Blizzard : Activision :: Boeing : McDonnell Douglas
Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
181–190 of 557 posts
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#18290% of my friend group stopped playing Blizzard games when they started to censor speech (specifically speech encouraging freedoms).
As an individual cancel culture or voting with my wallet is my only path forward, but as a corporation (specifically in gaming) cancel culture is going to be a huge problem.
Its not clear to me what the right solution to this is going to be.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community). I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (sk…
The competitive Starcraft 2 scene has definitely seen a new surge of excitement within the past two or so years. (This is just my subjective impression; no idea of the actual numbers. And I'm not sure what the non-professional scene is currently like.) I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are…
Also to a lesser extent, there is the rise of Clem (France). What makes that interesting is he is Terran, which is a race that rarely sees high level foreign (non-korean) players.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good, players like you leaving makes the game a better and safer place for everyone. Players like you, and Blizzard's inaction to do something about it is why I left. Players Overwatch with my girl friends has been the worst experience. Players any multiplayer game as a woman just seems to be toxic. I expected more from Blizzard here.
Exactly. I can tell where I'm not wanted. Enjoy! Edit: sorry I caught this before your edit to include popular buzzwords like "toxic". Good for you, I'm actually looking for games and experiences that are outside the realm of sanitized things my mother would like. And I'm sorry about your girlfriend, it was likely my girlfriend giving her so much shit. She's a real sailor when she gets going. And mean too!
“Girl friends” isn’t the same as “girlfriend”, and your mother does not represent all mothers.
It seems aaomidi is recounting personal experience, and from my own experience, when a person earnestly uses “toxic” to describe how other participants behave it is often an apt description.
If you are human, you’re a person with emotions. When a person describes something you might enjoy as toxic, are you able to pause and notice what you’re feeling, and then choose whether or not to act?
I did this before responding to you, in an effort to help others that struggle with this, (I do, in some contexts). If a person still chooses to respond in a dismissive manner, or worse, then perhaps they enjoy being mean to others.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#185Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion and some minor hearthstone expansions in the last 3 years. They have not really pushed any major IP releases. Acti-Blizzard is as profitable as ever though largely because of the MTX they've baked into COD and other games, their mobile games, and things like their overseas market penetration working out for them. That combined with the fact they've lost a significant amoun…
Hearthstone actually gets regular, huge updates now days. Far more than it did in the first few years. Just today they dropped a surprise update for Battlegrounds. It's clear there's a major, constant effort going into developing new expansions, new game modes, etc. They've figured out a clever model of rotating out the old content to make room for more new stuff. No doubt Hearthstone is very profitable for Blizzard!…
Didn't they just copy the MtG model on cycling content for competitions? I could be wrong but I thought it was almost exactly what Wizards of the Coast starting doing in the early days of Magic.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#186Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion and some minor hearthstone expansions in the last 3 years. They have not really pushed any major IP releases. Acti-Blizzard is as profitable as ever though largely because of the MTX they've baked into COD and other games, their mobile games, and things like their overseas market penetration working out for them. That combined with the fact they've lost a significant amoun…
Hearthstone actually gets regular, huge updates now days. Far more than it did in the first few years. Just today they dropped a surprise update for Battlegrounds. It's clear there's a major, constant effort going into developing new expansions, new game modes, etc. They've figured out a clever model of rotating out the old content to make room for more new stuff. No doubt Hearthstone is very profitable for Blizzard!…
I'll admit Hearthstone is the only mobile game I've consistently played over the years. As a huge gamer, nothing else in the mobile space has had the breadth and depth of Hearthstone, while being accessible for 5-20 minute sessions.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#187What 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…
> Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas.
My impression is that big game studios would rather put all their eggs in one basket where they're (fairly) certain they can make a decent return rather than spreading it around a bunch of smaller projects and hoping one of them turns out to be Minecraft. This is the same dynamic driving large movie studios to invest huge sums of money in a shrinking number of huge blockbusters.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's incredible that a "remaster" could destroy a game like that. I can't even go play a game that I love, a game from my childhood, with an art style and gameplay that still holds up unless I torrent the old client and connect to third-party multiplayer servers. For artists, there's a concept of "moral rights". Art may not be destroyed senselessly, no matter who owns it, because it goes against the human creative sp…
It's like they were trying to destroy any evidence that Warcraft 3 was ever anything special. I guess that's one way to dissuade people from making obvious comparisons.
Let's say WC3 had been a smashing technical success and it delivered everything everyone wanted in terms of the remastered graphics etc, it still wouldn't have been very successful.
Their legal team forced the ToS to include a clause where they claim any and all player-made content, stories or intellectual property belonged to Activision-Blizzard and not to the modders who made them. They did this because they believed they "lost" DOTA to Valve, instead of realizing that DoTA originally helped them sell a lot of copies of WC3 and they had no moral right to the IP anyway, something the courts recognized, thankfully.
I have a wild theory that no honorable veteran Blizzard dev actually wanted to work on Reforged because they knew about Legal's position and therefore knew Reforged had no chance of actually matching it's former glory days. The chance that a lot of modders would want to create content for it were effectively zero.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#189It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
I did, but none of my friends did. I went sofar as to delete my Blizzard account. I wasn't having fun with their games anyways though, and I tend to get irrationally addicted to watching numbers go up (WoW achievements) so I think it was a good choice all around for myself.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overwatch is just feeling stale because OW2 has been in development so long. I'm sure they'll get a huge boost when it launches. But yeah, all their current titles are pretty much just rolling along with nothing new, people are going to go elsewhere in the meantime. The FPS crowd is extremely cyclical, mostly owing to Call of Duty and Battlefield's annual release cycles. Gamers buy the latest FPS, play it for a few m…
If it launches, one of the major faces of that project has left. There's not a lot of trust @ Blizzard releasing good updates to games anymore.
I wonder if the reason Jeff left was that he was asked to leave for taking so long with the game...? I would rather he not leave as he has been the face of OW for a long time and beloved by the fan base. But, this is a public company and deadlines and dollars matter...