thing.
Black & White or Spore for example are probably 2 of the most innovative titles in the last 2 decades... But they were mediocre games at best and not exactly commercial success stories.
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Northern Ireland24378 Posts
On April 24 2021 00:38 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 23:19 WombaT wrote:On April 23 2021 22:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On April 23 2021 22:15 Harris1st wrote:On April 23 2021 22:11 Manit0u wrote:On April 23 2021 02:18 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
30+ million players and 1.9 billion in revenue indicate somebody is doing something right.
I just wanted to point out that Genshin Impact reached 1 billion in revenue in 6 months and their average monthly player counts went up from 15m to 30m during last 6 months. This is single and new IP. Compared to that ATVI looks pretty bad. Also note that the company that made and published this was founded by 3 students and employs only 2.4k people. That's hardly a fair comparison. Every now and then one game cracks the lottery (PUBG, Fortnite, Genshin, ...). But that is not something that can be expected. This type of thinking is exactly the problem though. Do you think Blizzard won the lottery a few times with their diablo, starcraft, and warcraft universes or do you think something changed at the company? At some point you stop innovating and rest on your laurels because you're printing money and Blizzard is well past that point now. There are so many games and genres that spawned out of custom maps in brood war and warcraft map editors. Can you imagine Blizzard making/progressing DotA instead of Valve? In some ways, it is for the best because the competition between HoN, DotA2, and LoL is what progressed the genre forward. I think it is absolutely fair, if I am reading Harris correctly. + Show Spoiler [snip] +This new level of mega, mega hit perpetual money machine kind of game is a bonus, it’s not something you can actively aim for because it’s so much of a well, lottery.
There’s not much of a pattern, or sometimes even a particularly high level of quality or design genius in some of these games. PUBG had a good core concept, but to say it wasn’t particularly well polished or optimised performance wise is probably an understatement. Fortnite threw a Battle Royale mode onto a game with interesting building mechanics that wasn’t getting much traction and it became absolutely gigantic. I mean even Flappy Bird ffs, I mean a worse reskin of an old helicopter flash game I played in the mid 2000s and it blew up hugely. + Show Spoiler [snip] +There is a level of reasonably predictable success that a studio with Blizz’s rep can aspire to with any high quality game they put out. What they can’t, or any studio can reliably do is make the next Fortnite or whatever. Either the horse has bolted with whatever new trend you’re trying to emulate by the time you bring out your game, or trying to predict where to place your bottle to capture the lightning for whatever new trend explodes is impossible.
What Blizzard could do was ‘hey MMOs are quite popular what if we do a better polished one?’ or ‘what about RTS with distinctive asymmetric races’ or ‘what if we did RTS but with heroes and RPG mechanics’?
Quality is an innovation in and of itself if you do it well enough, and Blizzard’s own ideas and tweaks further elevated many of their classic titles. Blizzard aren’t infallible of course, dropping the ball on claiming DoTA as theirs was a mystifying error.
This is where the friction in this merger is manifesting, least IMO. Activision appear to want Blizzard to solely produce mega mega hits and that’s bloody hard to do, as opposed to leaving them with their giant hit in WoW and their ‘mere’ huge commercial successes like Starcraft 2 I think this a bad take on management. You mention Fortnite like it got lucky winning the lottery instead of copying Pubg's success. You can see a few years later that every game has a battle royale mode now. Do you think it is impossible to notice the trend/popularity of such a thing and integrate it and improve upon it in any game? What do you think about Among Us completely shifting their development plans for the game and completely dropping Among Us 2 to focus on updating/improving the original game after it "hit the lottery"? Among Us exploded in popularity with the pandemic which they obviously didn't start, but they changed their plans to take full advantage of. That is what management should be doing. What I expect of blizzard is to be able to recognize those trends and take advantage of them. DotA is the easy example here for blizzard since it originated in their own game. Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 23:45 WombaT wrote:
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
Venture capital knows to diversify to get their fingers into potentially huge projects. Or other entertainment media that have banks of stable mainstream stars but take chances for little outlay on things that may explode.
