And that's a good thing
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It's amazing how we still pay lip service to the idea that Blizzard is still Blizzard. Speaking generally, no one who was there in 2004 or even 2012 is left. The Ship of Theseus isn't much of a paradox when the people who made everything you loved were replaced in less than 10 years.
People do that with all the developers for some reason, even when there's like 1 guy left from the original golden days. It's why EA buys and guts companies but still keeps "brands" afloat (Maxis) - they know people will buy the brand.
With the Ship of Theseus, though, the conceit is that the replacing is done with care, only when necessary, and trying to make the match as exact as possible. This is about as far from that as one can get.
This is like buying a classic car, putting its hood ornament on a Trabant and then trying to pass it off as the same car.
But but but BRAND!!!
We neeeed BRAND!
Same thing with Rocksteady. Look at their own website and you’ll see plastered all over “creators of the Batman Arkham games” but every single person who worked on those games are now gone. It’s bullshit marketing and normies fall for it every time
They have NOTHING, NOTHING to show off. This clip is from Asmongold a long time WoW player and sums it up well.
They've killed EVERY franchise that they own, all by their own actions. Want to know then end state of pandering, Blizzard.
I thought conventions were originally designed as a nerd and geek breeding program since how else do you get introverts together? /s
On the contrary - those conventions made them a lot of money.
Exactly. Hype is all lower now than it used to be, Blizzard makes more money selling mounts, microtransactions and carved up pieces of software than they used to, so there's no need to run a hype machine like Blizcon anymore. They shut it down, I think on 2021 as well, because they had no releases to announce. The profit factor just isn't there.
I know that this is a long time coming, but I have to wonder if "out of season April Fools joke" may have been the biggest hit to their credibility.
What was that?
Diablo Immortal is a mobile game made by Blizzard, which had for many many years been known almost exclusively for PC games, most predominately Warcraft, WoW, Starcraft, and Diablo.
The announcement (2018) was expected to be Diablo 4, as 3 had come and gone, as well as an expansion, so when a mobile game was announced, the audience was confused. A very based man got in line to ask the question "is this an out of season April Fool's joke?" to which Blizzard said no, and an unfortunate Asian employee stuck his foot in his mouth and asked "don't you guys have phones?" This was received poorly.
It was the next year's BlizzCon (2019) that D4 was announced, but it wouldn't come out until June 2023 and boy was it trash. They had a demo video of two fat women on camera shitting their way through a dungeon like complete amateurs and it left Diablo fans wondering wtf happened to their game.
The announcement of Diablo infinite rather than a proper Diablo game, which had by far the best question asked of them of all time
*Immortal
And this was done AT the Blizzcon presentation, meaning the entire gaming community could see it happen.
Oh that. Do guys STILL not have phones? :)
that man single-handedly killed Blizzard, what a chad.
Oh, we wish he did. It's ironic, I'm pretty sure I recall hearing the guy was a Blizzard shill streamer.
A company that had one of the most firm footholds on multiple video game markets that got sick chasing those who weren't really interested then had the killing blow delivered by diversity. All they had to do is understand why their games were ever successful to begin with, and keep doing that, and they make money for decades.
They hate their fans so much they can’t pretend to tolerate them for 3 hours?
More like the negative return on investment isn't worth it when you've got cashflow issues.
Blizzard:
Also Blizzard: Are we so out of touch? No, it's the gamers that are wrong.
"diversity space tool" ... wtf kind of purple-haired bullshit is this?
I can't like atm but look it up, it's like a fucking metric with charts and circle graph with attributes and they use it to make new OW2 characters. Those awful uninspired characters.
Requiring bnet login to play Starcraft 2 single player was the nail in the coffin for me. I don't think I bought a single blizzard product after that, though I did keep paying my WoW sub until just after sunwell and I burned out.
You could see the way the wind was blowing and the company flipped from creating great gaming experiences to "how can we best corral these losers to shove our 'important marketing messages' down their throats".
Looks like the buzzards have picked the bones clean on Blizzard.
I misread buzzards as "buzzwords" and it still made sense.
The buzzwords are circling. Man, that's apt.
We'd be free of almost every old studio, but the hyper monetization algorithms have granted them unnatural long life. If not for WoW addicts and zombie subscriptions, Blizzard would have gone under years ago.
The natural life cycle of a game studio is some guys get together and make a great game, grow and make sequels, go corporate, get heavier and heavier, then collapse under their own weight while a few of the new guys split off and form a new company to do it their way. This usually takes ~10 years max.
Microsoft had a hand in accelerating the demise as well, not to mention the 'department of fair employment' from California, which led to the Microsoft take over. I wonder if Microsoft had a hand in that as well. Microsoft has a very bad reputation in that regard. They're completely ruthless.