Naturally a business evolves and change over time, but when you’re working with consumers you’re also depended on them and their happiness to continue selling products. It’s part of a basic teaching in terms of running any major corporation that relies on consumers for income. Microsoft and Valve have been sort of special cases, since they’ve had more or less a monopoly on their sides. Microsoft with their OS brand and Valve with their Steam store. Both of which have been scrutinised by government consumer rights organisations for a long time. Remember the browser war in the late 90s per example?
The problem we have with ActivisionBlizzard is that they sort of have generated a lot of revenue outside of the consumer cycle in their E-Sports area, along the stream of revenue from people who don’t care about the corporate greed and just flail out money at the company without question. So they’ve sort of been able to operate without check, sure they might dip a bit on revenue now and then but in the end they’re earning money, and a lot of that money is earned from other markets than selling games.
That’s why I don’t trust ActivisionBlizzard any more, they’re not a “gaming” company as per say, but yet another major corporation that aim to max their revenue with what ever means they need, even if that means going against their consumer groups. Look at WoW per example, from one disaster to another for years now, and they’ve not bothered to learn at all from their mistake. And lets not forget their unmitigated disaster with Diablo: Immortal, which stands as a pinnacle of epic failure on their part, and a solid testimony just how much of a disparity there is between Blizzard, and what used to be their fans.
And they will continue on this path because they don’t have to worry about their revenue stream. They’ve shown themselves quite capable of doing what ever necessary for that revenue stream.
This is actually interesting, because back then IE dominated the market and everyone went hysterical. Nowadays Google Chrome is the “IE of our times”, but everyone is fine with that for some reason: with their share Google can twist the HTML specification as they will, same as back then with MS & IE. History repeats itself.
And that’s normal: once you grow large enough this is what happens. The question is whether they will be able to find a healthy balance.
You are preaching to a preacher: I stopped with WotLK and after it briefly checked on the game only once or twice.
It was a disaster, but mainly for the Western fanbase: the product was targeted for the Asian markets and primarily for China (also the game was mainly developed by a Chinese company, if I recall correctly). It was not the best idea to emphasise it so strongly during BlizzCon. I bet Blizz management would love to switch its fanbase to mobile because this platform tend to generate higher revenue on average (thanks to being plagued by micro-transactions) compared to PC/consoles, but the reaction of the audience only proved that Blizz’ hardcore fanbase is still PC-oriented (thank God!).
Thus the advice to vote with your wallet: voting with your feet and wallet is the only way consumers may (even hypothetically) hint businesses to rethink some of their decisions.
I’m afraid of that change, because many people are gonna derank just so that they can play without hero pools. That means you will find a more masters in a diamond game, furthermore debalancing the sr system.
The difference is that Chrome doesn’t go out of its way to make it difficult for its competitors to exist. Today we know we have various other browsers to choose from, but most people opt to go for Chrome.
I think this is where the problem starts, because looking at their financial papers, a good chunk of their revenue stream comes from sources that are not directly consumer controlled, like the E-sports market. Another problem is that a lot of people don’t seem to care any more whether major corporations waltz over them, they still continue to buy their products. Take Apple per example, which has for years withstood standardisation such as the charger port just so they can sell their expensive accessorise.
In a perfect world people would vote with their wallet, and for minor corporation that’s true. But for a major corporation it’s not that simple. The only thing that would happen is that they pull that product from the market, but they won’t change their way.
No entirely true, because there are only three independent engines:
The largest group of browsers are all based on Chromium (Google Chrome, Opera, Brave, etc.) which is in all but word controlled by Google;
WebKit (MacOS and iOS Safari, some browsers which have iOS versions) with its share already several times less than Chromium;
Gecko (or whatever Firefox uses today).
Even Microsoft dropped their own Edge and the new MS browser is based on Chromium. So the abundance of choice is illusory – there are only three fully independent ones. Well, at least that is my point of view, but I worry the less competition, the worse it is for us users.
I did not read their reports, so cannot really argue here, but in the end it does not matter on the source of revenue: voting with wallet does not only mean stopping buying new games, but also to stop spending on any kind of related branded merchandise, e.g. from loot-boxes and skins to figurines and plush toys.
