[smolder]

Blizzard started down the path to failure when they merged with Activision, though I'm not sure they would have lasted much longer outside of that. It's apparent to me the only way "make quality stuff" survives as a strategy long term is to stay private like Valve. Public ownership ruins companies. They grow into inefficient messes and lose any edge they had while alienating their customers in the interest of short term gain.

Maybe companies should consider limiting their growth to stay nimble enough to provide value and stay viable. Maybe they do more good by being good at what they do than by chasing peak profit and diminishing their brands. Either way, Bobby Kotick was a bad CEO.

[raxxorraxor]

Same experience as an employee really. Want to work for a healthy company? Join a private one. It is of course no guarantee and there are exceptions as well, but there certainly seems to be a trend.

[packetlost]

I wonder why this is? Fiduciary duty of the executive leadership? Regulation compliance requirements?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

IMO, Goodhart's Law[1] "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" is a big part of it. As soon as stock price is the primary target it ceases to be a good measure of the actual value of the company, management will try to game the stock price at the expense of the underlying value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[izzydata]

At least when it comes to artistic endeavors like video games it makes sense to be small. I find that the more you turn art into a massive assembly line the less passionate the product becomes. If the goal is quality art than massive growth is not the way.

Unfortunately the expectation for modern games is this near infinite scope which requires several years to complete and way too much money. If your game is required to be this large then you either need a huge team or decades of time from a small time.

So I believe that the larger the game the more likely it is going to be devoid of passion and artistic value. I'd prefer game studios to split up into many smaller studios and make more smaller games.

[0dayz]

Nope, it started waaay before that.

* The sexual misconduct most likely happened way before it came out publicly as all the sleezebags stayed until it was public

* real id debacle

* Diablo 3

* shutting down blizzard north, despite working on d3

* spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump

* x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled

* spent years trying to create a dedicated moba, and hots came out after the hype of the genre was gone

* Cancelling semi-experimental games (the Warcraft Point'n Click Adventure game, the Starcraft: Ghost game, and many others[1])

I'm sure there are more issues/fuck ups blizzard did, the point though is that the company couldn't adapt to the new norms of the industry (some are excusable due to the fuck you money wow gives) and thus became the black sheep.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1ft4...

Certain games on that list tbf is way past 2008.

[Etherlord87]

Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close. I have no idea why you put it on the list.

Activision Blizzard was 2008. Shutting Blizzard North was 2005.

So indeed it seems it was rotting before official Vivaldi-Activision merger.

I think, just like with Starcraft, you misread the situation with "hype of the genre was gone" about moba. I think Blizzard was very good at creating extremely polished products, but LoL already was polished and well established.

Project Titan's assets were used in Overwatch, but yeah, spending so much time on a big project to abandon it really shows poor management skills and overall bad design of the project.

[0dayz]

The problem was the timing, Starcraft 2 mechanics wise is fine even if they made some really whimsical balance changes that plagued the esport scene until it was almost pulled off life support (similar to how Overwatch couldn't balance itself to the point where the developers gave up).

If like HotS and Diablo 3 it came out much earlier it would've kept the RTS genre most likely alive (only revived interest in AoE 2 started to get the ball rolling for RTS again).

Not only that but Blizzard had since WC3 tried to create their own MOBA and stalled time and time again, they announced Blizzard All-star while announcing SC2, only for HotS to be announce after Dota 2 had left beta & LoL was already moving away from static MOBA design to the more "skill based" design they currently got.

Especially if the rumor that icefrog (last dev of Dota) approached Blizzard and Blizzard said no, it's the most obvious act of stupidity Blizzard did.

By the time HotS was out it was dead in the water because it had no competing feature setting it apart from the competition:

* if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2

* If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite

* If you wanted a "skill based" dynamic and more casual MOBA: LoL

HotS tried to mimic LoL which meant an already watered down MOBA being further watered down.

Hearthstone is a good example of how Blizzard's games could have looked have they timed their releases better and stopped with "fold it 3000 times", since you can only do this if the game's budget is a typical 90s game budget or you've got alternative income sources & isn't publicly owned i.e. Valve.

[properpopper]

> * if you wanted micromanaged static MOBA: Dota 2

Static? Dota 2 is not a dynamic game? Not why wdym by "micromanaged" - Meepo, Nature prophet?

