Or has his influence corrupted blizzard forever like it did bungie?
we have no idea who is making decisions about d4… bobby is prob 10 layers away from it…
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I don’t think people realize how much game developer decisions are based on pleasing their boss who wants to please their boss who wants to please their boss and so on up to Bobby. If the company culture is engagement metrics, that’s what the developers will be designing the game around. And this culture spawns from the top.
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Joe Shelly should have the biggest say. Though he may not have all the say.
Fix anything within Activision itself or just Diablo 4? If you’re just talking about Diablo 4, hell no, the CEO of the company just wants to make money for the shareholders, that’s their job. If their products aren’t making money, you best believe crap is gonna roll down hill and the only involvement they’ll have is telling the directors they’re fired, or to fire the people working under them.
Their entire corporate culture is screwed. They would essentially have to clean house of anyone in there that was responsible for the current corporate culture and get an entire team devoted to turning it around. Which is just unlikely.
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I think they study data analytics and make predictions and choices based on those combined with user reviews and purchased talent… So to say that a CEO is responsible for a bad game is like saying that the President is responsible for a lost war…
I mean sure… He is responsible from a shareholders perspective. Just like the President answers to the people. But they have upper management and lower management and leads for a reason. They have a chain of command that had to all simultaneously screw this up together.
The culture is $, they could give a sht about anything else
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I doubt that very much seeing as how this was their flagship game that releases once a decade. You only have to look at the most aggressive micro transaction model in an overpriced game to see that this is their best attempt at milking their “fan base”. This was Bobby’s love letter to Microsoft, you can bet your a$$ he had a hand in it.
He’s been known to manipulate designers and their art which is the reason so many devs quit until only yes men who do his bidding remain
Be that as it may, there are many strategies to accumulating those dollars. One of them is to just make a solid game with integrity so people buy it. Others are more focused on promoting engagement metrics they can show to shareholders to advance profitability guidence thus increased stock price.
As Javazon said, hard to say. Probably won’t have that much of an impact with Bobby leaving as I doubt a CEO in a massive corporation has that much involvement in the development process of the game and is rather more concerned with deadlines and meeting objectives.
While that is typically the end result their fiduciary duty is to do what is best for the company.
I honestly don’t see Kotick being very involved in any of the games. He runs the corporation and does big picture stuff. He has a lot more than Blizzard to consider. Blizzard isn’t even their bread and butter.
Btw, last I read (it might’ve changed) he’s slated to stay on as CEO after the Microsoft merger.
I don’t think it’ll change anything honestly. They’ll just replace him with someone else just as ineptitude. You have to consider that no single person makes all the decisions. Blizzard is in shambles due to more issues than Bobby being CEO.
Pardon me, but who is Bobby?
I can say that when Bobby started with Activision and when they purchased Blizzard, the quality of products has diminished. The share value has risen. But, I don’t like the direction of the games I play. The Blizzard “Soon” now means whenever we need to please shareholders.
No, the only thing that matters to Blizzard now is price. They have lied, stealth patched, and spit in the face of their player base for years.
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They are referring to Bobby Kotick, the current CEO of Activision. Who is he, look up the stories and timelines and judge for your self.
Bobby doesn’t make decisions about core game mechanics. It’s probably either Joe or Rod. Or maybe even other guy.
This game is bad not because it was half baked, lacking QoL, end-game or other stuff - it is fundamentally bad. All core mechanics from this game are bad. All design decisions were bad and etc.
Despite all the hate towards Bobby, he did not make decisions on these points. So you kinda wrong OP.
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Much like the passing of the torch at the CDC, no.