20 ms·
I completely support thwarting monopolistic practices and even trying to prevent them from being possible. I just hope Blizzard can one day be completely divor
by ulkesh 4y ago
I completely support thwarting monopolistic practices and even trying to prevent them from being possible. I just hope Blizzard can one day be completely divorced from Activision. Whether Microsoft is a better fit, I cannot say, but I do feel as if Blizzard has been making one poor decision after another ever since the acquisition in 2008 -- and only very recently have things looked somewhat brighter for them.
- p1necone 4y agoYeah, I wish MS could buy Blizzard from Activision rather than acquiring both of them. But I suspect they're mostly doing it to get Call of Duty so that wouldn't really work.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoIt’s interesting that nobody is talking about King, candy crush is a license print money.
- Camillo 4y agoOverwatch launched in 2016 to critical and commercial acclaim. I would say the opposite, it's in the last few years that Blizzard seemed to really go off the rails.
- AlexandrB 4y agoI think Overwatch was a sign of things to come. The loot box monetization, the focus on competitive play to the detriment of other elements, and the very rigid structure of the game (can't choose map, role queue) all felt like downgrades from Blizzard's previous efforts. At least the gameplay was good for a while. Overwatch was the first Blizzard game that I liked less and less the more they patched it.
- AgentME 4y agoOverwatch has had prominent open queue, arcade, and custom game options for a long time now, and with Overwatch 2 they've removed loot boxes.
- a_t48 4y agoInstead of lootboxes, we have $/time locked heroes. :(
- swagmoney1606 4y agoIt's frankly pretty insane to me that heros are gated behind a paywall in a competitive game mode. Is this the first pay to win competitive game?
- babypuncher 4y agoHasn't League of Legends been doing this for over a decade?
- blibble 4y agoLoL you pick your hero at the start Overwatch is all about swapping heroes during the game Blizzard even incentivised swapping heroes more in Overwatch 2 (30% ult charge retained, vs. 0 in Overwatch 1)
- a_t48 4y agoYeah I refuse to buy the battle pass on principle. I would have probably bought them if it were just cosmetics.
- djtango 4y agoAs someone who grew up paying £25-60 for a brand new game, I find it pretty insane that we've been trained to want games for free despite it costing millions to develop and run dedicated servers for millions of players. I tried out Overwatch 2, despite all the negative press it is fun and sweaty. I had plenty of fun despite not playing as Kiriko and I'm sure I could easily derive 10s if not 100s of hours before feeling a need to unlock Kiriko. If a game is taking so much of your time and you have a job, why isn't it ok to just pay a bit to unlock a hero? I'd take these kinds of monetisation over destiny 2 which didn't even have p2w or clash royale (before season pass)
- beebmam 4y agoI don't understand how this is any way monopolistic. There's an enormous amount of competition in the gaming space. If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
- sofixa 4y ago> don't understand how this is any way monopolistic It's oligopolistic, you have a virtually integrated behemoth across multiple sectors that is too big to fail, which is not good for competition and thus for consumers. > If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society! Is this sarcasm I'm missing? There's nothing wrong with conglomerates, but enormous vertically integrated with exclusivity ones aren't good for society.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoWhat market does Microsoft operate in where there aren’t strong competitors? Google docs, AWS, PlayStation and Nintendo, Zoom, Chromebooks, Postgres/Oracle, Splunk/McAfee. If Microsoft exited any of those markets the competition would soak up the market share and keep right on going. Doesn’t sound too-big-to-fail to me. Big on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad.
- sofixa 4y agoThe only reason the majority of Microsoft's product still exist is the company behind them. E.g. Azure, Microsoft Teams are objectively extremely poor products with tons of drawbacks compared to any of their competitors, and would never survive on their own - their only "advantage" is that they come from a known brand enterprises already have relationships with, so it's "easy". So legitimate competitors lose market share to a poor cross-subsidised product propped up by Microsoft's cash. This is not good for the competition nor the consumers (be they business or consumer).
- jxi 4y agoAs a childhood fan of all things Blizzard (clocked in thousands of hours on their games), Activision has destroyed any respect I had for this company. They defiled every franchise, and Diablo Immortal is a sickening game. Sincerely hope the deal falls through and the company goes bankrupt.