> * If you wanted a 3rd person shooter MOBA: Smite

Paragon?

> HotS tried to mimic LoL

Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone

[0dayz]

>Static? Dota 2 is not a dynamic game? Not why wdym by "micromanaged" - Meepo, Nature prophet?

Dota 2 afaik still relies heavily on static effects such as on click effects rather than LoL where it's mostly just a matter of "skill" based abilities.

>Completely different games, hots feels more like a team based game compared to Dota 2 or Lol because it has shared experience + no gold + no items - so the gap between a good and a bad player is not that visible compared to Dota2/Lol where you can abandon your team for 20-30 minutes and then destroy everyone

HotS is a watered down version of LoL, it doesn't mean it's bad it just means it could never compete to garner the same audience when we already have "Dota 2 for big brain people, LoL for casual people".

[bluescrn]

MOBA is a strange genre. Seems to take the worst bits of of RTS and the worst of ARPG, and combine it with the worst of the gaming community and a multiplayer-only design that's very hostile to beginners.

Never got on with them or really understood the appeal, despite loving RTS and ARPGs.

[invalidOrTaken]

The goofy thing about all this is that HotS is really good if you judge it on its own merits. I played DotA for a long time, switched to HotS, and never looked back.

[properpopper]

Hots feels great because it has multiple maps, you don't have to farm/ buy items, but it can feel boring comparing to Dota2/Lol

[pdimitar]

As a casual player who was deeply invested in the Blizzard-verse me and my wife absolutely loved HOTS, regardless of timing et. al. that you mentioned.

Our problem with it ultimately became the drudgery. We wanted more game modes, some wacky whimsical arcade-like stuff. It's been a while and my memory isn't great in terms of the timeline but I think eventually they did add something like that? Can't remember but basically we gave up on the game because there was no gameplay experience diversity; stuff was more or less the same.

...and then they abandoned it... :(

HOTS is still a beautiful and well-made game though. To this day.

[BlueTemplar]

That's bullshit, the greatest thing about SC2 was its marketing (including e-sports money). Ok, also the first campaign is great and the polish is, as always, top tier.

But RTS was only in a slump in the sense that the apex of the popularity of that genre was around the turn of the millennium (which probably was unavoidable).

And only a few years before SC2 released we've got the likes of Dawn of War 1 and Supreme Commander 1, and, last but not least : the amateur-made Spring(-Recoil) games, which put almost every other RTS game to shame, so advanced they were in comparison (and, sadly, still are, when you look at today's player's first impressions of BAR, despite it mostly only having improved in the graphics and performance department, as the 'R' suggests).

Compared to Spring games, Starcraft 2 looked like a very solid and polished, but also very safe and almost obsolete game.

[Pet_Ant]

> Starcraft 2 murdered RTS genre, it was and is so good, that nothing comes close.

I mean Supreme Commander has an active community despite coming out 3 years earlier, with less hype, and from a company that has long died.

Starcraft 2 had a nice campaign, but it really felt like Starcraft 1.5. Never really elevated the genre. SupCom really did.

[Etherlord87]

Starcraft 2 came with a new, 3D engine. How can you call it Stacraft 1.5 let's be serious.

[Pet_Ant]

Sure, but the terrain wasn't truly 3D. I'm pretty sure there isn't any ballistics calculations for the attacks in Starcraft. It could have easily been a Starcraft remaster. It didn't really take the RTS genre to the next level. Doom does a lot more innovation between iterations.

Have you played Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander? Those increased the scale, the tactics, the map size. The weapons felt more varied. Really, made SC 1 & 2 feel rather Mickey Mouse.

[Etherlord87]

I don't like Supreme Commander, but I definitely agree it is the competitor of Starcraft 2. AoE don't seem this way to me, these games are so clunky. And tens if not hundreds of titles that feel like inferior reskins.

[pdimitar]

Tastes are tastes and as such are subjective and can't be contested. But Supreme Commander looks like almost a different genre to me. I like SC2's format to this day.

[concordDance]

Supcom, AoE2, Zero-K and BAR are all superior along different axes to SC2. RTS is a very wide category.

[Majromax]

I hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail.

