Yes, well they probably expected a normal amount of support and manpower, the amount that’s afforded to other studios working on big projects and not the pitiful amount they ultimately received.
They also probably expected to be able to work on projects without them getting cancelled by the CEO directly, ruining months of work, as the former producer for the game said.
Probably because he thought it could turn it into a Battlepass/MTX money farm sooner rather than later (now) in spite of the glorious ambitions the devs had for the IP.
Bobby needs to step down. He is an irredeemable blight on the gaming community. So many awful things happened under his watch while the things the company should be doing didn’t happen under his watch.
He needs to go. He needs to walk into the ether, never to be seen again.
Yes, the monetization in OW1 was very time and lasted for some time, which is why I said,
“Bobby probably greenlit OW1 because he thought he could turn it into a Battlepass/MTX farm SOONER rather than LATER (NOW)”
He certainly received a great deal of pushback from the likes of Kaplan and Goodman, but eventually wore them down and wore the game down to the state it’s in now.
Those developers who constructed the “crawl, walk, run” model were doing their jobs as Blizzard devs, to create groundbreaking and incredible complete games that raise the bar, that’s what made Blizzard the beloved and wealthy company it was before its fall.
It’s the job of the artists to create art for profit, it’s the job of the moneymen to finance and acquire staff for the completion of projects, one party set out to do their half and the other party fell woefully short - more than that, they didn’t just fall short, they actively worked against the artists.
They might have thought they could pull it off, eventually acquire more funding and staff, but Bobby would come in and put them to work only to come by later and cancel all of it.
In light of that, casting blame at anyone but Kotick just seems like stupidity to me, like actual, real, genuine stupidity, or malice.
They created the idea without the resources to execute it and no viable plan to execute it but tried anyway. They’re part of the problem.
Kotick is a horrible human who should be fired into the sun, but the reality is that team 4 had their role in this too, and Aaron himself has said as much.
You can tell me all you want that he’s not allowed to criticize upper management, but it makes more sense that Aaron is just telling the truth given what we know of what happened, and what has been said both recently and historically.
Call me dumb all you want, I think you’re hoping that things will magically get better when the MS deal goes through
It’s up to upper management to correctly allocate resources to their projects. If the project flops because they weren’t given the resources, that’s 100 percent on upper management’s fault.
Lmao emojis make people dumb? Get off your high horse.
I’m sure Aaron would love to shift a little blame to execs and I’m sure he can’t, but I don’t think he’s lying about the very large mistakes he’s admitting to. Do you think he’s making them up?
I don’t generally want to be rude, but you’re calling people stupid and malicious, so I’ll just say it. You sound like you have no idea how a company works.
The CEO doesn’t just throw money and staff at projects. He delegates work to some degree, yes, but Team 4 was given their parameters. Teams can’t just create a project of any scale and demand the staff and money to do it from the CEO. They had a team of 40 people, a deadline, asset resources from Titan, and the instruction to create something from it. Kaplan was meant to direct that effort with what they had. He decided to widen the scope unrealistically to what parameters were given, and in a direction that was HORRIBLE for the game. Blatantly ignoring its success. Arguably the management above him stepped in to fix the problem.
Jeff didn’t deserve a team of 500 devs just because he had an idea. Thats not how a company works. Kotick got in the way and is a bad person, but misdirection of this level can be attributed directly to the person directing it, and in this case it was Kaplan, and to a lesser degree, Keller.
