EPTA short history of Activision Blizzard or how... - Page 24
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Dionyseus
United States2068 Posts
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jdc214
United States122 Posts
On May 31 2010 11:26 BanelingXD wrote: Why hasn't anyone reposted this to BNet? I'll happily do it with OPs permission. It has been, look at the SC2 General Forums. | ||
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DreamScaR
Canada2127 Posts
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Rickilicious
United States220 Posts
I almost hate to say it, but I hope that entire company fails. I hope no one buys their products anymore and their stock goes down the shitter. I'm canceling my pre-order. They get no more of my money. EA is no longer the worst. | ||
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SyyRaaaN
Sweden136 Posts
This is disgusting. If there was ever any hesitation about buying the game or not, they are actually all gone now. I'd rather spend my $60 on Save the Children or something like that. | ||
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Zealotdriver
United States1557 Posts
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Sc2ggRise
United States607 Posts
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dybydx
Canada1764 Posts
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Wintermute
United States427 Posts
I think we've all seen the shift in Blizzard's philosophy from delivering the best possible value to the Kotick philosophy of wringing every last dollar from every IP, regardless of how that dilutes the product. Sadly, this is not unique to A-B, which is just following in the well established footprints of Electronic Arts, makers of 20 versions of madden, 3764745 versions of the sims, 84657865 versions of command and conquer, and so on. It's terrible for the future of video games, but it's pretty clear that the video games industry is run by accountants and not by creative types. Just like every other "creative" industry, Bobby Kotick is a sociopath, but investors like sociopaths because investors don't see companies as collections of people, they see companies as collections of dollars. Kotick treats his employees, his customers, and the media like they are an inconvenient necessity that he would gladly scrape from his shoe when they cease to be of use to him. He treats them as means to an end, and the only end that matters apart from his own ego is money. As long as the investors are happy, then Kotick can feed his ego and his bank account, and as long as the investors are making money, the investors will be happy. Where you and I see games as works of art, Bobby Kotick sees them as just another commodity, like Toothpaste or Chocolate Bars. That's why it never occurs to him how wrong or bizarre it is to put executives from Nestle and Proctor and Gamble in charge of a video game studio. Right now it's up to consumers, and the employees of the video game monoliths to adjust. If every one just takes it, then Kotick and his ilk have no reason at all to re think their strategy. If consumers just pay for the privelege of eating hastily cooked McGames, and creative employees accept being treated like a fry cook, just for the awesome privilege of being allowed to make soul less works of corporate greed, then this trend will only worsen. | ||
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FolkenFanel
Colombia26 Posts
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Subversion
South Africa3627 Posts
Look at all the complaints and petitions about MW2, and its like the best-selling game ever. =/ | ||
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Captain Peabody
United States3096 Posts
D3xter said: Thanks Your welcome. And thanks for taking the time to respond in a non-flamey fashion. It's much appreciated.  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. They have "that tainted feeling" about them? Really? The reason Blizzard makes good games is due to their company atmosphere, design philosophy, and development schedules. If you admit their games are just as good as they were, then you're de facto admitting that none of these things have changed that significantly. But sure, the fact that a company you like is associated in some way with a company and a person you hate is bound to leave a bad taste in your mouth. But if you're basing your whole outlook on the former company on that feeling, then that's problematic. 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... But, see, the problem is, you again have no actual detailed image or timeline as you do now...only a general image that can be easily changed and obscured by nostalgia. Blizzard has always made great games...but the thing is, even you admitted they're still making very good (great is debatable) games, and they're following the same design tenets they were then, with even longer development schedules than before. You may not like WoW, but there's no denying it even at release showed Blizzard's attention to detail, quality, and polish; and these are the things that have sustained it since. And since WoW's success, their company policy in regards to release dates and development schedules simply has not changed. Their company policy in regards to quality standards has not changed. Indeed, the main thing WoW's success has done is give them a secure financial base from which to implement that policy and philosophy... 