A short history of Activision Blizzard or how... - Page 23

On May 31 2010 06:21 teapot wrote:
If everything is about money, then how do you distinguish good companies from bad companies?

On May 31 2010 05:45 D3xter wrote:

Thanks


The first part seems about right, especially based on the pictures used that should be clearly implied, and yes it is biased based on my personal experiences and values. What I was trying to "prove" wasn't that they're completely "greedy" like Activision, but that they have well been influenced by it, even if their actual games are still good for the foreseeable future, they have that tainted feeling about it.



I assumed people already know having played some of their previous titles...
Personally (although starting with WarCraft I) I bought (some even multiple times), played and really enjoyed a lot of their older more obscure games like "The Lost Vikings I+II" and "Blackthorne"... If anyone hasn't played those and wants to see some of the old Blizzard quality in action... get them, they're awesome and was almost a total fanboy by the point Diablo II and WarCraft 3 came out, unfortunately the company policy took a slow turn for the worse with the release of World of Warcraft, its success and said merger...

There's also enough articles to provide that contrast on the Web, a really great one: SERIOUSLY, DO READ THIS, can be found here called "How Blizzard became Blizzard": http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/how-blizzard-became-blizzard/

Some excerpts:


This was the time when Blizzard cared and more importantly listened to people, when they put their heart into it and it wasn't about "balance sheets", "business models" or "platforms". It was just a company of gamers, making games for other gamers and putting their all into it. I believe that most of them still do (maybe sans the enthusiasm from back in the day and more "professional"), but they're ultimately controlled by people that don't.



Oh but I think it does, because it makes the breach clear compared to how Blizzard operated before (and never overcharged or thought about monetizing every damn feature) and exposes that their business practices as seen today (building up from World of Warcraft and the point of the merger) have a lot more in common with the business practices of said Kotick (no matter how it came to be, if Kotick is directly involved and dictates everything, if he taught the Blizzard marketing thing how to "do business the right way" with those balance sheets or if he plays golf and eats lunch with Morhaime and has talks about the future of his company, directly influencing it) , who ultimately is one of the few in charge of big marketing decisions than their own back when they became "famous" and "world renowned".

If I could *prove* that he or Activision is behind it, I would instead just do that instead, and not bother researching the web insinuating things. Unfortunately there's no open documentation detailing all this or what goes on inside said companies open to the public to do it.



I guess this is one place where we fundamentally disagree...

While I do agree (and know) that companies are there to make money, they have a lot of different ways to do it, Blizzard made money before this didn't they? A lot of other companies are making money without slave labor or burning children for coal.
It is this difference that distinguishes a good company from a profitable company at the expense of the consumer (which is also more narrow-minded, because it provides short-term profit, but leaves a company vulnerable in the long term)...

And there are a lot of examples where inherently "good" companies can be profitable as hell too, like Google, with all their free services... from Google Books, Earth/Maps, the Android platform being Open Source, they have news.google.com, finance.google.com, they bought YouTube at a loss and still operate it free (albeit with commercials here and there), they released the VP8 Codec as an Open Standard to be used by everyone for HTML5, the Google Language Tools can translate whole texts understandably from the most obscure languages into your own, they offer great working environments while even paying attention to operating "green": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7292600.stm and more... They have and are basically changing the world, and all that mostly for free, while making most of their money with just Ads.

Sure there are some privacy concerns here too, but they aren't f...ing/exploiting their faithful/devoted customers by milking 30$ for a simple feature or 25$ for maybe 2 hours in a modeling program, saying they "requested" it... It is their right to do so, but(imo) morally it is a disgrace that Blizzard even considered doing that to people that already paid for their game, all add-ons and keep shelling out 13-15$ a month making them gazillions, and don't see why this is or should be defended.

Even going with your definition, their new plan for the "Remote Auction House" would actually hurt people IG, cause people could buy items others wanted using their iPhone or a Web Browser from wherever they are.


1) The pricing hasn't yet been determined, that's what they keep repeating btw.: http://eu.starcraft2.com/faq.xml

You can't know for a fact how they will be "priced".