The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:

* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and

* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.

My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.

Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.

[cogman10]

So interestingly you see this sort of thing play out in online media.

- Youtuber X has a runaway successful video/s.

- Seeing the cashflow from that video, they think "Hey, I could probably duplicate this!"

- When that duplication fails, they decide "You know what, maybe I just need to make a lot of videos"

- When that doesn't bring in the expected income and/or leads to burnout they think "You know what, I think I need some outside help to make me see my blindspots".

And, of course, invariably when that outside help comes in, so does the slop. The outside help does not care about quality, they care about getting money in through the door. That often involves hack and slashing all efforts at quality, shilling out endlessly, and some real questionable decisions when it comes to employment.

Now, of course, the creator is still responsible for what their company becomes. But, money is money and a creator/owner is just more likely to like easymode income (for themselves) vs duplicating the efforts of a prior period.

[mnky9800n]

But for some reason the angry video game nerd keeps making videos.

[KETHERCORTEX]

- Money from sponsored segments.

- Other people writing scripts, recording gameplay and other stuff.

It's a different series today.

[mnky9800n]

I used to really like James and Mike Mondays. Then Mike posted a dick pic on the subreddit and for whatever reason that wasn’t a fireable offense. Kind of killed the vibes for me. That was even before everything started really changing. Now it’s like the avgn is reanimated from the grave for each episode. I haven’t really watched in years.

[montagg]

As someone who’s seen the inside of a game company, this thesis reads true. Success really warps expectations, and warped expectations create perverse incentives that are different than make this particular game good.

[0dayz]

There was also imo a big cultural hubris among the Blizzard developers that if it wasn't done their way (i.e. they couldn't just take an existing IP like Dota and slap Blizzard logo on it, no no, had to start from scratch).

[bloomingkales]

My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.

Going over budget and going over scope can only happen depending on who is measuring. I can spend 6 months developing a part of a game and not consider it a waste of time or out of scope. I’m of the mind that this was the natural state of Blizzard prior to Activision.

I mean, they are fundamentally making things that roughly sound like this - we are all going to sit around on a server and pretend to have a giant adventure

Ridiculous, the very concept is out of scope lol. You simply can’t have the wrong minded people involved in this process, certainly not the wrong project managers. You can’t even have the wrong parent company for a pursuit like this.

[bluescrn]

> Spending 10 years on trying to make starcraft 2, when the rts genre was in a major slump

Was worth it though. SC2 was the last of the old, great Blizzard

[BlueTemplar]

Nah, as you can see with its online-only requirement (and ActiBlizz being greedy about custom made maps), it was already the new Blizzard, after merging with Activision and the changes that WoW brought.

[krageon]

starcraft 2 was really cool when it came out, but it is not good now. And you can't play an old patch because it's always online

[Thaxll]

This is just a bad take on Blizzard.

- x years on the project titan, only to get cancelled

Overwatch came out of that and it was one of the biggest game in the last 15years. It sold over 50m copies, an insane number.

[SketchySeaBeast]

And somehow modern Blizzard managed to convert even that success into a debacle.

[0dayz]

Which was pure and utter luck from scrapping a 10-ish year old project which who knows much much money they threw in.

What if Overwatch would've been a huge failure? Would we still vindicate Blizzard's failed 2nd MMO?

[Thaxll]

What if what if? Reality is that OW was huge success that you rarely see.

[Fokamul]

* Releasing Diablo II Resurrected and striping multiplayer option to host own server, because some modder, made a patch to play with old D2 Lod version on modded server in Alpha version. Years later they patched stripped multiplayer back and now modders are working on D2R multiplayer modded servers, Blizzard people are so smart...

[0dayz]

To be fair this list is only mostly during or at the time when Blizzard was still semi-independent i.e. not merged with Activision yet.

[portaouflop]

Shutting down Blizzard North was when it began to get real shitty

[hhjinks]

I'm confused, you say it started before the merger, and go on to list a bunch of events that happened years after the merger.

[0dayz]

Nope, all of these things happened before the merger, the fact that Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, etc. was released after the merger doesn't change the fact that Blizzard was dragging their feet on those IPs.

