Several days ago, IGN released a special report regarding a subject that many in the game industry have been covering and/or giving their own take on (myself included specifically as someone who once patronized the company offerings without much question until BlizzCon 2015 and as someone who has been an Activision Blizzard shareholder).
This special report offers a more in-depth take on what has not been a surprising development. But what is not broached for obvious reasons is that some of this has been self-inflicted by their own decisions (which due to Blizzard’s size, results in this corporate inertia of those decisions, taking time to actually manifest itself). Former executives, producers, or senior designers aren’t going to blame themselves for making the wrong decisions for example. And lower level designers and devs aren’t going to blame those folks or the company itself unless they don’t value their longevity in the industry.
The tone deafness of Diablo Immortal’s announcement at BlizzCon was emblematic of senior level personnel, growing out of touch with the community (let alone Cheng’s “don’t you have phones” retort to the chorus of boos). Sure, there was the speeches about how the company values the players and listened to their feedback. That’s kind of standard PR at many companies. The reality however is this is often times lost in the corporate bureaucracy where many organizations are not agile enough to cut through the crap and directly to the chase. And it is even more difficult when there’s levels of arrogance and hubris sprinkled in (because the thought process was that “Blizzard could do no wrong”).
It’s the same with the “chip on the shoulder” mentality many senior designers often times exhibited including this desire to offer up solutions to which no one in the player base was complaining about. Some designers (especially in Team 3) had this overwhelming need to control the game playing experience where it turned into design iteration gone wild (turning an ARPG like Diablo III, into this “on rails” action arcade game in the process). A lot of this blog pre-2016 covered my personal grievances with the D3 development team at the time where the basic jist is how the team failed properly parse the feedback the community was giving. They couldn’t even get the point when many of their D3 MVP’s (regular community folks) began resigning.
So it’s no surprise when the bleeding of long time executives began since 2014ish, that this was lost on senior executives during that timeframe. That same tone deafness was also lost when more senior level producers and designers began leaving. The big one was of course, Morhaime himself in 2018 followed several months later with Pearce (2/3 of the co-founders) leaving. I get that there was this desire to keep Blizzard running the same way back when they smaller with the same ideals. But there’s a balance involved when it comes to maintaining that corporate culture, and also being a bit more self-aware with project management.
A slower/deliberate development cycle isn’t necessarily a bad thing especially if you have the deliverables. And that is partially the issue; way too much money thrown at projects which never saw the light of day and have never been re-leveraged in some form. The other issue is when you have teams of designers that truly believe they know what is best. I often times come back to Diablo III (where you really had no prior core designers who had contributed to the prior games) which had so much designs iterated out of it by the time that it finally launched in May 2012. People often times placed way too much blame on Jay Wilson for this (as game director, he was more like an administrative head/manager) but people often times forget he wasn’t the lead content designer (the primary point person that normally drives the direction of the actual game systems) saying yay or nay to things (that was Kevin Marten and to a slightly lesser extent, Cheng as technical lead; it was Cheng who came up with the “then we doubled it” for Inferno’s original difficulty at launch while Marten actually thought they could pace out the end game grind to last “a decade” via the layers of RNG and drop rates they originally had, completely misreading why Diablo II had such a long lifespan).
The Diablo franchise should be a case study in mismanagement after Blizzard North was dissolved (well after it’s original principals had left the company). D3 was not designed with much ARPG braintrust and similarly, neither is D4 (which may not matter as much given they changed direction with making it a shared open world environment where it will have more in common with an MMO versus the single player/limited multiplayer co-op instances that defined it’s predecessors. It remains to be seen how that title will turn out BUT the fact Blizzard began active recruitment for the then unnamed project in 2016, and had absolutely nothing to even tease by the time BlizzCon 2018 happened, again highlights this internal struggle at the company with slowly incubating ideas, and then iterating on prototypes and designs with little awareness as to its community. D3 was already being neglected post Reaper of Souls (March 2014) as it became clear the 2nd expansion had been cancelled, and bits and pieces (like the Ruins of Sescheron zone and Kanai’s Cube) were being released as content updates in 2015.
