[ayngg]

Blizzard is close to being a zombie company, the last game with true Blizzard pedigree was probably around 15 years ago, their last decent game was almost 10 years ago, they are milking the last few drops from the geriatric cash cow that is WoW, they have completely failed to capitalize on competitive games with Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm or even WoW arena, and they are all languishing, Diablo Immortal is a mobile p2w game, while all they have to look forward to is Overwatch 2 which is a glorified patch and if Diablo 4 isn't some smash success they have nothing else.

Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.

[mmmmmbop]

I don't think it's true that their last decent game was almost 10 years ago. Overwatch is a really great game and it came out 6 years ago.

[ayngg]

Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game has basically been stagnant for years, waiting for Overwatch 2 (which was recently teased and didn't appear to change much) while other games like Valorant or Apex have made it largely irrelevant in that space.

[mmmmmbop]

All you said is true, but now you're shifting goal posts. You previously said Blizzard's last 'decent' game was 10 years ago, not the last game that was 'basically a pillar in the gaming wold'.

While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguably brought the modern hero shooter genre to mainstream popularity and caused a flood of similar games to follow it. You're right, nowadays there are more popular games in that genre, but at the time it was quite a novel concept.

Since you said 10 years since the last 'decent' game from Blizzard, I assume you referred to Diablo 3. I wonder, by what metric is Diablo 3 a decent game and Overwatch isn't?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...

[ayngg]

The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.

Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.

[abletonlive]

So you're using Hearthstone as an example when it's also P2W and has lootboxes?

Why is everybody so irrational on hackernews now.

[ayngg]

Under the context of industry impact, yes. If you wish to be pedantic, maybe I should have been clearer in saying that I consider everything past vanilla WoW to not be of the same caliber of the games that preceded it. Regardless, the point is that they are a shadow of their former self.

[jamespo]

Are you arguing that Overwatch should be F2P like Valorant / Apex?