[schmookeeg]

The Warcraft Adventure was terrible. I was working at Bliz at the time. Imagine the worst LucasArts-style fan art with no real story behind it. The true believers would have loved it and anything else released in the Warcraft universe, but.. it was very very "not good"

No argument with your other points though :)

[0dayz]

Oh totally, I think that if you guys had somehow manage to get LucasArt to make it or some other notoriously good Point'n Click studio and not... the makers of such classics like: Zelda games for the Philips CD-i or IM ME'EN.

[YurgenJurgensen]

“Do you guys not have phones?”

[stavrus]

This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms. At times, it practically sets them. It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.

Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.

Polygon [1] covered the Starcraft: Ghost game. Long story short, it got canned because it was in development hell for too long. Originally under development by a studio in the Bay area, there apparently wasn't a dedicated Blizzard producer to the game for the longest time, and the idea of what it should be kept changing as new games came out and HQ wanted them to copy those ideas. At some point, Blizzard shifted development to a different studio just miles away from them because they wanted multiplayer, but the same issues persisted. And then they released WoW, which consumed all of their attention. With the release of the gen 7 consoles around the corner, requiring further investment, they made the sensible choice to shelve it so they could focus their time and money on their new cash-printing machine instead.

Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2016/7/5/11819438/starcraft-ghost-wh...

[0dayz]

>This just reads as a random mishmash of missteps the company has taken over its 33 years of existence (remember, it's older than Amazon or Google) rather than a proper critique of when it arguably lost its shine in the public's eyes. The company still generates a ton of money, continues to set records for day 1 sales of its games, and owns extremely valuable IP in the gaming industry, so you can't really say it hasn't adapted well to the current industry norms.

At the expense of being treated almost as bad as people treat activision.

>It has certainly missed a lot of opportunities, such as turning BattleNet into a public digital storefront before Steam, or capitalizing on the MoBA genre that spawned from their own games before competitors did, but I doubt that they would have had as much success even if they did because their approach would have been different.

Afaik they never tried to compete with Valve with a Steam alternative shop, this only came about way later with Activision releasing their games onto BattleNet platform.

>Jason Schreier's recent book covers some of the game cancellations. The Warcraft adventure game was cancelled after they flew out one of the best designers in the genre for a week to try to make it work, and make it fun, and couldn't. It was a game that was outsourced to a different company, and they didn't feel like it was up to their quality standards to ship. Shutting down Blizzard North came about as a consequence of the distance between them and HQ, leading to a different studio culture that became difficult to manage, and the uncontested resignation of Blizzard North's executive team when they tried to make demands from Blizzard's owners, Vivendi.

Outsourcing those games was then the issue, they should've either done it in-house or tried to work with a more well known company, since afaik it wasn't exactly done by LucasArts or Seria but the same studio who did the Zelda games made for the Philips CD-i.

Same thing goes with SC: Ghost, and as you point out it was rife with mistakes that screwed it all up.

>Experimentation is important for finding the fun, and cancelling what isn't working is a required part of the process. And while, yes, there's a ton of games in the Blizzard graveyard, they're no exception. Valve has a list of cancelled games that's probably just as long. And they're all the better for it. Titan died in favor of Overwatch, Nomad died in favor of World of Warcraft.

I agree to an extent, you can experiment as much as you want, but if it keeps on happening without much change within the company, there's probably something systemically wrong within the company, which was the case for quite some time with Blizzard.

[realusername]

I kind of forgot but it's true that Starcraft 2 used to be a joke in itself somewhat similar to Duke Nukem Forever at its time.

[celdon25]

I thought Starcraft 2 was fine, even if it isn't Brood War. Not really a fair comparison with Duke Nukem Forever. Diablo 3 on the other hand...

[0dayz]

The issue is effectively that Blizzard released Starcraft 2 during a time where RTS was seen as a forgotten genre entirely, the best you had was the Company of Heroes & Dawn of War.

If they had released it 5 years earlier it might have allowed the genre to stick to the huge cultural legacy it had, at least in Korea.

Let alone the fact that the story of Starcraft 2 was... white-washed entirely compared to the OG & Brood Wars.

[sirwhinesalot]

SC2 plays pretty great but the plot really went off the rails. Brood War was already worse than base SC plot wise but at least it was still rather dark. SC2's plot feels like garbage fanfic.