I don’t think any of the label folks earnestly would have predicted say, Billie Eilish to be one of the biggest breakout stars in the world that year, but hey they had her on the books just in case she did. They wouldn’t say to Taylor Swift hey it’s the Eilish zeitgeist now so go do some of that and I'm saying that Blizzard bet on nothing. You can't hit the lottery when you never play. You can even examine a failure like Valve's Artifact. They jumped on the card game trend, took too long to develop it, went with an outdated and horrible pricing model. The game flopped horribly. Quality is a misnomer. People want things now and they'll play busted games like pubg, fortnite, cyperpunk, or whatever garbage you throw that them. You can see this trend even in the non-games industry for software. it is better to deliver a somewhat functional product and improve upon it than make a perfect product.
I did say DotA was very much a dropped opportunity that should have been obvious given it’s existing popularity. Can’t blame anyone but Blizz for that one!
You’re right though, if you don’t play you can’t win the lottery. There are other ways to make a buck though.
To crudely categoriise some aforementioned games into 3 areas, in bold.
PUBG was technically janky-ish, but a novel enough game in concept that it was always going to be successful to some degree. First to really nail a nascent genre and it exploded.
Fortnite and Among Us I’ll stick into opportunistic (in the good sense) and made smart decisions when they gained traction. Epic had a well-optimised game with a defined art style with a relatively unique building mechanic, and merged that with battle royale that PUBG was killing it with. The building mechanic added a different element that actually fits a BR game pretty damn well, and they made it very casual friendly and crossplay friendly to boot, so pulled in a different audience that absolutely love skins. Among Us was nothing particularly new, but had a recognisable art style and exploded on Twitch in ye olde lockdown era with people crying out for fun social games. I wasn’t aware they cancelled a sequel to focus on maximising the experience of the goldmine indie game exploding beyond expectation, but that seems eminently sensible to me.
Finally there’s Cyberpunk, I’d add say, CoD Warzone into the category of big dev hype/existing IPs. It’s CDPR. They made the Witcher, this is going to be like the Witcher, but Cyberpunk and more ambitious and better! It has Keanu Reeves! Atrocious launch aside it’s always going to sell, opinions in the thread here do seem generally to be positive enough, disappointing to some yes but technical issues aside most don’t seem to be saying it’s an outright bad game. If they don’t fuck up again the reputational damage is conceivably repairable given they are patching religiously and CDPR have generally had a lot of goodwill. CoD Warzone, after many had tried and failed to push into the BR trend succeeded because well, CoD is CoD and its CoD doing BR. Indeed this may have had other silver linings for the franchise in being a bit different and offsetting the franchise fatigue, so when the next regular CoD comes out it’ll seem more fresh than it would have.
To conclude a post I hadn’t intended to be this long, you’re right, I like to think I’m also right :p Blizzard aren’t playing the lottery, so they’re not going to win. They’re also not playing the slots, gambling on sports or investing in the stock market, they’re doing very little (visibly) and that’s the problem.
There’s no word of a truly novel game in the works, doesn’t mean there isn’t one but to outside appearance. I don’t think Blizzard’s strength is in creating nascent genres but in refining existing ones with a novel angle that pushes a genre forward, or just taking an existing solid base and doing it better. There’s not really word of anything in that vein either.
By virtue of seemingly having few projects in the works, they also don’t (seemingly) have a shell of a game built that could potentially be redesigned to take advantage of a consumer trend, as Fortnite did so well.
In terms of leveraging ‘Blizz game hype’ or existing popular IPs non-WoW Warcraft, something in the Starcraft universe perhaps of a different genre have lain dormant for a rather long time. Unlike CDPR, who prompted a shitstorm of negative press while making lots of money, Blizz managed to do the same by botching a remaster in spectacular fashion without the compensating huge windfall.
