It's Official. Activision Runs Blizzard Now

General Discussion
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First, they cut HoTS development and tournaments. This ruined the lives of the pro players/casters/coaches. They got blindsided out of nowhere and lost their jobs immediately. Now, Blizzard is paying Employees to leave. But apparently… BLIZZARD NEEDS TO SAVE MONEY.

Kotaku Article is called With Activision’s Influence Growing, Blizzard Is Cutting Costs. I do not have permission to posts links, but Yong Yea summarizes it here:

You know. Blizzard. The Multi BILLION dollar company partnered with Acticancer… i mean Activision. They are using a crossroads program, which offers employees to leave blizzard with “compensation”. This was offered mostly to the Customer Service teams. But now, they have “Expanded” this program to IT and QA (Which seems obvious due to the results that the customers/players see). But with the cutting down on Customer Relations, they are hiring more people in development.

So this means:

  • Less communication with the consumer.
  • More games pumped out quickly, to make more money.

But who is behind this change? According to an Ex-Blizzard Employee: The Finance Division.

“A lot of decisions now are being driven by business folks, marketing and finance folks. There’s a real struggle now between developers and the business people… Strategic decisions are being driven by the finance group”.-Blizz affiliate who wished to be anonymous.

The finance group can dictate what tech can be used to improve/create a game, to minor things as what is placed inside Blizzcon goodie bags. The man behind all this is Armin Zerza, who has brought in a bunch of dirty greasy Activison and McKinsey Consulting Company suits.

But he was replaced by the now new CFO, Amrita Ahuja. Guess where she came from? YUP. ACTIVISON. She has now said that Blizz needs to cut costs on spending. This money saving was strictly for non-game dev. departments, but recently with HoTS being gutted, it has spread to the devs.

The Article goes on, but i have to say this:

I do not think i can support any Blizzard game anymore. I will not be buying anymore Lootboxes for OW. I will continue to play, but I will not support this corporate greed that screws people out of their jobs. It is absolutely disgusting.

I think what is going to happen in the future is this: Finance will bury blizzard. Finance has no idea what they are doing. They don’t know what a good product is. They don’t know what goes in to making a good product. They don’t know what goes in to developing a good product. They just see money. And with all the greed that blinds them, they won’t see death until he is right in front of their nose.

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Im not given up on Blizz until they make an Overwatch battle royale or mobile port

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Well, the article says they are working on another OW title. I would not be surprised if it was a mobile game.

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Ship is sinking, and no one at Blizz proper wants to try and stop it

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A company is doing company things. Whoa there.

I’d welcome OW mobile tbh. I’m in hospital atm and would love to play a game or two.

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Get well soon! I ll send you a healing nade over there :wink:

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They cut those games and things because players don’t want it nor support it. Hots is constantly being crapped on by many players. Remember people posting they’ll boycott the company because of Diablo Immortal announcement? People also bring up the drop in stocks after that.

You can’t be mad about cutting games like hots, or the lack of esport player support yet also hate on the games and the esports.

Cutting costs, and restructuring its management and budget is part of fixing the “sinking ship” as some put it.

Also, we need to be aware of whats happening with the real world, the economy, the government shut down, the fed etc. That stuff might have some influence on their decisions.

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I mean, give them a little credit for paying them (quite a lot, I think it was 1 year salary) to quit. That’s about the nicest way to fire someone there is and they should be rewarded a bit for it (lest they just fire them next time).

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The game industry is also really tough in general. Many people get hired for projects a few months at time then move onto the next. Not a lot of security.

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*employee
Just letting you know so that you can fix it.

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At this rate it won’t be long before we hurt a company’s feelings and we can’t talk about them on here anymore

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Been there and done that with Atari when Star trek online was being sold off to another company, at the moment we have more freedoms on the forums than at that time.

Though that can change almost instantly.

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I wonder if there are content creators reporting on the events behind the scenes regularly en masse, like they do everything else

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As a kid i look up to Dev´s like Blizzard and Rockstar for putting so much love in there games and care about the community. Since I get older I understood that the goal of every company is to make money and that is what all big company’s do right now, and whoever don’t try to get more money our is not even existing anymore.
Its not the first year that Blizzard is a part of Activision, and they let them do there things, until now. If you wanna be competitive in this business you need to do things that is maybe not welcome by the community. Look at other companies like EA or Ubisoft, they are doing there things and a lot of gamers hate them but this still grow on stock and get more and more money every year.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see similar future for Blizzard, we get every other year a new IP or a new Overwatch game, some spin offs or even just some paid dlcs and a lot of people will buy it and keep complaining. I mean look at fifa, I boycott it since 2014 and it still grows bigger and sale more and more with almost no production cost on there side, if the game is without good competition it will be like that and let`s be real, Overwatch has no competition right now, there is just no other game on the market you could replace it with, you could do what ever you wanna and still the core fans will buy it.

My point is, yes its bad what happening to the people and some gamers and yes if you grow up with different few on the games and its development then its disappointing, but kids who took of the games right now there feel no difference and are hyped every year to get new game with minor changes. I will enjoy the game as long I can and if it takes over like the CoD games since CoD4 then I just move on to other games and enjoy them. I wish all the gamers, Devs and stuff a happy Xmas.

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I think now we know why Jeff Kaplan said it’s “secret stuff” , because even he doesn’t know what will be released or not due to internal problems.

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That is very likely to be the case.

On both op and your post spiral lol.

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To any idiots that think ceos get immediately replaced, they don’t, in fact they probably already have a new one by now after THREE MONTHS they just didn’t announce it. Shut up about this seriously.

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It’s funny because barely anyone actually cared about HotS’s e-sports while it was actually running, but now that they stopped it because no-one was interested, everyone complains and acts like the decision to cut the tournaments was totally unjustified.

Blizzard cancelled HotS’s e-sports just like any TV show would be cancelled if it wasn’t doing well enough. That’s just how it is. 🤷

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That will be the day I quit Overwatch.

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Wait, they’re paying people to quit? :joy: