Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#151

Post by cletus » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #139

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…

>Steve Jobs said it best. 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. Isn't this also kind of what Apple has become in the post-Steve Jobs era?

You have a point

Cook is not a product leader cut from the same cloth as Steve (I mean... few are). His talent was always for supply side management. This is really significant. To secure components and manufacturing capacity for Apple's scale is no mean feat.

I would say 2 significant things have happened on Cook's watch though:

1. The Apple Watch. This certainly hasn't had the impact the iPhone had. It was also launched as a luxury product (remember the ex-Burberry CEO who drove this? The $10,000 Apple Watch edition?). It later got rebranded as a health product and there I think it has potential. The latest version can do ECGs and determine blood oxygen. IMHO there's a massive future market in passive health monitoring.

It's still a somewhat awkward user experience however in a way that never would've happened on Steve's watch. Apple's reputation for polished user experience as a whole is degrading and we may eventually get to the point of Bill Gates's legendary rant [1].

Steve also pushed back against Johnny Ives' hardline pure vision and I doubt the butterfly keyboard fiasco would've happened under Steve.

The second innovation is on the silicon front. There are two prongs to this:

1. Replacing Intel with ARM (M1); and

2. Breaking Qualcomm's "monopoly" on wireless broadband chipsets. This is still ongoing.

Apple still has a lot of inertia from Steve even after all these years. Who knows how long that will last.

[1]: https://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an...

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#152

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

cuillevel3 wrote: post #10

zahrc wrote: post #3

Blizzards 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?

Until 2013, Blizzard was at least partially shielded from Kotick by specific terms in the corporate bylaws that gave the board (read: Vivendi, which had a controlling interest) power over Kotick on such things as the Blizzard budget, firing of Blizzard executives, and go/no-go decisions on Blizzard games.

All that went away when Kotick engineered the buyout of Vivendi's shares. This also led to considerable corporate debt, which Activision-Blizzard has been servicing and paying down since.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#153

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #132

Blizzard’s reputation was tarnished the moment they sold out to Activision. Soon after, they starting using the Activision monetization methods, churning garbage “games”, etc.

Vivendi sold them to Activision. Blizzard itself had no say in the matter. Blizzard hasn't been its own master since soon after it was formed.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#154

Post by ben_w » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

falomor wrote: post #98

FridgeSeal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics isn’t _really_ a thing that you can pretend doesn’t exist and operate in isolation/ignorance of it. You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist (see the “no politics in my video games/comics please” argument used by some gamers) because it a part of, as much as a function of, any given culture. This doesn’t mean of course, that we require every company to lay out some kind of political guidelines that they’ll support…

Companies ignore the vast majority of political events and issues. Consider a hypothetical startup where all employees are working too many hours to keep track of current events: recent political/cultural developments will necessarily be missing from company policies and products.

Being ignorant of politics isn’t the same thing as being able to operate in that state.

Imagine your hypothetical team had been (over)working on a game which was all about the “valiant mujahideen freedom fighters in Afghanistan fighting off the Soviet Union” when 9/11 happened?

Or they started working with the likeness of any of Prince Andrew, Rolf Harris, Kevin Spacey, etc. before they became personae-non-grata?

Just because some politics is trivia doesn’t make it all trivia.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#155

Post by regularfry » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

karatinversion wrote: post #130

robinsoh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. I don't follow, even in the air quotes monopoly context. Could you elaborate? I thought anyone can make a game, even that specific type of game and reach a paying audience quickly if it is good. Aren't the game engines for CoD and WoW actually owned by different companies? Eg: Unreal Engine is owned by Epic/Tencent.

I guess they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property? But I do see a lot of sloppy uses of the word monopoly that just seem to be autopilot.

There was no need for inverted commas in the GGP post. Intellectual property is precisely a government-granted monopoly under specific rules. Nobody else can make a Call of Duty game: they have a monopoly on the market for Call of Duty games.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#156

Post by LocalH » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:35 AM UTC

I've been boycotting Activision (and thus Blizzard) since way before this, just because they ineptly handled the Guitar Hero brand and managed to kill it off commercially way too quickly. Looks like I dodged one hell of a bullet by doing so. Fuck ActivisionBlizzard

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#157

Post by imtringued » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #111

username90 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Some whales spend $1000 every weekend at the club/bar. They simply have that much money and dont care how they spend it.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#158

Post by parineum » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #153

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #132

Blizzard’s reputation was tarnished the moment they sold out to Activision. Soon after, they starting using the Activision monetization methods, churning garbage “games”, etc.

Vivendi sold them to Activision. Blizzard itself had no say in the matter. Blizzard hasn't been its own master since soon after it was formed.

This is pedantic but didn't Activision buy Vivendi's game subsidiary completely? I assume Blizzard was the target asset there but I seem to remember that the whole company was purchased.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#159

Post by LocalH » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

unishark wrote: post #117

brundolf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The baseline is nature. Society has pushed the effective baseline so low that countless people are absolutely miserable, and we're slowing losing our connection to the natural world, to our detriment

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#160

Post by pfdietz » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

parineum wrote: post #158

pfdietz wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivendi sold them to Activision. Blizzard itself had no say in the matter. Blizzard hasn't been its own master since soon after it was formed.

This is pedantic but didn't Activision buy Vivendi's game subsidiary completely? I assume Blizzard was the target asset there but I seem to remember that the whole company was purchased.

To be even more pedantic: there was a deal where Vivendi's games properties was merged into Activision, the combined entity was renamed Activision-Blizzard, and Vivendi got controlling interest in it.