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Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

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Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#111

Post by hedora »

username90 wrote: post #97
dannyw wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the net social outcome of this? Would these people be spending money at the casino instead?

No, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before. The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is th…

That’s a good theory, but everyone I know that’s worked with game microtransaction data says the majority of money comes from a few “whales”.

Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#112

Post by sehro »

neartheplain wrote: post #32
exo-pla-net wrote: post #8

I'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…

Fun fact, Bobby Kotick (the "zero-empathy, profit-maximizing creature" who runs Activision Blizzard) was listed in Jeffrey Epstein's black book: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/dfsrt3/activision... Hard to draw further conclusions, but it's definitely not a positive.

Bobby Kotick was accused of exactly the sort of behavior in the current Activision/Blizzard allegations in 2007, by a flight attendant on his private jet.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#113

Post by weego »

thrashh wrote: post #90
cletus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know why this happens? 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. T…

I think you’re more explaining what happens than why it happens. Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be . When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to. There’s no replacement for passion.

Why it happens is because you cannot find a genuinely creative person with the drive and motivation needed to keep pushing a juggernaut like Blizard forward who would be willing to drop their own creative vision and adopt the one of the original founders. Who knows what they'll do? When its time to eat plates of shit will they do it? It's far too much risk to put an unknown in that position.

Your only option is to send in the corporate fleet because they're predictable. Even if they've failed before they will never surprise or throw out any curve balls to investors and shareholders and that's valued far above the possibility of a new creative spark achieving something.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#114

Post by ReptileMan »

pharmakom wrote: post #106
JustARandomGuy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with all of this. I'm a big fan of Blizzard products, played the original Starcraft when I was younger and still play some of the more recent games. It's blatantly obvious for a long time Blizzard has been sitting on its' laurels and not innovating. The linked article does a great job of pointing out the major Blizzard mistakes, but I'll add one more: Blizzard's storywriting ability has fallen off a cliff. I l…

Blizzard writing and storytelling has always been crap. I think expectations were just lower back then.

I disagree. Both Starcraft and Diablo I had good writing.

For me the decline came with Warcraft 3. Both the visuals and story of this game were shit.

And after that WoW became juggernaut and for some reason Blizzard decided that only pre teen david Eddings fans are their audience and never bothered to check the real demographics afterwards. Such a juvenile writing could only be achieved deliberately.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#115

Post by unishark »

cletus wrote: post #70
exo-pla-net wrote: post #8

I'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…

> Does anyone know why this happens? 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. T…

This is basically the innovator's dilemma.

A large market position (not really anything related to monopoly power per se) leads companies to be very risk-averse since they can always make better gains in the short-term by incremental improvements rather than radical changes. Right up until someone disrupts the market and crushes them.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#116

Post by coeneedell »

WitCanStain wrote: post #91
coder-3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know why this happens? I think it's because of incentives. For-profit companies are incentivised to maximise profits. There might be resistance against doing so in unethical ways at the start but as the company grows it becomes harder to control until eventually it just does whatever is most profitable, limited only by laws (most of the time). Any CSR or ethical decision becomes a PR stunt to distract f…

Do you think worker-owned businesses can mitigate this? After all, one of their pluses is supposed to be that the workers can choose to prioritise things other than profit.

Not the parent, but I have a thought on this. While workers would be able to prioritize things other than profit, I don't think they would. From an economics analysis, we're really just redefining profit as benefits to all corporation members instead of to the owners. Imagine a middle manager has to choose between hiring a factory that is cheap but has a bad rights/ecological/legal record and a factory that will be more expensive, but is proverbially clean . At a top owned corporation they have no personal incentive to maximize profits, but if they own part of the company, their own compensation will increase if they take the less ethical option.

Note: I generally think a distributed ownership model for a company leads to better health and production in the long run, but this is probably a case where it's worse. When incentives are distributed, and those incentives are perverse, you just have everyone bearing the pressure to enact unethical business prectices.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#117

Post by unishark »

brundolf wrote: post #89
exo-pla-net wrote: post #8

I'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 think company founders are often great, idealistic people. People who genuinely want to make the world better. > When they step aside, however, the people who take over after them tend to be terrifying: zero empathy creatures who favor profit maximization over any and all human cost. Seems to me like this has more to do with going public. When a company starts being treated as a money-printing machine, and its ac…

I think you're taking for granted all the benefits to society provided by those profit-seeking public companies. The baseline is all of us starving to death with no possessions or food except what we can grow ourselves or scrounge, not the local supermarket/retail/etc. stores always being there to provide for our needs efficiently.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#118

Post by Qwertious »

_RPL5_ wrote: post #22
exo-pla-net wrote: post #8

I'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 don't understand why a game company is expected to have an opinion about international politics, outside of "we don't want our platform to be used for politics." It's bad enough that Facebook mods are now in charge of deciding what constitutes the truth; don't also conscript game companies into fighting idealogical battles with foreign states.

If you continue to operate under the status quo without comment, then you are implicitly supporting the status quo.

For example, if you follow Chinese laws by banning anyone from your platform who criticise China in any fashion, you are upholding the Chinese status quo.

Now, you can say "that's the fault of the law, not of me". To which I would ask, do you actually expect laws to be the arbiter of morality? By that logic then anything immoral should be made illegal (libertarians reading this should be frothing at the mouth at this notion).

Of course, you could argue that it's not the law that ought to arbite morality, but the customer. In which case, why would you not understand why customers would expect game companies to have an opinion on politics, and pressure said companies when said opinion is unpalatable? You just (hypothetically) said you expect them to be the arbiters of morality.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#119

Post by Jare »

alasdair_ wrote: post #77
JustARandomGuy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with all of this. I'm a big fan of Blizzard products, played the original Starcraft when I was younger and still play some of the more recent games. It's blatantly obvious for a long time Blizzard has been sitting on its' laurels and not innovating. The linked article does a great job of pointing out the major Blizzard mistakes, but I'll add one more: Blizzard's storywriting ability has fallen off a cliff. I l…

The writing in WoW nowadays truly is appalling. Playing a horde character, I spent the entire expansion forced to perform actions that made no sense internally and were the opposite of what I would have liked to do. There is zero player agency and zero empathy. Quests were garbage and made no sense. I’m a player who has played wow since beta sixteen years ago and I am finally at the point where I am giving up.

Fellow beta player here, I never cared about the overall story (although I like jokes and good scenes / subplots when they happen), but the design, timegating, and a large chunk of the art in SL killed the game for me. So it's really a disaster in all areas.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#120

Post by phendrenad2 »

Blizzard once made games for $60.

Then inflation happened, and they had to pay their employees more.

But gamers are stuck in a "back in my day candy bars were a nickel" mindset, and refuse to pay more than $60.

So they had to hide the true cost of the games inside dark patterns and upsells. The end.

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