There is Diablo 4 but they’re really going to have to knock it out of the park with that one
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Northern Ireland24378 Posts
On April 24 2021 02:18 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2021 23:45 WombaT wrote:
You can’t aim to hit the lottery, sure there are things you can do to improve your chances by making a good or innovative product.
it seems you can make a lousy product that is innovative and hit the lottery. Pacman is not a good game. Starcraft1 was very innovative. As you've noted ... 3 race diverse race RTS. First ever that then became the defacto standard. Wyatt and Fitch have commented at great length and in very nice sugar coated ways what a frankenstein monster piece of software SC1 was. Morhaime publicly acknowledged his management team fucked up the Starcraft project. Crunch was far too long. etc. This is why I'm not too angry about ambitious projects that fail. If you are swinging for a home run... sometimes you strike out. Destiny2 recently included larger scale levels of combat. It was a bug ridden mess for about 4 weeks. However, once they nailed it down... man.. it was awesome. You get a little bit of a Planetside2 type of vibe from the biggest battles. Its really cool. It was a horrible bug ridden mess when it released. Kudos to the people at Namco and Blizzard for having a balls to make these kinds of innovative games. Destiny clearly isn't the financial success Bungie wanted. However, its a good innovative game. Kudos to Bungie for swinging for the fences.
Re Pac-Man it’s considerably easier to be innovative in a nascent space, in one sense. It’s also simultaneously harder because there’s not an established framework to work off. It’s remarkable to me how much Nintendo nailed with Super Mario 64, which I’ve been playing recently for the first time on the collection for the Switch and it holds up remarkably well in terms of 3D platforming 101
I suppose it requires clarification on what I mean by ‘playing the lottery’. Could reframe as lottery or nothing I suppose, but I mean publishers and not just Activision are increasingly pulling resources from pretty sure money-makers into projects that are long-term monetisable and hoping they explode into the next Fortnite.
Which I don’t mind, it makes sense but my issue is why not both hope to win the lottery and fund those projects as well as something more stable and less sexy than a lottery win, like a decently performing stock portfolio.
I don’t like games that revolve around gear grinding but from what I can gather both Destiny games despite having issues were pretty bloody good games that made huge amounts of money, and I’m rather warmly predisposed to Bungie for my early gaming experiences with them on the Mac in the 90s. Marathon and Myth were incredible games in their time.
A success, but not a Fortnite or a League but if that’s the bar these days it’s insanely high.
We’re all outsiders at the end of the day, some with better insight than others, some with better logical deduction than others.
Your Destiny example actually pretty neatly encapsulated my own particular personal proclivities. It was a big, ambitious game under the Activision banner, by a real blue chip developer.
The frustration at times, again may be incorrect but the feeling is I want to see what Blizzard’s Destiny would be, whatever that is.
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I really don't get Blizzard. I know they wanted to try something new with Overwatch but why not make it an SC game?
They have 3 very strong universes/IPs in the form of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. I think they should double down on that at least for the forseeable future. There is so much worth in having such a great base - you already have lore and characters so it cuts down on development time for future installments and spinoffs, you have the technical base and experience for different genres (ARPG, RTS, MMO) which also cuts down on development time and lets you avoid mistakes and you also have big fanbase for each of them, meaning you have guaranteed sales and you can cut down on marketing as just dropping a single trailer will spread like a virus over the Internet because all of the exposure your other stuff is getting.
What went wrong? Why are we even having this discussion instead of just praising Blizzard over other shitty game dev companies? Why the stuff they come up with gets them booed out of their own stage?
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Pretty simple, money. Larger RTS were pretty collectively flops within the last decade with the exception of Sc2, but even Sc2 couldn't compete with the big selling franchises. So cost/win ratio isn't good for these. MMOs suffer from the same effect and blizz are still selling expansions for their 17 year old game, so that's the one area they retained some of their success. They got bad reviews for d3 and basically got booted out by an indie studio in the ARPG sector (and they are working on d4, so they haven't given up on that yet). Naturally d3 and sc2 sold well, but they were both games where the fanbase made clear that they were a bit disappointed, so blizz' next game would likely be harder to sell to said fanbase.
There's also a limited number of products a company can effectively market, so Atvi likely bought Blizz to create some huge cash cows like WoW. Since blizz was the one studio from Atvi everyone knew was great they likely looked at the franchises that were selling well at the time and tried to create a contender for the throne. So we got a f2p cardgame, a MobA, a multiplayer shooter and now a handy game. Sadly with the exception of the cardgame these games failed at being top dogs and were built more with casual players in mind, while their old base mainly played hardcore titles. So they lost the goodwill of their now ignored community and failed to really attract a new one.
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Did someone create an account just to troll?
