This was posted several days ago probably as a PR move to tug at the communities nostalgic memories given the recent negativity that has occurred since BlizzCon 2018. The comments on this video are somewhat overdramatic with the “RIP Blizzard” as an ode to the sentiment that the Activision side of corporate is now beginning to overtake the Blizzard side which isn’t necessarily true; Blizzard has been having to walk this line for awhile. It just looked like they were heavily insulated because for years, they were able to depend on their WOW cadence of new expansions along with some well timed releases in their other franchises including the hits of new ones like Hearthstone and then Overwatch.
But Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale has been eating everyones lunch when it came to actually impacting metrics of other game franchises such as player engagement (logins as well as concurrency) which also hit Activision Blizzard across all of their franchises. Bottomline, a publicly traded company does have a fiduciary responsibilty when it comes to at least maintaining shareholder value and that is translating into the usual do more with less mantra where the usual “solution” is to cut expenses in order to make the bottom line look good.
I personally don’t always agree with how this is accomplished since usually, upper management tends to become a lot more out of touch the further away they are from the actual customer. Thus some decisions tend to be short term where they “mortgage the future” by driving away their most experienced personnel (losing historical awareness of what made the company great to begin with). Blizzard is still fortunate to have two original founders (though Adham rejoined in 2016 after having left in 2004 and has been tasked with “special” projects in terms of growth opportunities; one which as noted before, was mobile which Blizzard for the most part had ignored as well as actual new IP).
The issue as I noted before has been Blizzard’s stubbornness to simply acknowledge they made an error in announcing Diablo: Immortal at the wrong venue to the wrong audience. And then having Adham double down on the fact that Blizzard was moving some of their most experienced designers onto mobile projects across all of their existing IP’s. The tone deafness from their usual deft PR department has been staggering which is why it isn’t too surprising that many are looking at the company as if it were closing up shop (there’s a general feeling that this push into mobile is going to destroy the company that many have come to love).
But this again isn’t something new; the company has been evolving away from a lot of their corporate mission statements for awhile. Backing up a bit, I still recall that interview just prior to Diablo III’s launch where Jay Wilson noted the challenge with developing the follow-on to D2.
Yeah, one of the lessons that we learned in development was people’s memories of Diablo II were way different than the reality of Diablo II. They remember all kinds of stuff that never actually happened in that game.
https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/jay-wilson-and-christian-lichtner-interview-the-wsj
This was of course in much nicer terms than some of remarks that were being made during actual development where it was conveyed that some of the player feedback was from “rose tinted nostalgic glasses” (paraphrased since the general gist was one of “misplaced nostalgia” when players were duking it out with Bashiok; who was serving as an interim community manager for Diablo III during its development).
The general mindset that seemed to be brewing at Blizzard Entertainment was this growing arrogance when it came to game design (where it was less of a priority to properly parse feedback that was put together by their community management teams; more so with the D3 devs where there was normally more radio silence than actual communication, and just chalking most of it up as noise/people not knowing what they are talking about); thus the “you think you know, but you don’t” sort of attitude. This isn’t unique to Blizzard but can be more of a problem when there is a community as deeply attached to various franchises like it is with Blizzard Entertainment. Additionally, more companies are basing decisions on “what the data says” which adds to the disconnect. This is fine to some extent BUT has to be looked at in concert with what is also being communicated by players.
The Diablo community was already at this tipping point due to years of neglect (seemingly less than worthy after Reaper of Souls was released in 2014) where the small presence near the restrooms at BlizzCon 2016 (repeated again in 2017), was something that just seemed to “whoosh” over peoples heads at Blizzard HQ. In the meantime, the listing of job positions continued unabated for this “unannounced Diablo project” since 2015 where Blizzard had to curb expectations for BlizzCon 2017. Anyone with logical sense could figure out that they have been working on something for the franchise. So naturally as each year passed, the expectations grew (this even included investment firms covering the company).
And then the machine went into overdrive in 2018 when it seemed that even Blizzard themselves were hinting this would be the year for some really big Diablo news; more so given the fact that Diablo was getting the keynote closing and then the main stage for BlizzCon 2018. Blizzard again had to curb expectations just a few weeks prior (this coming after the early October news that Mike Morhaime was stepping down as CEO/president), making it clear without specifically mentioning “Diablo 4”, that there would be no such announcement of it.
