About essentially being forced to change the game into a pay model. I’d rly like to hear from the boots on the ground about this switch.
I understand they have bills to pay. I respect it. I understand the devs don’t set deadlines for releases or prices. This is NOT an anti-dev thread.
I’d really like the devs to discuss their true feelings about creating one of the best multiplayer games ever in OW1, to be tasked with creating this dumb, broken junky OW2 disaster.
Fixed that for you, hope you don’t mind.
It goes without saying that it is not going to happen even if they wanted to simply becuse they are not allowed to.
What we know from ex dev is that their time has been wasted on projects for OW that ended up being canceled.
They probably just accepted that it’s just the way things are these days and got over it within a week, they have lives outside of work that would take up their thinking time as with most people.
You’ll never find out about this.
Blizzard is massively allergic to bad news of any kind, so much so that they believe MAUs reflect success, even when many of those aren’t actually playing the game (which is why they keep giving away cosmetics just for logging in).
This is the same company that refused to merge servers in WoW, even when they had many servers that were dead and merging them with other servers would’ve been the right thing to do for those players, and all because the news of “WoW is merging servers!!” would’ve spread and they didn’t want that negative press.
I’m sure Jeff Kaplan could say quite a few choice things about the company but he, like all employees past or present, is locked down by a terrifyingly strict NDA.
It’s generally this. A lot of times you’ll see the potential, want to work on that potential, but just sigh and shake your head knowing that’s not what is on the menu for the project managers, so whatever.
Might be a meeting where you can mention something that can be done if it’s close enough related to the project to flex into doing or be done soon.
World of Warcraft must be extra dead for them to resort to doing this for Diablo and Overwatch.
blame it on the board and shareholders
Activision has the the midas touch. They destory everything they touch but they still think its valuable gold.
Pay the bills? Are you actually trolling?
The payment model of OW2 has NOTHING to do with Blizzard not making enough money.
The monetization is 100% investor-aimed.
now days, i doubt most of them have ever touched a video game, aside from playtesting.
If the genuinely cared they would stand up and refuse to implement it… i highly doubt the people making these decisions can code…
But they keep their heads down and do what their told because the paycheck is more important
As much as it’s fashionable to talk of passion, standing up for your beliefs, you can only do those if you can afford those, most of us on pla et earth can’t do this, you do what you are told to especially if your monthly pay check depends on it.
Till the whole dev team gets behind it… then they are forced either to negotiate… or halt development till they can replace everyone…
These things never go smoothly and will only result in a toxic work environment and lots of cliques, the moment Aaron tries to put his foot down , the guy above him will try to groom the next lead.
Especially in private companies it’s not a joke you can destroy your real life career over some random people who would troll if you buffed 5hps more to mercy.
There is no win here for the Devs, they can make a great stand and will be left thankless the moment the next patch rolls.
Right now the truth is Activision feeds them
Funny how “toxic work environments” only in exist woke companies.
Cant imagine why that is
This is honestly true to a great extent i feel like there is less empathy there than actually being more humane.
Because much of “toxicity” is created by those who comlpain, than those being complained about…ll
Ultimately “toxicology” is just a means for people to excuse and justify their intolerance of others while trying to play the victim
Well, Jeff left.
A lot of them left, despite the OW team generally being exempt from the scandal of woke being used as a cover by nasty employees at Blizzard (thereby annoying everybody possible).
As someone who worked for a shady (yet legal) business, you feel dirty sometimes, especially when you talk to your coworkers, but most of the time, you don’t care that much.
My guess is the Bigwigs saw Battlefield and all those other money making games and said “yeah, we like money and they have money, you guys should make it like that other game”.
I’m guessing the decision was pushed through hard by money men to make the game more actiony and shooty (and generic and broken) without properly considering the consequences. I dont blame Jeff for leaving.
As for monetization - its a necessary evil, but OW2 being P2W has leaned into the EVIL side a bit too much.
Because the non-woke companies just let toxicity happen and do nothing. Hopefully microsoft will stamp that toxic abuse out soon.