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. The thing is, for the development schedule of SC2, we've had a front-row seat through almost every stage of development. We've seen the game shift, change, we've seen the hard decisions being made, we've gotten angry about those decisions, heard directly from the people who made them, and seen the game take shape. And development of a game is frankly a very messy process; it which involves release dates, quarterly forecasts, discussions of money and profits, and the basic question of how to make enough money off the game to make it financially worthwhile. And it was the same when SC1 was being made. But the thing is, we just didn't see that side of development with SC1. The developers of SC1 had to deal with finances and questions of how much time and money to spend on the game, questions of if they were ever going to make a profit off of it, questions on how to make ends meet; indeed, they had to deal with it much more then, in a new software company struggling to make ends meet, then in the present with the comfortable flow of cash from WoW. But we didn't see it. We didn't see the charts and graphs and quarterly forecasts...but they most certainly did. Your perception of them as a "company of gamers making games for other gamers" is nice and true, but it's colored by nostalgia. They were gamers, they made games for other gamers, but they were still part of a corporation run by businessmen. Blizzard has always had to deal with "meddling from above" in the corporate ladder; in their lifespan, they've been owned by a total of five different corporations; they've faced mergers, sales, and financial difficulties. The thing is, you're acting like the current situation, being owned by a financially-minded corporation with an eye towards the bottom line, is something unprecedented; it's not. Blizzard has for most of its life dealt with exactly that situation. And if you compare Bobby Kotick's statements about his plans for Blizzard with what's actually happened, I think you'll find they're dealing with it now. Blizzard isn't some innocent rabbit unaware of financial pressures and the temptation to cut quality in order to make a profit until it suddenly married Darth Vader; it's a hardened veteran that's earned its space to do what it does quite often through sheer stubbornness. And it's not going to give that up for Kotick or anyone. And Blizzard development teams are still the same as they were then, gamers making games for gamers. If you've read an interview with Dustin Browder, or talked to the guy, you know what I mean. The guy is passionate about the game, he's passionate about making it great, as everyone who's met him can attest; and he's basically a colossal nerd and gamer. And if you've read any interviews with other members of the dev team, then you'll know that this attitude is near universal. Little has changed in the Blizzard dev teams. You can dispute their development philosophies, but you can't deny their passion. But, forget all that: in the excerpt you quote in your post, you have provided us with a specific frame of reference. And if anything, it only shows how little Blizzard has changed over these years. When SC2 was first announced, it looked like this: + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://us.media.blizzard.com/starcraft2/images/screenshots/ss7-hires.jpg) In response to fan complaints, Blizzard almost completely overhauled the look of the game. Color saturation was reduced, "grittiness" was added back, Protoss team colors overhauled; the game looks totally different now than it did then. A complete overhaul of the engine was not necessary at this point, for the main reason that roughly 2-4 years (minus the WoW break) had been spent on developing the engine. If Blizzard was run by industry men, they could have simply re-used the WC3 engine, or used another engine on the market, but they took the time necessary to turn out a totally new, well-crafted, and flexible engine that allowed them to do everything they needed to do with it. [Also note that a 3D engine is a lot more complex to put together than a 2D engine; no one could ever put together a 3D engine like SC2s or overhaul it in anything like 2 months.] Then, they spent three years developing the game while giving the community a great deal of access to that development, with Blizzcons, Battle Reports, etc. Three years. If you've read any of the articles from past live events where the game was played, you'll know that SC2 has been in a playable state for most of that time. Heck, it's been in a polished playable state, a state more polished and balanced than most of the RTS games that come out, for most of that time. If Blizzard was run by industry men, they would have shipped the game years ago. But instead, they changed it around, messed with it, added and removed units, until they thought it was good enough. Blizzard started the campaign, and decided that, instead of simply creating another linear campaign, they were going to create something bigger, better, more exciting, something revolutionary. And it became so big, and so deep, that they realized it would take years to complete just one of the three. If Blizzard was run by industry men, they would have balked at it, and made a simple campaign rather than delay the game. But they didn't. And as if that wasn't enough, once they had built the campaign, set everything up that needed to be set up, they set a rough release date, working tirelessly towards that. But in the end, they decided that the game simply wasn't ready, that the campaign wasn't cool enough, Battle.net not good enough; and they delayed it for another year. If Blizzard was run by industry men, they would have released it in 2009 regardless of what state the game was in (which had to have been pretty good). For Beta, Blizzard has made large changes to just about every race. New abilities have been added and some removed, changes made to the AI, etc. And the dev team is quite literally working around the clock to get it out there; they're basically living in the office right now. They're in "crunch mode." And they're on Battle.net, too, playing games against people. David Kim, the balance designer, plays in the top levels of the game; CowGoMoo, a QA person, also is in the top echelons. So tell me; looking at this, besides the change in technology and time (a three year dev cycle as opposed to 5-7 years), tell me the huge, massive difference in the picture you see here. 