101–110 of 161 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kotick didn't go to Harvard, doesn't have an MBA, and in fact dropped out of university. It's not about MBA vs not. He's just shit.
True, but this is just nitpicking over something that's not really the point being made. The argument behind the OP still stands... the decisions being made by the company aren't ultimately being made by gamers or gamedevs (the workers who make the product / customers who use the product). So everything just turns to shit from a product standpoint...
Mighty No. 9 Biomutant
The list goes on
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't a high-ranking guy sexually harass a woman to the point of suicide at this company? I can believe the company in which a person in leadership sexually harassed another employee to suicide can also have petty executives that demand firing when they feel thin-skinned about their wealth.
And let's not forget the Cosby room - a room dedicated to rape and sexual assault of female employees by ActiBlizz leadership. You might argue that "those" folks are gone, yet apparently their culture has not really changed.
Remarkable, isn't it? Blizzard's knack for consistently managing to misalign their PR strategy with big launch events like Diablo IV is almost as intricate as their game design. There's an unexpected plot twist even George R.R. Martin would be envious of. It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs. One might argue that the co…
Putting my tinfoil hat on, maybe they know the game is terrible, so they do it on purpose so fewer people talk about how terrible it is?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a distinction between "Activision" and "Blizzard" is a distraction. It's "Activision Blizzard". Has been legally for 15 years, and in practice for at least 5 years now. It doesn't matter if it's Ybarra or Kotik speaking now - they're playing by the same book on the same field.
> It's "Activision Blizzard". Has been legally for 15 years, and in practice for at least 5 years now. So call it Activision Blizzard? The difference between Ybarra and Kotick speaking is both one of recency and personal culpability (Ybarra was hired as the cleanup lead, so a reversal on the stance that it happened would be notable in its own right), and of abuses that have gone in other non-Blizzard Activision studi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blizzard as a company sucks though. As in, even if you’re a brutal capitalist and don’t care at all about people stealing and drinking their coworkers breast milk, they just keep failing spectacularly at actually shipping games and getting people to play them. If you’re Microsoft, I’m not sure why you’d keep most of their exec team _even if you don’t care about the culture_
Diablo IV is shaping up to be very successful, though.
I don't really care about the scandals, but man, Blizzard games have been shit for a long, long time. Gone are the days of Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3.
I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps. This is not…
What I don't understand then is this. If the Harvard MBA types are so detrimental to a gaming company, why don't we see any or many widely successful gaming companies who are run by dev types rather than MBA types?
Publicly traded companies tend to use greedy algorithms when making decisions.
There are plenty of dev (or really, artist driven) type companies, some may argue with my choices, but I would say Bethesda, Epic Games, id Software, and Double Fine. Bethesda and id are now owned by Microsoft, so there is a possibility that market forces will seep in over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs. Funny you say that, a writer at Blizzard just got fired for writing a satirical "greedy CEO" character, after a high-level executive played that part of the game: https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1663998815458951168
That seems hard to believe at face value. Maybe there's another side to this story?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad attitudes are way more contagious than a lot of people realize. Just having one person with a bad attitude and resentment to their employer can spread to 5-10 people if they're influential enough.
Maybe people wouldn't resent their employer if their employer did something about the people stealing breast milk, or if they actually took action against the managers sexually assaulting women in the "Cosby Suite".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When this happened and it happened late in the history of the company, they were hoarded by Activision's people already. Morhaime kept the company from the usual bosos for as long as he could, but he had sold shares in the early days so it was only a matter of time before his dream haven would fall to evil.
No, I'm sorry. People want to assume the people that made the games they like aren't responsible for the harrassment, and the people who made changes to the games they didn't like are responsible, but there's plenty of the classic blizzard people who have been involved in the abuse, yet at the same time I haven't heard anything bad about the behaviour of the likes of Ion, lead designer for BFA/Shadowlands, or the "Do…
Making shit products is something that affects consumers, and they will complain about that.