I like to acknowledge when I was completely wrong about something so here it goes.
The first and top one was YouTube Gaming. I was completely wrong with that one missing the most important aspect of why Twitch even exists in the first place; and that is its community. Google has never really gotten these social subtleties (witness Google+) and looks like they never will.
The next one is Trion World‘s (the North American and European publisher of Devilian). This publisher represents everything that is wrong with not focusing on a high quality player experiencing first versus trying to make any money off of a licensed IP (the actual developer is South Korean based Bluehole Ginno). I seriously thought this game had a chance to at least carve out a reasonably sized niche but failed to realize just how terrible the publisher actually is (giving them the benefit of the doubt with all that I had heard about them from players who had actually played their first South Korean published MMO, ArcheAge). There is just to much “bad” that has happened since the game was launched that I haven’t even had the time to put it into a sensible format for posting (maybe I will attempt to when the game is 6 months in which isn’t too far away from now).
And the final one is of course related to the original focus of this blog; Diablo III. Despite all of the games issues since it launched in May 2012, never did I ever believe that I would become disinterested in the franchise to where I would actually stop caring about it completely. But that’s exactly the point that I somehow managed to reach in late 2015/early 2016. And it wasn’t like any one particular moment. It’s just that there was not even any desire to find out where the game stood in terms of the latest patch, what was planned for that patch, or even logging in once to try and see if things had gotten better. Like I have zero idea as of this posting what patch the game is on as the last time I even logged on and played was November 9th (around the time of Blizzcon 2015). I would very rarely load up the Blizzard forums and read a few threads and even more rarely post my actual thoughts but even those were already synopsized snippets that I just cut/pasted.
And that is when I realized what little remaining passion I may have had for the game, was gone. That is also when I realized that I hadn’t even logged into ANY of Blizzard’s other games. I hadn’t even completed the Legacy of the Void campaign. While I could hardly be referred to as a huge Blizzard fan, I’ve been pretty much a captive customer since the 90’s. The above made me realize that “IT” finally also happened. That Blizzard has completely lost me as that captive customer where simple cross promotional marketing would somehow keep folks like myself engaged.
As mentioned before, Overwatch (as an FPS) doesn’t interest me at all. And the only thing I found mildly interesting about it recently was the whole Tracer “butt” thing that I just rolled my eyes at because people are getting offended about that when at its core, the game is about shooting and killing others. Keyword here is GAME and games have and always been about the un-reality where any well adjusted person would know what is reality and what isn’t.
