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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

#91

Post by WitCanStain »

coder-3 wrote: post #13
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? 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.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#92

Post by 411111111111111 »

username90 wrote: post #88
411111111111111 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convenience features are not the issue. Sure, there are people that don't like them but there are even more that would never bother playing without them. It's a convergence of multiple factors that's destroying WoW, and not all off them is entirely in Activision Blizzards control. I cannot remember playing any games in recent history that had a community as toxic as WoWs to non veteran players. Their effectively P2W…

> P2W Cashshop That is branded as a convenience feature though, it is very convenient to buy a maxlevel character or buy gold.

No game ever brands itself as P2W, so that's not really an argument.

The phrasing made it pretty clear that their issue was with the LFG tool and that you get ported to dungeons when using it to level.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#93

Post by Lazare »

_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.

The point, I think, is that we were expecting them not to have an opinion about international affairs, but Blizzard went out of there way to take a pro-CCP position.

> don't [...] conscript game companies into fighting idealogical battles

Quite right; China conscripted Blizzard into helping them fight an ideological battle, and I think that's reprehensible.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#94

Post by dannyw »

trissylegs wrote: post #24
mgh2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a master at this. News of its child and slave labor abuses have been brushed off because people love their products.

Also making a lot money off what is essentially a huge casino. (games that use Addictive Gambling Mechanics to sell Micro-transations)

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

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#95

Post by pkphilip »

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 it is possible that many people who start new companies are also passionate about making a difference in a specific field and that is what pushes them to go through the trouble of starting a company from scratch.

The people who take over from them, on the other hand, are likely people who don't quite have the same level of passion and who see success purely in monetary terms.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#96

Post by Apocryphon »

void_mint wrote: post #35
ctvo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For WoW your reply is a fallacy without addressing the original point. For every other point outside of Overwatch, you justified, agreed or misunderstood the OP and defended its release vs. its current state. You think your edit justified your original reply, where you attack the OP's credibility without addressing any of their points, I disagree.

> For every other point outside of Overwatch, you justified, agreed or misunderstood the OP and defended its release vs. its current state. The points weren't critiques, is what I'm saying. Calling a game a "hot mess" doesn't actually say what's wrong with it. For WoW, as an example, it's inarguable that it's the biggest MMO of all time with a super active playerbase, even now. Saying "Well it's a hot mess" ignores a…

I wonder what the total number of MMO players is. Maybe the genre is dying and WoW is accelerating its demise.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#97

Post by username90 »

dannyw wrote: post #94
trissylegs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also making a lot money off what is essentially a huge casino. (games that use Addictive Gambling Mechanics to sell Micro-transations)

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 the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#98

Post by falomor »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #27
_RPL5_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#99

Post by username90 »

411111111111111 wrote: post #92
username90 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> P2W Cashshop That is branded as a convenience feature though, it is very convenient to buy a maxlevel character or buy gold.

No game ever brands itself as P2W, so that's not really an argument. The phrasing made it pretty clear that their issue was with the LFG tool and that you get ported to dungeons when using it to level.

But the introduction of that LFG tool (more specifically the raid finder) also coincides with the start of wow bleeding subscribers, and they haven't recovered since and instead just kept bleeding.

I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.

Re: Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

#100

Post by evanmoran »

enraged_camel wrote: post #11
ethbr0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It speaks to executive disfunction -- an inability to currate and fund a long-term creative pipeline, instead focusing on short-term revenue generators.

Yeah, milking existing franchises is definitely a sign of deeply rooted dysfunction. I was excited for their Project Titan of whatever but it got axed. That was years ago…

Using existing franchisees isn’t the problem. It’s doing it poorly!
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