There’s a reason why I didn’t bother jumping into this topic when it first began a few days ago (many sites have been covering it and here is PCGamer’s synopsis of what has been happening). Part of the reason I decided not to comment on this early on is related to the original emphasis of this blog (which was Diablo III) and its slow descent into issues with that specific dev team (Team 3) and generally, Blizzard Entertainment as a whole (where by the end of 2015, I had stopped playing any Blizzard title) where I decided to scrutinize anything they announced (hyped) or released from that point forward. The debacle of that launch isn’t a surprise to me.
The company has been living on the goodwill of their established player bases (across multiple franchises though they’ve been burning through the Diablo player base goodwill since 2012) and had been able to perform PR/marketing mind tricks to deal with speedbumps that happened along the way. For the most part, that worked well enough for the core demographic. But that facade was also failing rapidly as the game industry itself continued undergoing changes (including a tilt towards mobile which Blizzard, was very slow to at least parlay some of their IP’s into at that specific 2014/2015 time frame).
Even back then, some of their corporate mission statements were more or less a facade since even though Blizzard still maintains its own corporate identity and organization, there is still pressure to show revenue growth (as well as increasing margins) for Activision Blizzard (the combined holding company) since it is a publicly traded corporation (ATVI). This is why I personally dismissed their old “we’ll ship it when it is ready” mantra years ago. It also didn’t help that many of their design teams, consistently were out of the touch with their respective player bases (there is a point where they needed to get that “chip off their collective shoulders” and really be able to properly parse the feedback which their respective community teams provided to them).
The problem with most of their design teams is trying to be way too much of the arbiters of what THEY think their players would like and enjoy. I do get the notion that designers and developers can do whatever it is they want but there’s a point where you do have an audience that needs to be catered and listened to IF what you came up with, it not being well received. The problem is their design teams have got it in their heads through the last decade that they can come up with all of the solutions to game systems and mechanics that they alone, believe will be well received by their players. What they have been excruciating slow at coming around to is that you do have to be able to properly parse the collected feedback and pulse of what the players are saying. Sure, complaints like “game sucks/games dead” doesn’t help. But there has always been other well articulated feedback that ends up being oft-repeated because nothing is ever done to address them (or the design teams feel they have better solutions which they need to iterate through, but end up never being able to implement in a timely manner since they end up trying to come up with solutions to address several issues at one time, but end up discovering other problems in the process – leading to over iteration or over thinking things).
The cracks really began appearing in recent years though (which is why there was such a major disconnect with the Diablo Immortal announcement at BlizzCon 2018) culminating in the various bad news that happened since then (downsizing the Hearthstone team, layoffs after announcing better than expected results, another co-founder stepping down, the whole blitzchung fiasco heading into BlizzCon 2019). Somewhere in between all of that was the company restructuring/downsizing their e-Sports division which I didn’t bother really looking into. All of this does bring into question the leadership abilities of J. Allen Brack who took over as president after Mike Morhaime announced he was stepping down (their PR-fu has really gone downhill since Brack took over).
A Blizzard community manager did finally post up a lengthy response that was obviously written by someone higher up in the chain command (the result is that it sounds like typical corporate PR where the tone of the message lacks an actual sincereness to it). For myself, this isn’t anything new since Blizzard lost me as one of these loyal customers (the automatic sale variety) a few years ago. They are no longer above the rest of the game industry. And while my Blizzard Battlenet account is a testament to the whole pre-order collectible (physical) edition, the company at least for me, no longer is going to get that benefit of the doubt (that is if I even bother considering buying another Blizzard game including D4). Their whole Diablo IV announcement ended up falling flat for me and I believe the D4 design team that was put together, will miss the mark on putting together an MMO-ARPG (where it will likely miss the mark in both areas and end up alienating more of their player base); more so in light of Echtra Games nixing their original MMO-lite version of Torchlight Frontiers for a more traditional ARPG with Torchlight III).
Blizzard’s teams are nowhere as agile as these other studios though and given they’ve been through several internal iterations of D4 before rebooting with what they ended up announcing at BlizzCon 2019, means it may take them all of this year to realize what Echtra Games came to during their alpha test (the dichotomy that exists between core ARPG designs and trying to meld that with an open world MMO design). Again, Blizzard Irvine has never had actual ARPG expertise and that hasn’t changed with the team put together for D4. When they mess up something like a remaster of Warcraft III though (and they had a template to follow with the Starcraft remaster) and show this consistent failure to properly communicate, it should be clear to the most ardent Blizzard fan that the emperor no longer has any clothes on.
