Poor guy...
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Blizzard was not bought by Activision. Blizzard was sold to Vivendi and was a part of Vivendi games along with Sierra. Activision proposed a merger with Vivendi games and Vivendi agreed under the condition that Vivendi maintains the majority of shares in the company (they started with 52% and ended around 63% of shares) once merged the new Activision-Bizzard axed Sierra. Under this Blizzard entertainment mostly maintained their autonomy. In 2013 Activision-Blizzard purchased about $5 Billion of their own stock from Vivendi reducing Vivendi share ownership to roughly 11% making Activision Blizzard an independent company.
Honestly it’s probably not activision that’s causing the problems so much as it would have been under any corporate entity they were owned by. They weren’t even an independent company when they made WC orc and humans. By the nature of corporations, they are terrified of risk. But video games are a creative and risky business. 2 things that corporate drones do not understand and have an instinctual revulsion to. So when you have creative people move on for whatever reason someone has to be hired or promoted to replace them. And guess who picks the candidates for the most important positions. Corporate drones. So uncreative, risk averse, yes men are now placed in creative positions, like editorial boards or creative directors deciding what gets made and what doesn’t. Add on sjw brought in by hr who get mixed into the bunch kowtowing to communist China is obviously the next thing to happen. It just sucks so bad for blizzard because they had talented people in the creative positions for so long and when people left it was obvious in the product.
From the inside, I'll say that the Activision influence, coming directly from Bobby Kotick, was a meaningful element in the company going to shit between 2010 and 2018. It wasn't the only factor, but I was personally affected by Kotick's mandates.
I don’t doubt it. My point was that it was likely to happen regardless of who their corporate overlords were. It’s hard to name a major studio who made a hit series that is owned by a major corporation that doesn’t eventually make rehashed low quality trash. It probably would have happened under Vivendi too as soon as wow subs slipped.
I do agree with this. Creative industries do not make for sustainable companies, because creativity is a flash in the pan unless you're Brandon Sanderson.
And Brandon is an individual who has sole creative control over his work. He may have had some guidelines over what he had to do for his work finishing up wheel of time but at the end of the day he makes the decisions. Games are typically collaborative works. If the creative director or narrative director are good at their job they can wrangle a bunch of cats to all pull in one direction (and as long as some corporate blown doesn’t get the idea to play creative for a bit) their chances of making a good game is high. But if they have crap directors at the top who let in every bad idea because some associate designer thinks it would be really cool to implement a bad idea they will flounder.
Look at wows story after metzen left. Sure not everything that was put out under his watch was gold but cataclysm, mists, and warlords are all better story wise than bfa and shadowlands. Or overwatch, he leaves and every bit of story drip turns into a tumbler page discussing each character’s sexuality.
Rockstar devs can cause huge problems for teams if there is no collaboration on a project, but there needs to be someone in the room capable of saying no whether that’s to others on the dev team or some overpaid corporate twat.
tl;dr
they were owned by a company that was bought by them. Activision runs Blizzard corporately. But there is no difference because it is just as if they were bought by Activis.
It started under activision, so yes it is. compare wc's sequels to sc, and you can tell how much of the quality had left after the merger was complete.
Point was that blizzard would have eventually gone to crap regardless of who their corporate overlord was by nature of how corporations operate.