You keep bringing on e-sports, but that is fueled by merchandising and viewers numbers (OWL, it would seem, was in large modelled after, let’s say, NBA, in the sense of monetisation), because sells ads, and if the audience numbers are too small, this stream of income won’t satisfy.
In the end, this is not a walled garden and we are all still free to vote with our feet and wallets in other directions when we are strongly dissatisfied.
Could very much be, that’s life, so you say “Fine!” and support those who you think are doing it right. =)
What I hate the most is that the Overwatch League probably looks like a huge success because of all the people who don’t give a damn about OWL watching matches or paying money for OWL skins because they look nice
The game going downhill hasn’t been because of the OWL, it’s always been going downhill and the OWL is just a nice excuse to shift blame away from Blizzard’s fundamental decision making. Blizzard didn’t add hero pools to appease OWL. Most if not all of the OWL requests were for bans, not pools. They are different concepts. Blizzard chooses the pools (or luck, really). Many of the players (and many of the casters) wanted bans that the teams chose. Blizzard added hero pools because they want to do things their unexpected and unique way, as with every solution they present. That’s been a fairly common trend for a long time.
Don’t mistake, I’m not saying the OWL is a perfect thing. It’s remarkably stupid how they chose to kill off the entire scene that was already developing to replace it with the league. But the game was already being overloaded with questionable decisions.
I don’t understand where this stigma about Blizzard only caring about the OWL is coming from. If you look at how they treat their esport scene, and I mean really look at how they consistently ignore the requests and grievances of the professional scene, it doesn’t look like they care about it that much.
Even the illusion of choice is better than how it was in the 90s, it’s still a selection of different browsers to choose from.
The brand merchandise isn’t that big to be honest, on the whole it’s a rather small section of the revenue stream relative to the total income of sales.
And that’s why they get a strong income on E-sports, it’s not necessarily tied to the game and as such a lot of their audience comes from people that doesn’t necessarily play Overwatch, but still are interested in E-Sports and pay attention to that scene. Not everyone that watches football plays football themselves. So they don’t have to develop the game to cater for people that play the game, they only have to develop to cater to what makes an interesting experience for the viewer.
Sure we can, but it doesn’t matter that 1 or even 10 000 people walk away from their products, they lose maybe 1% of their revenue stream, which isn’t significant enough to even make the shareholders nervous. Remember that WoW dropped significantly on subscribers, and all they did was stop reporting the subscription numbers. Didn’t actually change the game at all. People “voted” with their wallet, nothing changed.
The E-sports market has a grown incredibly the last years or so, and is on the verge of becoming a billion dollar industry. No company would spend anything on E-Sports, had they not seen a fat return on investment from it. It’s not just spending, it’s big business and a whole lot of money involved on it.
Thats exactly what happened with Heroes of the Storm. The game got a lot better when they shut down HGC, I can’t wait for Overwatch to do the same so I can enjoy it even more.
Im not a huge fan, but I do watch a couple games here and there, and its interesting to see how pros play in organized teams and from different views and perspectives, all of which I cant see on twitch.
Overall I feel like OWL has helped keep the game alive and relevant as it has been. I’m not a big fan of some of the changes they have made because of OWL balance because I’m nowhere near that level so it really doesn’t help me, and often presents other problems unique to my rank. But at the same time, it probably doesn’t affect me nearly as much as much as those at the pinnacle, so I dont feel I should complain.
Those decisions don’t just come in suddenly though, if they were physically implemented into the game in later part of the year, they were already developing or discussing it months in advance. This is because of the time it takes to implement and of course advance it with teams, management or companies.
OWL should remove hero bans, it’s a snooze fest when lucio is banned and people are playing double shield slow comps. Or make OW 1-3-2 so we can see them dps pop off.
They definitely have but people don’t like that. When “simple” heroes are made to be more usable/viable at the higher tiers, they dominate the lower bracket. This is why people complained about heroes like Torbjorn, Symmetra, Reaper, Bastion who generally are noob stompers.
