"Do you guys not have phones?" -Blizzard staff in 2018, in response to booing fans upset that Blizzard wouldn't make a PC version of a game those same fans obviously wanted to play. This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have…
I think this is more of the enthusiasts vs. causal user conundrum. Gaming has made the transition to a mature industry where mass market appeal is more profitable than a great product aimed at enthusiasts. I can't really blame either side. It sucks for enthusiasts who want games that are complex, to be offered a watered down experience full of MTX. But it sucks for studios when they sink a 10xs the money into produci…
This seems obvious, but there are examples to the contrary (Zynga, etc). Assassins Creed was a legitimate artistic experience long before Ubisoft began milking it for everything its worth. Stories out of Bungie during the Halo trilogy era paint a picture of a college dorm, filled 24 hours a day with people working because they loved the product; a far cry from the billion dollar delayed outsourced forced-overtime disaster of Infinite (though, to be clear, nothing is all roses). Near every franchise that is worth anything nowadays started in raw, true passion.
Its difficult to simply say "Money shouldn't matter", because it absolutely does matter, but when it starts entering into the equation guiding development decisions, the quality of the product will decrease, and over the long term the company will begin making less money from their games. Call of Duty is a great example, which has seen reducing sales every year, until the Modern Warfare remake (also a bad sign; when a company has to reach back to their glory days to reignite the playerbase). Warzone captured a zeitgeist, but Cold War met with poor reception; the passion is gone, and players recognize that. More applicable to the article; WoW as well, where every expansion released since Wrath has seen a decline in player-count (except spikes when they first release, and Legion saw a small uptick, which per the previous parenthesis was mostly just a "hey remember Burning Crusade" expansion); its not a coincidence (though certainly not the whole reason) that Wrath introduced Dungeon LFG late in its cycle, and Cataclysm introduced Raid LFG soon after.
I don't know how companies can engineer an environment which helps maintain this flame of passion for the decades a franchise can last, except to say that the business should absolutely be firewalled as much as possible from anyone implementing the artistry. No talk of revenue; no metrics targets. That's a trust fall; businesses don't tend to like trust falls, but on the other side of the coin, this is more-or-less the model Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo all follow with their first-party titles, and the general high quality shows. Its a luxury for them, but seemingly a necessary one. Centralizing artistic power in an individual also seems to help; many incredible games, despite being the work of many, tend to have names predominately associated with them (The Last of Us? Neil Druckmann. Mario? Miyamoto), whereas bad games tend to be associated with a company (which may point to less artistic agency in any individual and more design-by-committee).
The world would benefit from learning about what makes some game companies so insanely successful (Nintendo being a big one); but, I also suspect, companies which have nailed the culture & process necessary to make it happen aren't keen to share, as its a serious, serious moat. One thing is for sure; I would not jump at the chance to emulate whatever Activision-Blizzard is doing right now.