If only they could cut ties with Activision. I wish another publisher who buy the Blizzard staff. You think Rockstar is big enough with how successful they’ve been to buy them up?
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Activision ruinning the huge talents Blizzard have. They should just free Blizzard from them, for everyone’s sake.
When I see Paladins improving a lot of aspects, still updating a lot, and doing a lot of things people wanted, and Blizz hasn’t been able to topple that, something’s clearly wrong. Because the talent in Blizz is there. It is completely misused because of decision makers.
Ever heard of the ripple effect?
Pokemon Go as a Wow game?
Oh man, sad. Looks like they are trying to follow Nintendo’s footsteps as they are the king of mobile games from a game developer but this will fail miserably.
I don’t get how people get into them.
They show these cool 3D cinematic trailers for the games and it looks cool-ish if you dont know what they games really are, you get in and its a crappy looking 2D birds-eye view thing where the first thing they do is show you how their premium currency circumvents you having to wait ridiculous amounts of time for simple things to happen.
I get it’s a mobile game but we had infinity blade in freaking 2010 that proved the potential for serious games on mobile, the graphics were easily on par with an xbox 360 game and it shocked people.
Why don’t devs invest more in that direction?
Each game is a carbon copy cash grab of the last, there’s no innovation unless it directly makes them more money and 50% of the mobile game market is the same build and conquer game over and over.
Every other type of game is willing to give you paid boosts, re-try tokens and abilities that completely break the game competitively.
What fun is there i knowing someone achieve just as much as you several times faster and better if they play with their wallet?
Runescape mobile is the only exception to this, i had a blast and considering it’s a PC based MMO, the controls are a breeze, there’s PLENTY of free content to keep you playing for hours.
It just make sense to be able to grind my woodcutting a couple levels while waiting for my bus, it’s satisfying to make use of your dead time by levelling up, go home, hop on the computer and do some real grinding.
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Seems a lot here are so butt hurt on everything.Its sad because people here probably do play other games(god help’em) and explode their forums with Nerfs,and buffs all dang day with cry baby tactics because they are getting blown away to much.
Yeah it doesn’t bode well. “Investors”, ie. lord only knows, Saudi oil shieks and brokerage firms, don’t care at all about PC Gaming. The vast majority of people now perceive games as the stupid games on mobile devices, and that’s their gold standard. If you are really into gaming in their eyes, you get a console. A PC? That’s so 2008… despite the fact Nvidia sells boatloads of graphic cards to gamers… and games like WoW still generate millions upon millions of dollars. But hey, mobile Farmville cost like 300K to make, and it makes millions, so, let’s pimp that instead… god help us.
Typical investor: “Yeah, that Overwatch thing, I dunno, but hey look at my new high score in Candy Crush!”
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I think it’s interesting how many people became experts on game development and team management in the weeks since Blizzcon. Sure, what happened there was a mistake - I’m right there with the rest of the community about the Diablo Immortal announcement - but I think the armchair managers might need to take a step back from posts like this.
One story that needs to go away and never come back: the idea that “All Blizzard’s best devs are working on mobile titles!” -> this doesn’t mean what you think it does. What it means is that Blizzard have set up a new working group where high-end developers can seek some respite from the ceaseless pressure of working on top-end triple-A games with their unforgiving release cycles. Projects like that burn developers out, and working on smaller titles is how developers can sort of reset themselves, ready to work on something big again. It’s also a safe space to prototype new ideas that management would hesitate to spend big bucks on, meaning there’s a greater chance we’ll get new kinds of games in the future. It’s a win-win.
Blizzard is not TellTale, nor is it Bethesda, nor is it in fact quite the same as any other games studio. It has its own unique set of strengths and flaws - the biggest of those that I’ve seen is its relatively recent merger with Activision. THAT is what you should have you eyes on, not some nebulous end-of-the-world like nonsense about everything all falling apart at once.
I have an iPhone 8, so specs aren’t an issue, I just wonder when anyone actually plays them. I have a PC and XBox at home, and it’s not a massive commute even if I’m not cycling, so where’s left? Work? Too many distractions, like doing my job…
Seems weird that there’s such a big market for such a small chunk of time.