- chrononaut 4y ago> Diablo Immortal is a sickening game. I actually only (re-)learned of the game recently (I recall its original announcement), but not enough to know anything more about it and I have been meaning to go back to it and check it out. Do you have a short version of what lends you that opinion?
- Zircom 4y agoI think the biggest issue people point to is you have to sink literally 10 years or $100,000 into the game to fully upgrade a character with how the rewards are structured/priced.
- ghastmaster 4y agoI've been playing Diablo 1 for about two decades, not every day and not every year, but I assure you it is countless hours. I have not found all the items that would perfect my characters. It takes an extraordinary amount of time to find them. Some items I may never find in all my life. I enjoy playing the game. Some people are willing to play, some pay.
- Zircom 4y agoSo by 10 years I don't mean playing casually for a decade, it's literally 90,000 hours. And Diablo Immortal is a little different being a PVP game, having good gear doesn't just let you solo dungeons, it means people paying their way into kicking your ass every time.
- AlexandrB 4y agoIt's fundamentally "pay to win" - money spent matters more than skill or mechanical mastery. Since it has a PvP mode, this means that if you're not whaling you're just krill for the whales to kill.
- SpaceManNabs 4y agoBlizzard was done before Activision. Even before the Vivendi deal.
- tarsinge 4y agoI never got over their shift to cartoon fantasy art style, and how it contaminated fantasy art in general in the 00’s ruined it for me.
- chowells 4y agoShift... to cartoon fantasy art style? You mean the style of The Lost Vikings, Rock'n'Roll Racing, Warcraft (all of them), and so on? Any games not in that style are outliers.
- tarsinge 4y agoThese elements were present but better balanced. The cartoon aspect for 16-bit games like Lost Vikings is on point. In Warcraft 2 you had a perfect mix of seriousness / grit with humor. Over the top art AND comic/anime style AND polished don't work for me. It's Fantasy, the subject is already silly, humor can be present but everything else has to be serious, it's a fine balance otherwise it devolves into parody. Another way to put it is that for me it worked while Samwise contributed but was in check. Edit: Now I'm not blaming them, from a business perspective they had to follow the shifting zeitgeist and it obviously worked, old school D&D/Warhammer/Heavy Metal/... were totally uncool at the time especially for teenage millennials.
- Pulcinella 4y agoBlizzard and Activision definitely need a very, very thorough house cleaning when it comes to worker mistreatment and sexual harassment.
- TillE 4y agoAll I want is Bobby Kotick and his friends on the board gone, so I can think about maybe buying Diablo 4 when it's released.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoDiablo 4 is a grindy MMORPG with some Diablo elements, so don't get your hopes up too much
- gopher_space 4y agoAll I've ever really wanted was a modern D2. I like what Beamdog have done with Neverwinter Nights 1, even though they focus more on the backend.
- vkou 4y ago> All I've ever really wanted was a modern D2. That game exists, and it's called Path of Exile. It is also the poster child for why most of D2 aged really, really, really poorly. Another take on that same concept is called Last Epoch.
- extesy 4y agoGrim Dawn is an excellent modern take on D2 formula. Single player, no MMORPG nonsense, no microtransactions.
- account42 4y ago> I like what Beamdog have done with Neverwinter Nights 1 Double the price for minimal fixes? They didn't even bother including fixes for known issues which known workarounds available on the vault like e.g. HotU companions sometimes not using most of their abilites because the AI selects the mount ability as the best available one. Really, these old games should just be released to the community to maintain them like iD used to do. And if someone like Beamdog wants to profit off such maintenance then they better be able to do so without taking the original down from sale because they know they can't actually compete with vanilla + community patches.
- holler 4y agoTotally, but also excited to see what ex-blizzard creatives at Frost Giant Studios and their upcoming RTS Stormgate will bring. Happy to see the talent reform elsewhere. https://playstormgate.com/ https://playstormgate.com/
- Goronmon 4y agoThe track record of "ex-<Popular Game/Company> devs/etc" splitting off for new companies/IPs isn't that compelling to me personally. Lots of games have been sold with that angle, and few that I can remember were able to come even close to the previous titles.