2) All people that want to play the game at a competitive level, getting all the units and buildings, enjoy the newest maps etc. will have to pay for all 3 parts, especially in conjunction with "no LAN", requirements of all the keys for each account, regional restriction and several other restrictions this doesn't exactly seem like a good thing from the consumer side of things:


3) Each of the new "Expansions having as much content as StarCraft 1" arguments are a non-issue, considering both Brood War and The Frozen Throne, while being considered Add-Ons and being sold at a price point of 30$ and below also had 26/27 missions respectively WHILE having 3 different campaigns and different units/levels etc. for each.
I don’t see where they come off praising themselves on this or using it as an excuse to charge more, seeing as it remained the same.

On a personal note I see it like this:
WarCraft (1994): 2 Playable Races/Campaigns (Orcs & Humans)
WarCraft 2 (1995): 2 Playable Races/Campaigns (Orcs & Humans)
StarCraft (1998): 3 Playable Races/Campaigns (Humans, Zerg & Protoss)
WarCraft 3 (2002): 4 Playable Races/Campaigns (Orcs, Humans, Nightelves & Undead)
StarCraft 2 – Wings of Liberty (2010): 1 Playable Race (Humans) with a small Protoss "Mini"-Campaign

Having 3+ different campaigns to play through, that all started anew at some point and offered a completely new perspective and way of playing on things while not overstaying their welcome in the Single Player part of those games was one of the charms and quality features of previous Blizzard games for me. It still remains to be proven that 28+ missions with the same race and largely same units/base-building doesn't get boring in SP after a while.


Just see this thread for this one: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=127066

In short: It is not only a thing of money but also a thing of gaining control and future control over certain things, I think the community would have been a lot better off if they didn't intervene at all into this one and just left it like it was in WarCraft 3 for the most part.

Also I've already said stuff to the following points somewhere in this thread already and most of your disagreements still originate from your belief that every "feature", no matter how minor, bad, greedy, annoying etc. it is or the circumstances it came to be (like leaving something out of a game on purpose in the first place, to sell it later on or leaving something else out that was there before, people got used to and everyone wants back), no matter if a previous product had them already included or not and they should be considered standard is a "good" thing.

If they feel the need to include something like FaceBook, they can at least put a feature in to ignore/make said feature disappear, because for some people having "FaceBook" written all over their game is like waving a red blanket in front of a bull.


For some people it does, even if they take some of this stuff much too seriously xD
I didn't include the whole history of Blizzard or the "entire development cycle of SC2" because I: a) didn't try to make a point about that, b) didn't want to write and research for weeks and make this article even bigger with stuff that do nothing to further my argumentation and c) simply didn't know about, feel free to elaborate yourself

The alpha images of "warcraft in space" have been reported multiple times to be fake and to have never existed

Blizzard was the best company because it had an excellent devteam (which split up/left during wow development)

The interference started with wow and the devs who worked at warcraft and starcraft went on to arenanet to make guild wars

Instead i didn't even try wow out

On May 31 2010 06:58 Murdoink wrote:
Blizzard is the girl you liked in school
Activision is the typical asshole with money
And now they're married

Videogames

On May 31 2010 07:16 Zemtex wrote:
I remember the old days of WoW when you got free days when the servers were down. Zero chance of that happening now.

On May 31 2010 06:58 Murdoink wrote:
Blizzard is the girl you liked in school
Activision is the typical asshole with money
And now they're married

Videogames

The new company map features one business unit focused squarely on the Call of Duty franchise, another overseeing Activision-owned brands such as Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, and a third unit to handle licensed properties. Blizzard Entertainment rounds out the fourth unit but interestingly, Blizzard's Mike Morhaime now reports directly to newly appointed chief operating officer Thomas Tippl, who in turn reports to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick.

"This is an important change as it will allow me, with Thomas, to become more deeply involved in areas of the business where I believe we can capture great potential and opportunity," Kotick said in the employee memo.

"Performance shares" are, according to Investopedia, "shares of company stock given to managers only if certain company wide performance criteria are met, such as earnings per share targets." Meaning, in so many words, that Activision has to meet a certain performance level in order for Tippl to earn said shares. That they will "vest ratably" is only to say that on Feb. 15 of each year for the next four years, he will earn part of that eventual 225,000-share goal (in 2014) ... should he stay in his position for all that time, of course. And finally, this is all based on the prediction that he delivers a higher or equal to non-GAAP earning per share when compared to the previous year. In short, he has to either break even or make money to get the stocks, and he has to maintain that for the next four years. Quite a tall order, sir!