EPTIMO it's inevitable for companies that start off as truly passionate game developers, when they eventually grow past a certain size and profitability, the passion is lost and it becomes all about corporate profits.
Activision Blizzard pays $0 in taxes for 2018 - Page 3
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Pangpootata
1838 Posts
IMO it's inevitable for companies that start off as truly passionate game developers, when they eventually grow past a certain size and profitability, the passion is lost and it becomes all about corporate profits. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16642 Posts
I bet you Activision spent as much on its legal team as it did on its development team in the first four years of its life. Loosely speaking ... Activision was a pirate ship at the start. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7192 Posts
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Manit0u
Poland17236 Posts
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Zambrah
United States7192 Posts
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Yurie
11757 Posts
On August 11 2020 12:25 Zambrah wrote: Yeah as soon as Money Above All Things becomes the way of things quality takes a dive because quality is expensive and CEOs and business douchers don't give two shits about making a half-decent product, just so long as it sells. Ferrari for example cares a lot about their quality. A lot of companies do, as long as they can charge a premium for it. In computer games that isn't the case. Blizzard isn't charging twice as much, nobody is. Thus quality has very limited value in gaming apart from moving volume since you can sell to all customers if you make a good enough software. Massive advertising also moves volume. So you have to compare the reliability and cost of making quality products versus advertising. Since you will always fail a few products here and there, advertising is likely more reliable. It is very similar to movies in that regard. Where advertising can be half the total cost. | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17236 Posts
On August 11 2020 15:02 Yurie wrote: Ferrari for example cares a lot about their quality. A lot of companies do, as long as they can charge a premium for it. In computer games that isn't the case. Blizzard isn't charging twice as much, nobody is. Thus quality has very limited value in gaming apart from moving volume since you can sell to all customers if you make a good enough software. Massive advertising also moves volume. So you have to compare the reliability and cost of making quality products versus advertising. Since you will always fail a few products here and there, advertising is likely more reliable. It is very similar to movies in that regard. Where advertising can be half the total cost. The thing is, Blizzard had something that is very hard to achieve. A renown for making super high quality, awesome, genre-defining products. People would buy their shit blind without asking any questions if they kept it up. This can cut down your advertising/marketing costs tremendously. You simply mention new product on your site and the Internet goes wild with speculations, news etc. This is no longer the case for them I think. Now people are wary and more disinterested, which will drive their advertising prices to increase in hopes of capturing a wider audience. For some reason Blizzard's acquisition by Activision (can't really call it anything else) resulted in them abandoning their original playerbase and changing their ways, which resulted in IP degradation. You can contrast that with Creative Assembly, which was acquired by Sega. They still release the same stuff they did before, they do stumble now and then but the players stick with them because they trust them and know that eventually they'll get the product they want out of them. I can't say that about Blizzard. Nothing past OG WC3 and D2 really captured me. SC2 I knew I wouldn't play after trying the beta for a bit, HotS was garbage compared to DotA and HoN, Overwatch might be a good game but I wouldn't know since I'm not interested in those kinds of games, D3 was a disaster, WC3R is a disaster, WoW used to be OK, then it broke but I don't really find any incentive to play it any more (tried it out recently before Shadowlands but it's just meh, there are better alternatives now). Blizz has lost its way and its fans. Even if they manage to go back to their old ways it'll be years before they regain players' trust... | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24396 Posts
On August 11 2020 22:26 Manit0u wrote: The thing is, Blizzard had something that is very hard to achieve. A renown for making super high quality, awesome, genre-defining products. People would buy their shit blind without asking any questions if they kept it up. This can cut down your advertising/marketing costs tremendously. You simply mention new product on your site and the Internet goes wild with speculations, news etc. This is no longer the case for them I think. Now people are wary and more disinterested, which will drive their advertising prices to increase in hopes of capturing a wider audience. For some reason Blizzard's acquisition by Activision (can't really call it anything else) resulted in them abandoning their original playerbase and changing their ways, which resulted in IP degradation. You can contrast that with Creative Assembly, which was acquired by Sega. They still release the same stuff they did before, they do stumble now and then but the players stick with them because they trust them and know that eventually they'll get the product they want out of them. I can't say that about Blizzard. Nothing past OG WC3 and D2 really captured me. SC2 I knew I wouldn't play after trying the beta for a bit, HotS was garbage compared to DotA and HoN, Overwatch might be a good game but I wouldn't know since I'm not interested in those kinds of games, D3 was a disaster, WC3R is a disaster, WoW used to be OK, then it broke but I don't really find any incentive to play it any more (tried it out recently before Shadowlands but it's just meh, there are better alternatives now). Blizz has lost its way and its fans. Even if they manage to go back to their old ways it'll be years before they regain players' trust... You might not personally like SC2, many don’t after all. I think there’s a danger with perceiving a drop in quality when it’s an issue of personal taste, or indeed just getting older and games not having the magic they used to in our youth. It’s pretty fucking polished and has stuck around a decade. Compared to its competitors it’s... well no other RTS games have competed with