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. Again, you act like Blizzard has never actually had to think about money and finances before now, as if Mike Morhaime never had to deal with a CEO who wanted to make more money off their properties. And the monetization of certain features actually is to the benefit of the game and the consumer in some cases. Take something like character re-customization; WoW is based around a persistent character, and if people were able to change that too easily, that would have deletrious effects on the integrity of the game...but at the same time, it is a feature that many people want, and as long as its used sparingly it doesn't hurt the game. By requiring payment for it, Blizzard gives the people who really want it this feature what they want, and by making it cost money, they keep it rare enough that only the dedicated players who really care about this kind of thing (read: not all that many people) will use it. The same holds true for server transfers (Blizzard wants you to play with the same group of people in general). And, frankly, these kinds of small features simply didn't exist in past generations of games...so there's no direct comparison even with something like a mount store. In the end, though, it's still cosmetic, and it makes Blizzard money. It's not morally praiseworthy, but it's also not deleterious to the game. You can't know for a fact how they will be "priced". Everyone and their brother at Blizzard has called them expansion sets, referred to them as such, etc. They have also said that they will be priced according to their content. Blizzard wouldn't give away prices this far in advance anyway. The logical and natural deduction is that they will be priced thusly. Saying they're greedy because no one can prove that they won't over-charge is simply a bad argument. 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: Okay, let's talk about expansions. Expansions exist almost totally for financial reasons; they exist to allow a company to make up some of the development costs by using the already-created resources to create new content and sell it. The reason BW exists is in order to make up for the losses incurred over the long development time for SC1. Blizzard also licensed two other expansion packs at the same time, for the same reasons; they were frankly pretty bad, and are little know today. And let me also be clear about something else: SC2 is not going to make Blizzard a profit. They have worked on this game for upwards of seven years. For about five years, they have been paying a full development team, and making not a penny off of it; they have hired professional voice actors and voice actors, paid writers and composers and a full orchestra. The amount of money spent on this project is astronomical. Even if SC2 sells as well as they're hoping, the project is going to be heavily in the red when all is said and done. And it's probably been the same way for a lot of Blizzard's games. It almost certainly was that way for SC1. SC1 made a profit only with the help of the BW expansion and ten years of sales. But by the time Blizzard got to SC2, they were prepared for it, and they knew the development cycle was going to be long; heck, by the time they got to work in earnest, it had already been long, and their plans were extremely ambitious and time-consuming. And so, as numerous interviews attest, they had calculated long before the idea of splitting the campaigns that it would take two expansions for them to make a profit off of the project. And it will; SC2 will probably not make a cent of profit for Blizzard until the second expansion pack is out. But Blizzard in SC1 also was committed to making sure that the expansion simply wasn't a cheap money grab; that the people get their money's worth when they bought the expansion, with enough content to make it worth their while. And Blizzard is committed to the same thing with SC2. In interviews, Dustin Browder has affirmed that they want to make sure that everyone gets their money's worth as well; with this in mind, they're going to be creating two totally unique campaigns of 30 missions with totally different mechanics and with a totally different experience than the Terran campaign. And they're going to be adding multiplayer units, abilities, etc. The expansions are going to be packed full of content, and there's even question (by Browder in interviews especially) if they're going to be able to get them out fast enough to make it worth their while. BW came out the same year as the original SC. SC2's expansions are going to take significantly more time, and they're going to have as much content as a full game. This is hardly greed, and if anything it is less greedy than Blizzard in the past. 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. Don't make me laugh. SC2's campaign is many times more complex in terms of design than SCs. The BW campaign could be designed in the map editor in a month without any trouble; the SC2 campaign contains oodles of mechanics, units, abilities, art, tilesets, etc not found in the multiplayer. It took Blizzard years to develop, and they're going to be starting again from almost the ground up for each of the expansions, building an almost totally different system Again, if this be greed, I'd hate to see charity. 