And well, we knew what happened where a mobile game (not even being developed in-house) was announced to a mostly PC-centric audience at an actual Blizzard event; which didn’t resonate well across large swaths of Blizzard’s normally loyal fanbase. And it was all happening amongst a confluence of macro events (the initial demand for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 being strong but not as much as its predecessors, another consecutive quarter of lower player engagement across all franchises, the stock market in general taking a beating due to other macroeconomic factors). The recent Heroes of the Storm news just added to this air of doom.
Part of this is Blizzard’s own doing as they’ve grown though. Complacency comes to mind specifically with regards to taking the loyalty and goodwill of their community for granted. It became almost too patronizing to hear company representatives mention the loyal community/extended family when behind the scenes, there was unsurprisingly disdain by some (this is just an unfortunate aspect of the game industry where it’s a two way street with way too many toxic players on one end who do force the game designers to stop active engagement). The way the business side has gone in the industry doesn’t help matters either (that’s an entire subject matter on its own when it comes to questionable monetization practices, poor quality code, hiding behind the early access moniker, utilizing Kickstarter with nearly no way to fulfill many of the unrealistic objectives, etc).
Blizzard Entertainment facade wise, represented one of the few AAA studios that managed to really create its own narrative that was helped by this very loyal community who were portrayed as this extended family (there was a time when Blizzard was small enough where that was true and players could have closer relationships with the dev team). But over the years, the company (by necessity) had tied itself to larger corporations as the industry grew. Still, the company for the most part had fair monetization practices until more recently when they began introducing loot boxes into titles like Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch) and while not everyone agreed with the direction of some design decisions, many saw the appeal of their franchises. While I didn’t get much into that whole community thing, there was a time that I at least considered myself part of that loyal customer base for the franchises I enjoyed (specifically Diablo and StarCraft). And as noted before, that all came to an end after BlizzCon 2015. This blog prior to the end of 2015, partially detailed how that devolved; what some loyal customers have been going through post-BlizzCon 2018, is sort of what I went through from 2012-2015.
Bringing this back full circle to the nostalgia angle that the D3 developers noted (similar to current Blizzard president J. Allen Brack’s “you think you do, but you don’t” comment) where the belief is that players forget about all the bad parts about an older version (they could not be more wrong because I’ve always noted the issues; especially the lack of the quality of life stuff), this video montage of Blizzard’s franchises is not much different. That imagery was from a time when it seemed that Blizzard was nearly infallible and could rely on the goodwill of their very loyal fans to come to the companies defense. Simply put, a lot of players trusted Blizzard. That veneer has been unfortunately stripped away now since Blizzard themselves have telegraphed major changes (Morhaime stepping down, Brack being selected and not having the best of starts to his tenure, co-founder Adham noting their commitment to mobile titles within all of their existing IP’s and reallocating resources to them, willingness to outsource development again after having learned before about the loss of control that occurs like what happened with the Hellfire expansion for Diablo) and made some remarkable PR blunders since November 2018 (to the point where there are many who believe this is the Activision side exerting more influence). This nostalgic montage does absolutely nothing to assuage their player communities worst fears.
Up until this point, the company has not introduced a lot of new IP’s or even a stream of games based on existing IP’s. Overwatch is the newest but it’s characters were in long development for Project Titan. What is being partially telegraphed now is to expect a much faster cadence (probably from mobile titles within the existing franchises) along with some newer franchises (which will span from mobile to PC to consoles from the get go), and then something similar with the existing PC franchises but instead of full blown expansions, continual DLC additions. That pace however will likely impact the quality level of those titles since it will come at odds with some of their current design parameters including how often they spend iterating on designs. Don’t take this to mean that a lot of Blizzard’s recent offerings have been of the utmost quality because it hasn’t. My point here is that parts of it could get worse in the future. It’s well known that Blizzard doesn’t have the fastest nor most agile design and development process. And there are times when over-iterating can be a problem (witness vanilla D3) where you end up with non-sequitur design decisions.
These changes will likely have an impact on personnel since those who were very comfortable with the “old” way (having a lot more leeway from the “suits” looking at things via the numbers), may not agree or work well at this faster pace. So the thing to watch for in 2019 are the amount of departures from the company. I also don’t expect to see the effects of this faster pace to be felt until 2020 (using Diablo: Immortal as a barometer since they don’t anticipate releasing this until some time in 2019) where the consumers will see a larger product line with faster release schedules.
