Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also because almost every other tech company (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc.) make their products at the exact same Foxconn factories. Apple just gets the biggest headline.
Apple probably gets the biggest headline because, of the four companies you listed in total, they're the biggest company.
Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
61–70 of 230 posts
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#62Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classic, but no one stayed for long. Blizzard has been destroying all of their franchises WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatc…
it was very odd to watch indeed, they're completely divorced from reality
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#63Revenue: 8.09 billion USD (2020)."
Who needs reputation?
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#64So, firstly, I deplore the behavior that's been exposed recently. I hope the people responsible and their leaders end up getting shut out of the industry, sued and/or criminally charged as appropriate. But I wonder if those hoping aloud that this saga kills off Acti-Blizzard are indulging in wishful thinking. Isn't it likely that this is yet another so-called PR "disaster" that the vast majority of customers won't be…
What constitutes a "significant number" of customers to your mind? Losing 5% of WoW customers in very mature recurring revenue business would be huge hit, and not something they can easily make up. Its not like kids today are beating down the doors to play a game that launched the year Ronald Reagan died. Even customers without a heart will be upset when content deadlines slip because of labor turmoil caused by this…
TL;DR — I don’t think this will have any major impacts to anyone in the long-term, but I can remain hopeful that at least some changes at Blizzard will benefit their employees.
1: www.investopedia.com/how-activision-blizzard-makes-money-4799286
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#65Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#66Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classic, but no one stayed for long. Blizzard has been destroying all of their franchises WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatc…
> Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. That was in 2008, right? So their reputation has been going downhill for 13 years?
They got a few brownie points back for coming up with the successor to TF2 in Overwatch, but by that point that was the aberration. Everything else has been nostalgia or momentum.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#67Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. Some of my veteran WoW friends returned with the release of classic and TBC classic, but no one stayed for long. Blizzard has been destroying all of their franchises WoW - convoluted imbalanced hot mess Diablo - repetitive. Diablo immortal. Warcraft III - buggy and laggy steaming pile of undelivered promises Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatc…
> Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. That was in 2008, right? So their reputation has been going downhill for 13 years?
Classic Wow and BC were not convenient, to enter a dungeon you had to travel to it, often you had to finish the quests in an area to unlock it, if someone wanted to come who hadn't done this yet you were compelled to help them, often these were quests that were beyond what one person could do. It was built around teamwork and collaboration, but at the cost of convenience.
Starting with WoTLK the story got better, animation and art got better but also a lot of odd convenience things started making their way into the game, and often at the expense of community. Most people at the time realized this but it wasn't strong enough at the time to erode the other things they liked. This was right after Activision merged/bought them and I would say they still had 80-90% of their core staff then.
After that was Cataclysm, which most players do not look fondly on. Though I would say that again they did well with storytelling and Art, but made poor gameplay choices. Most long time players quit playing then. Some really important leadership left during this time or right before it was released, often due to conflicting opinions about direction. I want to say microtransactions for vanity items were introduced at this time.
Then it was Mists of Pandaria, which I think they restructured their leadership quite a bit and put some of the right people in charge again. I think they were down to 60% of their core staff by this point. This one was mostly considered a success and is looked on as mostly good. It was around this point that Blizzard got really involved with the Chinese market or at least more involved. I want to say this was when they introduced services like buying a level boost and race change.
Warlord of Draenor - most players see this as one that had a ton of potential but never really grasped it, most new features were considered not fun, even more convenience things appeared again lowering camaraderie and need to work together. Eventually it was abandoned halfway, the story never finished and so it was scrapped for the next one that they hoped would be a more compelling theme/setting. The art got very good though, but it felt like we were getting less bang for the buck somehow. It was around this point that the game shifted focus to just help everyone level up to endgame content, making the old content barely matter anymore, which is a shame in a lot of ways.
Legion - was mostly considered good, they implemented an artifact system that acted a lot like a re-balance patch on the mechanics of play, this was where most of the praise came from. But even with that there were a lot of complaints, world quests felt like a chore, and so when people developed ways to get through it quickly they patched it to slow it down. The region Suramar got a lot of praise since it was a region that would change based on what quests you've done and I think going forward they should learn from that, but so far it hasn't felt that they've learned much.
Battle for Azeroth - This was a failure of an expansion, people didn't like the characters, the story direction or any of the new features introduced, the game balance was poor and the new artifact system didn't act like a patch like the previous expansion and instead was just unbalanced. It feels like they skipped to the next one fairly quicly. Probably 25% of core staff still remains at this point.
Bonus - Warcraf 3 Reforged - for those who are warcraft fans they like the lore, many grew up with the RTS and they were looking forward to this game. Blizzard failed to recognize the importance of branding here and instead looked at RTS as a dying genre. They overpromised, got pre-orders and then when it was time to bump it back to keep those promises they instead opted to not refund pre-orders and instead release a known inferior product that was different that what was promised and in fact different from what was pre-ordered. Honestly I wouldn't be shocked if more lawsuits came because of it. This was a final nail as a breach of trust for many fans who have felt continuously betrayed up to this point.
Shadowlands - it had good ideas but never lived up to any of them, people came back to try it out for a few months but it's mostly abandoned by players now. probably 10% of core staff still remains, it's a sinking ship.
So yeah it's been a failure 13 years in the making, that's just been exploding all at once the last couple of years. Blizzard has failed at branding, especially since joining activision. Blizzard used to be a company that made high quality computer games with an ethos of "it's done when it's done" and would go so far as to not release a game (starcraft ghost) because it wasn't good enough. That's not who they are anymore, they release things that aren't finished, that are outside of expectations or that are at a disconnect between what their fans want(like game balance over flashy story, community over convenience, or feeling like a part of the world instead of you being the center of it). I think they have some great developers who get it and have advised management many times about this kind of stuff, but a decade of not being listened to has made those with any clout to go off to other companies, often founding their own.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#68I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
I used to think like that, but I now think that's a skewed view of the world that I used so that I could feel better about it.
I don't have any doubts that some founders "genuinely want to make the world better", but I now believe that they are just the minority. Most founders are just after the fame and money—some are even adept at putting on a facade so that you would happily give them money. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just not the world that I would like to live in.
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#69I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years
#70I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years.
Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. They want a formula to produce content that can be predicted, projected and tracked.
Here's another key point: everything you do as a company either adds to or subtracts from your brand value.
For example: Square Enix giving discounted subscriptions and a general mea culpa around the original FF14 release, brand value add. Blizzard adding micro-transactions to classic TBC? That's nothing more than the short-term extraction of brand value into money.
It's a bit like delivering pizza. You're trading long term car depreciation and maintenance for short-term cash.