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On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2021 12:03 Archeon wrote:
Pretty simple, money. Larger RTS were pretty collectively flops within the last decade with the exception of Sc2, but even Sc2 couldn't compete with the big selling franchises. So cost/win ratio isn't good for these. MMOs suffer from the same effect and blizz are still selling expansions for their 17 year old game, so that's the one area they retained some of their success. They got bad reviews for d3 and basically got booted out by an indie studio in the ARPG sector (and they are working on d4, so they haven't given up on that yet). Naturally d3 and sc2 sold well, but they were both games where the fanbase made clear that they were a bit disappointed, so blizz' next game would likely be harder to sell to said fanbase.
There's also a limited number of products a company can effectively market, so Atvi likely bought Blizz to create some huge cash cows like WoW. Since blizz was the one studio from Atvi everyone knew was great they likely looked at the franchises that were selling well at the time and tried to create a contender for the throne. So we got a f2p cardgame, a MobA, a multiplayer shooter and now a handy game. Sadly with the exception of the cardgame these games failed at being top dogs and were built more with casual players in mind, while their old base mainly played hardcore titles. So they lost the goodwill of their now ignored community and failed to really attract a new one. Cash Cow WoW? What has changed? Still paying the same as i did ~17 years ago. Created by the "old school blizzard" by the way.
If you look up cash cow you'll read that it is "A product or service that provides a steady, dependable source of funds or income." Not sure what you want to discuss.
On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
They still update Diablo 3 for free. For some reason, you forgot to mention that. Isnt it all about money? I dont understand....
Booted out by an indie studio? How? When? What numbers are you talking here? Path of Exile is the cash cow. Have you seen what scam they sell as microtransaction? They also delivered a shitton of bad seasons, laggy and unstable. It took them years to develop the game
PoE has significantly higher player numbers than d3 and again it's a small studio without IP. Not saying D3 was terrible (but it had a rough start too btw) or that Blizz is doing nothing for that game, but simply put PoE has larger content updates and a much better player retention. So yes compared to a studio with a much smaller initial budget Blizz failed to keep the genre throne.
On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Activision created Overwatch? What? When? Wasnt it the old school crew: "Kaplan and co." who created the game? What "Activision" created the game?
Not sure where you read that Atvi created Overwatch, because I never said so. Blizz never created a multiplayer shooter, gets bought by Atvi and then decides to create a mp shooter with loot boxes. Atvi bought Blizzard and as such likely has a large influence which projects Blizzard decides to develop and multiplayer shooters are probably the largest stably selling product of the last 2 decades. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that the Atvi management and potential revenue had an influence in the decision to create the game.
On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Hearthstone? Whats wrong with the game? Whats wrong with Diablo Immortal?
They are a f2p cardgame and a mobile game. Which were/are highly selling products at the time of development and not Blizz' classical fields of development. Especially the mobile game wasn't exactly what the community of the brand was hoping for and made that very clear.
On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Only casuals? What? When? Post the numbers. Is someone playing DotA hardcore? Or just russian? Or enjoys being carried? Because the numbers for CS:GO are much better, so its just a bad game? I dont understand.....
Dude have you played dota? Like ever? In 3/4 matches I play some fuck starts a flame war because his ego can't afford the possibility that he's bad at the game despite his mmr explicitly telling him so and the rest mainly shuts up because they know it isn't increasing their chance to win. Even in trash tiers people look up guides on every single element of the game. Outside of Sc2 I haven't ever played a game with a more hardcore community. People report others because they picked something they don't think as meta.
And if you can't see that LoL simplified a lot of elements from Dota and that HotS again simplified a lot from LoL you've played none of these games. So yes, HotS addresses mainly more casual players that want a shorter more brawly experience. Blizz themselves described it as a "team brawler".
Not sure why you compare CS:GO with Dota, they are different genres. But yes player retention and player numbers are indicators for the quality of a game.
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On April 24 2021 23:09 esaantio wrote:Show nested quote +On April 24 2021 22:45 Archeon wrote:On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:On April 24 2021 12:03 Archeon wrote:
Pretty simple, money. Larger RTS were pretty collectively flops within the last decade with the exception of Sc2, but even Sc2 couldn't compete with the big selling franchises. So cost/win ratio isn't good for these. MMOs suffer from the same effect and blizz are still selling expansions for their 17 year old game, so that's the one area they retained some of their success. They got bad reviews for d3 and basically got booted out by an indie studio in the ARPG sector (and they are working on d4, so they haven't given up on that yet). Naturally d3 and sc2 sold well, but they were both games where the fanbase made clear that they were a bit disappointed, so blizz' next game would likely be harder to sell to said fanbase.