it for a full decade now. It’s been supported well and still has a vibrant scene. It’s still very much a game with all the hallmarks of how Blizzard used to do things. From it’s general polish, support, the involvement of Blizzard in the pro scene etc. Well optimised for all sorts of hardware too, another thing Blizz used to do well, WC3 ‘remastered’ was insanely choppy on release for rigs much better than mine and why I didn’t buy it despite WC3 probably being my favourite game ever. I’m unsure where Blizz dropped the ball exactly. Overwatch didn’t interest me, but it does seem a very well made game for people who do enjoy such things. HoTS seems intriguing to me but not that interested. D3 they made a bunch of missteps but it seemed eventually they got a decent game out of it. Eventually WC3R, absolute unmitigated disaster as far as I’m concerned. Far as I’m concerned, prior to that Blizzard hasn’t abandoned its core audience (but I wasn’t a huge Diablo fiend) I‘m 30 now. Literally no game is ever going to enthuse me as much as WC3 did to me at 14/15 ever, part of getting older is novelty of experience is hard to find. If I was slightly older that game may have been Brood War. If I had slightly different tastes that game would have been Diablo 2 but I’m more a fan of more mechanical/less grindy games. As an older gamer with certain tastes my metric is really ‘are they making good games for modern tastes/tastes that aren’t mine?’ and largely I think that’s still the case. Their most recent release was a complete fucking shitshow though, especially it being a remaster of my favourite game ever, so I guess I’m reserving judgement for what comes next. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7192 Posts
Warlords of Draenors little dip in squeezing out expacs that are smaller faster (which would obviously only serve to make them more money on expac sales) is where I perceive WoW dipping into shitty cynical corporate fuckery. WC3 Refunded is full on REPUTATION ruining garbage. A SHAMEFUL release of an absolute classic. The kind of thing that the old Blizzard would never have the balls to release onto the poor unsuspecting public. WoW has recently earned a new meme for PLAYED TIME, systems feel like they're designed to feel bad unless you pump sheer play time into the game which is a metric they measure the games success on. Blizzard of today just feels like it's becoming the same gross corporate animal that EA and Activision and Bethesda are. | ||
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KT_Elwood
Germany821 Posts
SC2 picked up many WC3 players, and WC3-R could have again picked up many players from SC2. But I guess "good enough for Marketing, for initial sales" was good enough for Activision-Blizzard, a company that now proudly owns "Candy Crush Saga", and paid only 6 Billion Dollars for it. To say it with the words of a wise orange man "It is what it is". | ||
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Dingodile
4133 Posts
On August 12 2020 18:21 KT_Elwood wrote: But I guess "good enough for Marketing, for initial sales" was good enough for Activision-Blizzard. I have two assumptions why wc3:r has failed: 1) They had big plans for wc3:r but after they saw the very low (I assume) pre-sale numbers, they changed their mind. 2) We saw a trailer of Diablo4 at Blizzcon 2019, which means they need a lot employees, I guess they took 90% of wc3:r workers to D4 department right after Blizzcon 2018 (which they announced wc3:r). | ||
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Manit0u
Poland17236 Posts
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Broetchenholer
Germany1883 Posts
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Falling
Canada11321 Posts
On August 11 2020 12:25 Zambrah wrote: Yeah as soon as Money Above All Things becomes the way of things quality takes a dive because quality is expensive and CEOs and business douchers don't give two shits about making a half-decent product, just so long as it sells. Thing is- it's money in the short term as they slowly burn away the good will and drain the quality of the product. But quality product was the thing that generated the huge amount of money in the first place. But it's long term big money. CD Projekt is still in that long term thinking and is profiting from it. But notably they have still kept control over their own house and haven't let outside money men who have no vision (except to drain until it's a worthless corpse) take over. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16642 Posts
On August 12 2020 19:31 Manit0u wrote: With WC3R it just begs to wonder really. How come games like AoE and C&C get amazing remasters that people love but the "RTS giant" can't do it? C&C ... amazing remasters? I think its getting the same reception Blizzard's remasters are getting. https://www.gamereplays.org/community/index.php?showtopic=1040338 I'm happier with the SC1 Remaster than with any of the C&C Remasters. On August 12 2020 21:44 Broetchenholer wrote: The drop in quality started really with Diablo 3. The absolute mess of D3 at start was baffling to me. How a company with so much knowledge in how to do it right could create a system that was not working. And i am not talking about optics or casual vs hardcore gamers, i am talking about the core of the game. Itemization was in such a ridiculous bad place at the start of D3, not just because of the AH and bound on equip, but really basic things, like having no end game uniqs or interesting set items. It felt like they did not understand the genre they had themselves created. SC2 or WoW were far from being without mistakes, but this was the first time i felt Blizzard was just another video game company. i agree with you here. my guess is... D3's release timeline occurred when Blizzard had to release games to meet a financial//revenue generation schedule. Up until D3 Blizzard was teh Led Zeppelin of game makers. They did what they wanted to.. when they wanted to .. and who they wanted to do it to. I vividly recall Browder's "we're in the final stretch " comments in February of '09. It would be 13 months before the beta began. At that stage they were still pretty much independent of ATVI's influence. Once SC2 didn't make the massive amounts of cash that Blizzard internally promised ATVI .... that is when ATVI started to put the squeeze on Blizzard and decisions started getting made for financial reasons rather than artistic/creative reasons. just my $0.02 of speculation. | ||
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EdinStops
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noticetax
1 Post
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