Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

I dunno. I think riding on nostalgia can only get you so far. Disney's new Mulan and WC3 remastered getting flak were due to happen at some point, and the criticisms are well deserved IMHO.

On the other hand, Mario keeps reinventing the adventure genre with creative mechanics, even though storyline/CGI of each new game is basically non-existent compared to Blizzard's capabilities. WoW obviously did very well in spinning the Warcraft lore into new directions, and Starcraft Ghost was also highly anticipated before the vaporware lost its steam. I think the main difference between Nintendo and Blizzard - and why Nintendo still commands such strong brands - is Nintendo plays the long term game, never getting drunk on a single unicorn success.

> Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly.

Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like.

> There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim.

I actually really liked how roads were handled in original WoW. They twist and turn, and yet somehow they're always faster than going offroad. And they were reliably safe -- until in Duskwood there's a wolf right on the middle of the road, which added to the atmosphere for me.

For the latest expansion, my main complaint is that they provide a bunch of cosmetic features, which they know are a draw -- but you can't use the cosmetics on your other characters. All shadowlands cosmetics are restricted to characters who belong to the particular faction. (Which is, overwhelmingly, just the specific character who unlocked it.) I characterized this once in guild chat as "welcome to Shadowlands! To enjoy this expansion's new content, please wait for the next expansion to release", and got many pained agreements.

You can't use your mail-wearing toon to unlock plate cosmetics, either. You need to go through the entire rep grind, again, if you want two sets of cosmetics from the same vendor.

I feel like it's relevant to mention how huge Hearthstone is, and that's a mobile first game (at its best on iPad which is rare) that I feel is totally Blizzard tier quality with expected polish and substance to it, and both satisfied a lot of Blizzard fans + successfully tapped into that 10x market.

There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it like the MMO genre with WoW.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess just that between Overwatch and Hearthstone I actually mostly enjoyed this recent era of Blizzard and I'm more hopeful for what's next. I didn't feel contempt from them playing these games, I felt that old Blizzard spark.

Yup - spreadsheets and an absolute aversion to creative risk.

What I don't understand is the financial equation around AAA studios like Blizzard.

Our software company is not even 10 people big and we are able to deliver extremely high quality software multiple times per day to many customers, while supporting a wide range of business contexts. The annual budget for our whole team is something like $750k. Our part of the AWS bill is less than $400/m, but we seem to make due and get shit done.

Blizzard in particular has something like 2 billion dollars in free cash flow to work with. Obviously not exactly the same problem domain but effectively the same sort of cost structure around core product development. Nothing ever works out linear at scales like this, but even assuming a 10x loss in efficiencies of scale (i.e. due to organizational overhead), you would still have resources to run ~200 copies of our software team in parallel on ~200 unique projects. How many teams would have to succeed before that model pays off? 1/200 figuring out how to build a proper WoW killer could get the job done...

To Blizzard I say: Take all that capital the gaming community has been injecting into your money bin for the last 2 decades, and invest in an internal startup culture. Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. If you find some hits on one of these teams, maybe you take a less successful team and add their resources to the more successful one. In this way, you can dramatically expand the portfolio & diversity of the product base. This has caveats for any "common" creative vision, but judging by the comments in this thread, you may want to re-evaluate any convictions around that idea.