| > According to Wikipedia, Valve's total equity is $2.5 billion while Activision Blizzard's is $8.068 billion. It's not just Blizzard. You're forgetting about the huge juggernaut that is the Call of Duty franchise. >I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that WoW and WC3 are similar games. One is an RTS and the other is an MMORPG. Obviously, WoW has an army of creatives making content and developing an immersive world, but WoW is using the Warcraft engine. You can have diverse experiences using the same engine. I was just stating that Blizzard didn't begin to branch out until a couple of years ago. >But you know how much money I've spent on Counter Strike over the years? Probably much less than I've spent on Overwatch loot boxes plus the game, and that game only came out last year. Anecdotal data not withstanding, Coutnerstrike still gets roughly 1.7x the viewers on Twitch > As someone who is a 1x MOBA player, I like HOTS. I find the way that experience is combined makes games a little bit more competitive but also less toxic (No all chat helps too :)). Different strokes for different folks I guess. The other major sport with 5 players (basketball) is superstar driven. Teamwork is cool, but I just find spectating a singular talent who turns the tide of a game by him/herself more fun and entertaining. > They have a story-mode coop now, Overwatch Origins. And it's over!!!!! Grrrr >Yes, I do think they regretted not capturing the value created by Dota.
I don't think Blizzard games are perfect, I just think their strategy is obvious. Valve may be smaller, but they seem to have a lot more freedom and a lot more diverse business interests...hardware company, the defacto online pc game store, sometimes game developer >Blizzard is going to approach modding with the same care and caution that Nintendo approaches mobile games. Sigh, don't get me started. The Switch was such a massive dissapointment to me. Of course it's going to have top quality games, but I find their decision to not include a $5 gps chip a huge missed opportunity. It's dissapointing that Nintendo won't be the trailblazer for AR, location based, or VR games. MArio 64 and Zelda 64 basically set the standarrd for how to develop 3D games while no one on the PS had figured it out at that point. I could also go on for days about how much of a letdown AR Pokemon became. It captured the attention of the dev community like no other game has. I marvel at what the game could've become if Niantic had allowed this completely self-organizing group of disparate devs to continue hacking away...it could've been a transformative moment that forever changed how games are created and revolutionized the social aspect of it. Sure, the bots were a pain but let's be real. The gameplay was absolutely terrible, the UI even worse. I've seen better core gameplay scrapped together in a 24 hour code jam. Single devs made improvements over the base game, and it took them only a couple of days to redo certain features I was praying for Nintendo to step in as consultants after the game spread like wildfire... Then again that could have been disastrous too. Nintendo still has not figured out online multiplayer gaming |
The Basketball analogy is interesting, and I definitely think that watching Dota is a lot more interesting than HotS, no contest.
You've made a lot of good points, and I hope Overwatch's modding tools are awesome. I think we both agree that opening up Blizzard games for modding would be great, but we can both only speculate as to the effect that snubbing modding has on their business. I think I'm undecided on that issue now.