There's also a limited number of products a company can effectively market, so Atvi likely bought Blizz to create some huge cash cows like WoW. Since blizz was the one studio from Atvi everyone knew was great they likely looked at the franchises that were selling well at the time and tried to create a contender for the throne. So we got a f2p cardgame, a MobA, a multiplayer shooter and now a handy game. Sadly with the exception of the cardgame these games failed at being top dogs and were built more with casual players in mind, while their old base mainly played hardcore titles. So they lost the goodwill of their now ignored community and failed to really attract a new one. Cash Cow WoW? What has changed? Still paying the same as i did ~17 years ago. Created by the "old school blizzard" by the way. If you look up cash cow you'll read that it is "A product or service that provides a steady, dependable source of funds or income." Not sure what you want to discuss. On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
They still update Diablo 3 for free. For some reason, you forgot to mention that. Isnt it all about money? I dont understand....
Booted out by an indie studio? How? When? What numbers are you talking here? Path of Exile is the cash cow. Have you seen what scam they sell as microtransaction? They also delivered a shitton of bad seasons, laggy and unstable. It took them years to develop the game
PoE has significantly higher player numbers than d3 and again it's a small studio without IP. Not saying D3 was terrible (but it had a rough start too btw) or that Blizz is doing nothing for that game, but simply put PoE has larger content updates and a much better player retention. So yes compared to a studio with a much smaller initial budget Blizz failed to keep the genre throne. On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Activision created Overwatch? What? When? Wasnt it the old school crew: "Kaplan and co." who created the game? What "Activision" created the game?
Not sure where you read that Atvi created Overwatch, because I never said so. Blizz never created a multiplayer shooter, gets bought by Atvi and then decides to create a mp shooter with loot boxes. Atvi bought Blizzard and as such likely has a large influence which projects Blizzard decides to develop and multiplayer shooters are probably the largest stably selling product of the last 2 decades. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that the Atvi management and potential revenue had an influence in the decision to create the game. On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Hearthstone? Whats wrong with the game? Whats wrong with Diablo Immortal?
They are a f2p cardgame and a mobile game. Which were/are highly selling products at the time of development and not Blizz' classical fields of development. Especially the mobile game wasn't exactly what the community of the brand was hoping for and made that very clear. On April 24 2021 21:32 esaantio wrote:
Only casuals? What? When? Post the numbers. Is someone playing DotA hardcore? Or just russian? Or enjoys being carried? Because the numbers for CS:GO are much better, so its just a bad game? I dont understand..... Dude have you played dota? Like ever? In 3/4 matches I play some fuck starts a flame war because his ego can't afford the possibility that he's bad at the game despite his mmr explicitly telling him so and the rest mainly shuts up because they know it isn't increasing their chance to win. Even in trash tiers people look up guides on every single element of the game. Outside of Sc2 I haven't ever played a game with a more hardcore community. People report others because they picked something they don't think as meta. And if you can't see that LoL simplified Dota and that HotS again simplified LoL you've played none of these games. So yes, HotS addresses mainly more casual players that want a shorter more brawly experience. Blizz themselves described it as a "team brawler". Not sure why you compare CS:GO with Dota, they are different genres. But yes player retention and player numbers are indicators for the quality of a game. Post the fucking numbers. How much higher? You havent answered yet: They still update Diablo 3 for free. For some reason, you forgot to mention that. Isnt it all about money? I dont understand....
https://steamcharts.com/app/238960 Apparently PoE has between ~50k and ~150k avg players per day in the last week. D3 RoS currently has 15k according to https://playercounter.com/diablo-3/.
Yes they do very minor updates for d3 every few months. How do you think the community would react if they didn't support d3 when their free to play largest rival continues to produce free content upgrades? What would Blizzard's chances be to sell diablo4? Minor long term investment are a form of marketing your next product and d3 has had very minor long term investments. Blizzard knew that back in the 90s, which was part of the reason they were known as one of the best studios for a long time.
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