- leidenfrost 4y agoThat's true, and somewhat related of what I think about nostalgia. Sometimes it's not that they lost the touch or that they sold themselves. It's just that we're not teenagers anymore, in an old internet cafe playing on LAN with our friends. Even if a similar game is coming back, the entire moment with all its context is not. Still, I'm happy to see they're still alive and faithful to their roots.
- OhioMan2943 4y agoRespawn entertainment (Co founder of infinity ward) has been successful, with Fallen Order and Titanfall 2 both being memorable games. Obsidian has been arguably less so, but grounded and the outer worlds have both been unique feeling and creative titles in my eyes.
- Aeolun 4y agoThe Outer Worlds mostly lacked a compelling main narrative, but it was a pretty fun RPG. I dunno, the soul was a bit missing I think.
- caskstrength 4y ago> Lots of games have been sold with that angle, and few that I can remember were able to come even close to the previous titles. Troika? Obsidian?
- sergiotapia 4y agoAll of the people responsible for the Blizzard seal of quality are long gone. They are Blizzard in name only.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI'm not convinced the acquisition was responsible. The problem I've perceived (with my very limited wisdom on the topic) is that once they made it huge with World of Warcraft, shipping a "pay-once + expansions" product is just such a financial footnote that it's seen as a distraction. I wonder if that's why the "Real Money Auction House" from Diablo 3 existed.
- bombcar 4y agoWoW was too big of a cash cow for too long, and sucked the oxygen out of the room at Blizzard; everyone who was involved with making non-WoW games left.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoHow can that be true if Blizz still had multiple non-WoW games, including new releases like Overwatch 2 and upcoming Diablo 4?
- wnevets 4y ago> but I do feel as if Blizzard has been making one poor decision after another ever since the acquisition in 2008 "Gamers" might believe this but do the stakeholders actually believe that? The company is still printing money. [1] [1] https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-made-300-million-dollars/#:~:text=Blizzard's%20Diablo%20Immortal%20surpasses%20the,in%20revenue%2C%20according%20to%20reports https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-made-300-million-dollar....
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago$300M compared to WoW printing $7B per year in profit in its heyday is almost a rounding error. To put things into perspective - in its heyday - WoW was half as profitable as Tesla is now... It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice. They made WoW. It was insanely profitable. Their valuation soared. They sold. They declined. It's hard to say if its reversion to the mean or the Activision acquisition - but it's hard to argue Blizzard hasn't declined by every metric.
- wnevets 4y agoAre you really saying a mobile game earning 300M in roughly 4 months is bad?
- Retric 4y agoThat’s earnings not profit. Considering the cost to create and amount of reputation damage it caused, YES. Diablo immortal was a massive failure.
- wnevets 4y agoWhat percentage of that 300M do you believe went to cost? According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
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- madrox 4y agoI believe that ship has sailed and the culture has changed. Simply removing Activision's influence won't put things back the way they were. Perhaps bringing back some of the original leaders might.
- n4bz0r 4y ago> and only very recently have things looked somewhat brighter for them Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoNothing monopolistic about this acquisition. Microsoft is a small player in a huge market right now.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoIn America today, when people say “monopoly” they just mean “big”. It’s watered down to the point of being meaningless.
- baud147258 4y ago> I just hope Blizzard can one day be completely divorced from Activision. What for? Blizzard's a shell of its former glory and hadn't done much of note recently (even if it's still making money). The way things are, within Activision, Microsoft or on its own, I don't really see Blizzard making anything on the level of their best games in the future.
- Eji1700 4y agoFrom my pov blizzard was already draining LONG before activision. The success of WoW killed their creativity and standards as they could just focus on recycled cliche on rails content and make loads of cash. That said, even if it's activision, and even if you can can somehow separate them, the talent that made blizzard blizzard (whatever era of it you enjoyed) is likely long gone.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoI miss the days when Bill Roper was there. The fact that they repolished D2 into a game absolutely worth playing today on modern hardware, gorgeously really shows how good he was. And tbf, how good the graphics team is. D2R is a wonderful game, and the fact that the same old (but great) engine is actually still running is kinda incredible. I wish OW2 was a gem like that. A friend and I have over 1k hours each into OW1.