In many software shops December is the month when a lot of things cool off. People burn off their remaining PTO to keep themselves under cap for the coming year, there are holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving at the end of November, New Years), and a lot of your higherups in particular (who often accumulate near to the PTO cap in a given year, if not over it) take time off to spend with their families or go on vacations.
The larger the shop, the more this happens. They also become hyper conservative about releasing anything that might impact the system over some of their busiest times. A lot of places end up in either production freezes or—in more extreme cases—code freezes through this period.
Meanwhile: You aren’t paying a monthly subscription fee. You certainly aren’t paying for the privilege of having someone provide ongoing updates through the holidays.
So relax, updates will happen when they happen. We know they are working on a developer update. We know that a new map is in the works. We know that a new hero is in the works. We know that there’s a bunch of other stuff happening behind the scenes.
You’ll get details when they are ready. You aren’t owed them before that.
nb. It is mandatory for publicly traded companies to keep their secrets when it comes to the future plans, and it is often better from a value standpoint for them to be overly cautious than it is for them to be overly aggressive about communication.
Cautious about what? There is nothing in OW that no other game hasn’t already done. Except over-promising on things. There is no reason to not show progress in areas. To a minimal extent.
“top secret stuff i’m not allowed to talk about”
“more top secret stuff i’m not allowed to talk about”
“top secret stuff i’m not supposed to talk about”
This makes me scared, really scared. Because the last time they had some “top secret stuff”, they brought news of Diablo Immortal. Their top secret stuff usually involves ways to capitalise on something, like how they’ve tried to forcefully ram E-Sports down everyone’s throat with Overwatch.
Lets face it, they’re basically locked up in a room with Activision, trying to figure out how to turn things around so they can get more money. The only thing Activision likes, is money. They don’t care about their games, their gamers or any of those technicalities. They only care about making money.
You base this on your experience working for Fortune 500 companies?
Anything that may impact their earnings—positively or negatively—needs to be communicated to shareholders (which I’m guessing very few people here are, I’m certainly not). Whether others have done it is not relevant.
Usually you are judged in part on execution of your promises. So if you communicate “we’ll be doing X” and then you miss it consistently (for whatever reason, including changing priorities to better things), this creates serious problems. Having it miss expectations, even if those expectations are not reasonable, also creates serious problems.
Not saying anything ends up with a subset of people grousing about lack of communication, but that’s about it.
Outside of the requirements and how this comes across to shareholders: You will make people far more upset by communicating and missing than you will by not communicating. Consistently. Across disciplines and fields.
So ask yourself: What does Blizzard gain by communicating? What is the upside for them to communicate outside of the semi-regular Developer Updates?
It gives you a warm fuzzy feeling, maybe, it helps the small subset of users who visit these specific forums on a regular basis, perhaps… But what’s the upsides for them beyond that?
No, Activition is Activison and Blizzard is Blizzard. There was always a bad looking changes from blizzard, just not so much in one time. Everything will be OK. Right now people are overreacting about everything.
Activision Blizzard currently includes five business units: Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, Major League Gaming, Activision Blizzard Studios and King.
You know, one influence another with ther ideas. I dont know how much tho i dont watch that much about their problems with each other. Just see complains, i dont know what is difference between blizzard and activision anyway.
strategic business unit - a relatively autonomous division of a large company that operates as an independent enterprise with responsibility for a particular range of products or activities.
I spen 1 minute to find it and 4 to translate it to my language to understand.
I dont know, they call it activision bliizard, so its nothing strange that people will blame activision because “blizzard was so good company that care about us!”. And you know, still im sure there are some people working there that have impact on more than one of this divisions. But i dont wona waste time too look for that, its pointless anyway, most company’s now just look for quick cash grab not to make games better.
And because of that topic i start to look for more about this, i dont know how true this is because i dont know kotaku but they have at least 2 articles that talk about influence of activision to blizzard. One about diablo problems where i see statement like:
“Yet over the past year, Activision’s influence on Blizzard has been very real - and Blizzard staff say things are starting to feel a little different for the once-autonomous company.”
the other one is just called " With Activision’s Influence Growing, Blizzard Is Cutting Costs", i dont wona read mutch of it, but for sure what ever is there it have big impact on how people see activision blizzard relations.
No Wyoming it is not the answer the OP or others are looking for.
Most of this is “secret” stuff which in this day and age from what Blizzard has showed us for years, at least in OW, likely means nothing much. Nothing permanent anyway, nothing we are all holding out for. They need to give us concrete stuff that we want as this is make it or break it year for Blizzard and they have not seemingly gotten the idea quite just yet how thin of ice they are on across all of their IPs.
I hope they have… but without telling us anything but “hush hush” stuff. No.
I work in software (not game development, but software nonetheless), and can confirm 100%. My last full day of work in December was 12/19. That wasn’t even me taking any PTO. Just a holiday party, half days, and holidays given off by my company. I just got back in on the 2nd, but not much was expected of anyone.