Now more than ever though, the company has to deliver a Diablo product that doesn’t incur the sort of backlash that they could easily weather as before. As I’ve noted many times before in this blog, Blizzard began burning through a lot of goodwill loyalty (mine included); goodwill which they could really use now and going forward for the foreseeable future. I’m probably one of the few who wasn’t feeling it when they finally announced D4 along with the trailer and game play video. Some of their decision choices seem to be the definition of literally about making the game more dark and devoid of color (shades of black, gray, and white comes to mind) versus environmental design and use of lighting including light radius along with sound effects and music choice. But that’s me in terms of no longer being an automatic sell. With that said, the company still has a sizable demographic that they haven’t yet driven away so it is imperative they not botch up this particular release.
As for whether or not the Activision side of the business has been getting involved in pressuring Blizzard, the reality is that it’s not something obvious. Blizzard has always been allowed to run their affairs as they saw fit. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely hands off either. As a publicly traded corporation (the main Activision Blizzard holding company), certain financial details need to be released (though most corporations also have ways to obfuscate the actual details). Bottom line, Blizzard Entertainment as a whole underperformed compared to say the Call of Duty franchise in 2020. This was during an year that Blizzard (with most all of its titles being online) should’ve thrived given COVID-19 and how large segments of the population across the world, were under stay at home orders. Yet Blizzard saw a decline in their monthly active user numbers (just one of a number of key metrics financial analysts use).
I know for myself, my playing pattern of what I was playing, didn’t change (except adding Genshin Impact into the mix). The time that I played in the two main games I was already playing (ArcheAge Unchained and TERA) increased though which would lead to increased engagement. The fact that Blizzard bled players, should be concerning to executives. And judging by how they’ve continually mismanaged communications or even still not understanding the reasons as to why larger percentages of the Blizzard community have been uncharacteristically critical of the company since BlizzCon 2018, tells me the current leadership team, is still missing the forest for the trees and that continuing on this path, will only lead to decreasing their influence in the combined Activision Blizzard company. Blizzard has all of these iconic franchises but hasn’t been effectively monetize them, And by that, I don’t mean silly willy fast ways of blatant monetization.
I would’ve gladly paid for expansions for D3 had they not dropped the ball and disengaged again shortly after releasing Reaper of Souls. Had that team put actual actions to words, maybe I’d still be playing the game and have some level of goodwill still established. On the StarCraft side, had the company actually not been afraid of releasing another MMO based in the SC universe, they will never know if they had another potential hit on their hands (IMHO, a well made Sci-Fi MMO with an established franchise like StarCraft, would’ve been well received). Instead, the company chose to not go down that route (the lack of action implies there was a fear of cannibalizing the cash cow World of Warcraft).
With all of this said, do I believe Blizzard Entertainment is in trouble? That one isn’t easy to answer for obvious reasons. It really depends on their release cadence over the next 2 years. We know both D4 and OW2 are in active development. Both are going to generate decent numbers. What they do for recurring revenue will help answer part of that question for me wearing my shareholders hat. Then it’s the release cadence for their other franchises. In between all of this is how they manage their communication and engagement with the community. Despite my own personal reservations with opening my wallet again for another Blizzard title, I am also well aware the demographic of loyal players. It’s why I remain a shareholder. If they fail to deliver anything within 2 years, I will revisit my longer term view of Blizzard Entertainment in 2023.
As I alluded to before, I believe the departures of the old (where some long time designers have developed myopia due to arrogance and hubris), are also an opportunity to make way for new blood. I do believe that Brack is NOT the right person to lead Blizzard Entertainment into the future though. He’s failed miserably at fully understanding the backlash of several PR failures including BlizzCon 2018 and the entire Blitzchung controversy). Like everything else, time will tell with all of these departures as well as Brack managing the business.