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. Sure, it's a tradeoff. In exchange for not getting an experience of newness that often, you get a much deeper and longer experience. You obviously feel one way about it; but that's only your opinion, and many people would disagree with you on it. It remains to be seen whether it's a trade-off that's worth it...but regardless, it's a design decision, not one based on money or greed. 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. Many informed people in the community disagree with you. In the end, I am confident it is good for the community. We'll just have to agree to disagree. And, just to make it clear, an optional feature is good if it adds value and does not negatively affect the game or take away a core feature from people who choose not to use it. I think I made it clear in my last post, but whatever. 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. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. If seeing the Facebook logo makes you angry, then frankly that's your business, and your problem.  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 Well, sure, I know you were trying to make a point, and I agree you don't have to include everything in the world. But hopefully, I've shown in this post that the evidence you leave out speaks against your point, as my last post attempted to show that the evidence you include does not really necessitate your conclusion. Because that's the thing about most of the evidence you present in the OP. It could be taken the way you say...or it could just as easily not be. At best, you've created a plausible narrative that could or could not be true; at worst, you've created a blatant falsehood. But because you have not included so much evidence, the narrative you give simply cannot conclusively prove your thesis. And the evidence you have not included goes a long way towards disproving it. | ||
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mangomango
United States265 Posts
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ChApFoU
France2982 Posts
With the rapid expansion and success of the internet video game sphere, I guess it was unavoidable. That's how capitalism goes :/ Im' buying the game (the 1st one, Wings of Liberty) because I'm a fan, that's fine but I won't spend a single buck in any of that customizing BS. edit : Btw thx for the article TS, really well written and interesting. | ||
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Vexx
United States462 Posts
On May 31 2010 14:12 Subversion wrote: Problem with Kotick is, everyone hates him, but he's damn good at what he does. He's making a ton of cash for Activision, despite people threatening boycotts etc etc, what he does WORKS. Look at all the complaints and petitions about MW2, and its like the best-selling game ever. =/ Not exactly accurate. The best selling part is on the xbox and PS3. The whole controversy was on the pc and PC sales were roughly estimated to be about 6% of total sales. There's an article stating that MW2 on the pc experienced 550% piracy. Anyway, the next game in the series has corrected all the controversy but it is being developed by another studio. B.net 2.0 is xbox live on the PC. That's like taking a car and replacing the steering wheel with handle bars, removing air bags, getting rid of AC/Heating, the radio and a clock and barely leaving the tools to use your turn signal. | ||
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Vynakros
Slovenia63 Posts
There will be chat rooms, they're just not making launch. Probably. So Frank was out for interviews in EU it seems (?) and said something to the effect of "no chat rooms" but there would be chat for guilds and groups. Which is more or less what was said before. That it would be more about getting people into focused discussions instead of just having free for all chat systems. In any case, I don't know a lot about it. Personally, chat rooms are soooooo 2002. And they're thinking of adding cross realm support too: Here's the last thing that was said on region locking (this was Sigaty btw): Q: How far in the 'long term' are those plans which allow for swapping to U.S. servers on an E.U. account - or a global account? A: Jumping to the region you want is definitely in the long term plan for Battle.net, although we do have some concerns about communicating properly to the player what's happening if they choose this because it WILL affect the latency of the game. As far as a date on when, I don't have one yet. There are a number of features that we want to make sure get out their first and jumping to different servers is lower on the priority list at the moment. Hope it's not old news, but there's a glimmer of hope anyway. Source | ||
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Failsafe
United States1298 Posts
Fucking with Starcraft, on the other hand, is damning. Fuck Blizzard. P.S. Why are you hating on capitalism when it's not capitalism that sucks? People suck. Capitalism is fine. Without capitalism you don't have economic freedom. Economic freedom is simply freedom to choose what you do with what you have. If you don't like what people do when they do what they want, then you don't like people. There's nothing wrong with freedom. There is no sane alternative to capitalism. Your choice is whether or not you buy Starcraft 2. As with any good prisoner's dilemma, your choice doesn't matter. Your opinion won't be heard unless you can get a few million people to echo it. Either Starcraft 2 is worth $50 to you, or it isn't. What does the question have to do with the moral qualities of ActiBlizz? | ||
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Daralii
United States16991 Posts
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ToeJam
United States282 Posts
I hope this writeup will be shared with other websites. It's pretty important imo :/ | ||
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afirlortwo
United States161 Posts
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