Let’s fix that, you pay money to circumvent playing the game…
They buff who we ask, and they nerf who we ask.
I’ve seen it change people facebook/phone games, it’s like people you knew a few years ago are lost with a screen in their face. Cash grab for Blizzard, but I don’t blame them.
For now, sure.
My observation is based on profit, and with PC games you need to cut corners to save on spending, whereas with mobile you don’t; WoW (Warlords of Draenor specifically) and Diablo 3 (virtually no development in years, which is rare for Blizzard) are examples of this.
These changes happen slow enough to not notice, but Blizzard has slowly changed, and they are an accurate representation of AAA studio business trends in my mind.
Aside from the fact that I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes, my guesses would take years to develop in reality…which I don’t care enough to invest paying that close attention.
Basically (TL;DR), investors want to make money, and so long as a company is controlled by them, they will choose the easy road: mobile games. This needs to happen in generational shifts though, (slowly) so right now we’re seeing signs of it.
Again, just my opinion.
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I Don’t think they got the message because we don’t have a phone.
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Sits at Piano and plays a soft melody
Sadly theres a conference where they said that they had the best developers bringing all their ips into cell phones games. So if they got the message, looks like it was the wrong one
On another note imagine if the origonal Blizz dev’s got together and made a company name Ice Storm (or something like that) and started making games again?
But without becoming a publicly traded company so companies can’t buy them.
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Mythbusting time!
That conference seems to have been wildly misunderstood by people who were preloaded and prearmed to hear that Blizzard is doing what other Triple A devs are doing, and selling out for the mobile market.
What we heard does not imply that that is necessarily the case. They have created a new work group with a small budget and free rein to work on small projects, with a more experimental brief - allowing them to test out ideas without too much pressure to perform. They’ve put senior devs onto this team because the senior devs ELECTED to be there - it’s a much easier working environment than a big project like WOW or OW, and it’s a place for them to rest up and recharge their creative batteries.
The idea that the existence of this team means that Blizz is pulling resources away from bigger projects couldn’t be further from the truth.
Don’t worry, Nintendo will save us once again 
.
But, about the topic, yes, something is very wrong with Blizzard, when a traditional PC game company says “our best devs are working on mobile”, it really says something about its state…
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Diablo inmortal was outsourcing a small companie that had the game already there, changing skins and adding little mechanic. I do not see that they needed a core of elected devs in a perfect working environment to create and rest and recharge their creativeness.
Diablo inmortal was a faliure in communication basically, taking an event that was directed to one basic target and presenting a product that was not for that people. I can be biased sure, and preloaded with prejudices… but thinking that Blizzard always do good, ahve all the data available, and use it in the best way possible…is having a real ideallistic idea of how companies work.
I do not know their interest, nor their projects, they also had people working on OWL and a lot of people have said tht been so big it was not taking reasources from them…till we had people like jk saying that they haven taken resources, to not expect changes on events etc.
So, I do not know what to believe in all honesty. I trust what you have heard, but im sure that diablo fans, ow fans and a lot of people would consider a good idea to improve the product they have already. We have been experimenting a decay on this title, it has been years since a diablo release, other games are forgotten, blizzcon was in the best of the cases taken as a “transition year”.
So yes, I will ignore that conference. But been part of the same company, if you use a small budget and direct it to a new one, even if is a core developers or the budget is small…that is by definition, pulling resources away from bigger projects. Same company, same budget, the ceo decides which project have priority and which ones increases resources or human resources.
I have already tried to explain the management structure at play here as best I can - if you want to know more about it there’s BellularGaming on YouTube who did an excellent breakdown of this, without resorting to hyperventilating “oh my gosh the whole sky is falliiiiiing” stuff. The point is, Blizzard doesn’t seem to be making any abrupt lurches towards mobile gamers - they simply used the Diablo Immortal as filler when the community (reasonably) was expecting a major announcement - and Diablo Immortal was the absolute worst thing to occupy that spot.
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