The game series that creates a whole fresh world and story for most of its games, and that has shifted across and flirted with genres other than the one it started with? That resisted “when’s the final fantasy 7 remake?!” requests and a guaranteed pile of cash that started almost as soon as the original game was released, until very recently finally releasing a remake that actually does interesting things with the game rather than just being a lazy cash grab?
They risk alienating fans (and, often, do so-alienate them) way too often to put them in this category, I think, and specifically for the reason of having failed to play it safe and target nostalgia.
As someone who loves the old turn-based games, nostalgia bait has been pretty light in general. World of Final Fantasy is the last game that really did it for me.
whatever the formula you want to use, it's something something times something equals dollars and whoever has the more dollars wins and well I love the shit out of Blizzard for being formative during my childhood but I'm sureWalt Disney has more money than Blizzard does. Or whoever owns Walt Disney.
Walt Disney is also making new things (the most popular franchises among today's childs aren't reheated old stuff, they are new franchises: Frozen and Moana).
Blizzard on the other end hasn't made anything that was not nostalgia farming for a decade. And besides Overwatch you have nothing new in this century. That's a lot for a company that's barely 30 years old…
The second last time Blizzard launched a new franchise, Mulan had just been released…
> Frozen and Moana are 10 years and older now. That doesn't seem new?
That's 10% of the life of the company. And they are just the most striking success of the last decades. Many other movies were made in the meantime. Obviously we cannot expect every attempt to become a generational franchise.
> From what I read about blizzard it seemed like Activision wanted them to treat wow like cod
Activision merged with Blizzard in 2008. At that point the last original game from Blizzard was already 10 years old. Blizzard has been milking its three franchises for the entire 21th century.