They can in theory, but there aren’t that many buyers for a multi-billion dollar video game studio, and in the current situation those buyers would demand an enormous discount and/or for Activision to shoulder the financial burdens of the lawsuit. It doesn’t really help them.
Sure, but they’re not going to just close the doors at Blizzard. Even if it’s “only” 1/4 of ActiBlizz’s total value, throwing away 1/4 of your value is not something shareholders take kindly to.
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. Take your pick. They would not give a care in the world even pay premium. Maybe even netflix, dunno if they could handle the debt thou.
If they sell it in pieces they get that value back to reinvest elsewhere, second to that they can simply rebrand it all and reallocate people as they dismantle the current IPs. Scrapping bigger projects etc. They did not even “sell” destinty and see what happened after that, nothing. Less than one year impact.
Apple is only interested in mobile gaming which is not (yet) that big a part of Blizzard, Stadia and therefore google gaming is effectively dead, so that leaves Microsoft and Amazon. For the right price they’d definitely go for it, but they would absolutely use the current situation as leverage for a discount, that’s just practical business sense.
In any case… while acknowledging I’m the one that brought it up in the first place… selling or spin-off options is really a digression. The initial point I was disputing is that the company isn’t going to be completely shut down. Selling them isn’t shutting them down.
If you scrap OW2 and Diablo IV and dismantle the staff, and bury the Blizzard name, you’ll never get more than a tiny fraction of the value from selling off the video game properties (sans personnel) piecemeal. Such a course of action would be like setting fire to a mountain of money.
Considering they have been paying a premium before I doubt they would care that much.
They can just sell the IPs separately. EA and Activsion are infamous for shutting down stuff regardless. Again they did the same with destiny. I do not doubt them doing the same. Sure we might get to see OW 2 and Diablo 4. Both seems to be in development limbo thou, not really making any progress so the question is if they will even wait that long.
Why are you so concerned regardless, it is just business.
No, they didn’t. Destiny was a publishing agreement, not their own property. They simply released Bungie from a publishing agreement for a year where they projected they wouldn’t make much money anyway. It’s apples and oranges.
They can, yes, but if they reallocate the staff as you suggest and just sell the IP they will not get much for it. IP without an active team is worth much less than IP along with the team.
Just because they aren’t sharing behind-the-scenes details doesn’t mean that no progress is being made… and in fact we know some progress has been made because they did do that OW2 presentation a couple months back. The entire reason that Overwatch isn’t getting heroes and maps anymore is because it’s all hands on deck to develop OW2, so they had better be making progress or ActiBlizz is just throwing money away.
Well they do not even have a release window and frankly the product looks about in line with what else they have been produced lately, namely wow. So garbage. People do not want MAUs milking from blizzard products, but under Activison they can not deliver anything else. On top of the quality cutbacks, coz again that is how activsion does business. I think they are dead in the water. We’ll see. I fully expect, if these games are ever released it will be the last cycle of AAA games we see from blizz. Right now even a next WoW expansion is looking doubtful.
Oh, I missed this.
I don’t know that I’m actually all that concerned… it’s just an intellectual exercise on projecting likely business decisions for me. I’m not an active investor in Activision-Blizzard because I don’t care for their short-term thinking or their reliance on predatory mechanics … not for ethical reasons exactly, but because I expect increased regulation on loot boxes and other whale-targeting predatory monetization to very badly hurt their mobile games income in the coming years.
The industry as a whole has been moving towards not giving release dates until they are extremely solid, generally less than a year from release. There has just been too much trouble with schedule slippage and the fallout from it ruining sales and/or franchise reputations.
I’m currently estimating OW2 as being Holiday 2022, but I wouldn’t be surprised at a slip to Q1 2023. Optimists are estimating Q1 2022, but if they are right then I would expect more promotional material soon. It’s all very guesswork, but you obviously don’t release a title without a marketing hype ramp up, and the current level of information release looks to me like ‘teaser for a product a year away’ and not ‘start of the release marketing hype run-up’.
Diablo I don’t follow closely enough to have an opinion on.
As for the quality of OW2, I’m skeptical as well. I don’t plan to preorder, I want to see the reviews and initial customer reaction first. (Well, on principle, I never pre-order. Maybe I would compromise on that after a really good playable demo someday, but pre-release playable demos when you haven’t already pre-ordered are really rare).
However, as far as the shutting down Blizzard question goes… ActiBlizz obviously is planning to make a lot of money on OW2. Otherwise they would not continue to pour money into OWL and OW2 development.
They can PLAN all they want but since they keep releasing garbage games they wont. WoW makes money right now cause they have cut all production costs to basically not exist while they are funded by all the whales that still believe that their sunk cost has meaning. OW doesnt need a Sub because this game isnt worth one and blizz hasnt shown that it should even be worth one.
I agree with the statement. People are know to troll less, cheat less and generally not be an a-hole if they have to pay monthly for something.
In an ideal world where people weren’t ashholes that would be great, but we also have things in life like the police who fine us tickets and we pay taxes for specifically for this reason.
Sad reality is if we wanted to keep up competitive integrity a system like OP’s suggesting one of the only ways to do it realistically.
Of course I don’t believe Blizz would do it because they’d probably lose more money than they gain.
Somehow people are still paying for World of Warcraft though, even when they get the new content they have to pay for it on top of the subscription 
I can finally be top 500!
This is the only community I know that is begging to be taken to the cleaners. You will all reap what you sow if you keep begging blizzard to make you pay more money for the same product
What do you suggest as a fix for the problem then?
Stricter comp requirements something like a certain win percentage must be maintained to play competitive. Now obviously it wouldn’t be too difficult to maintain I dunno 45% of your game but that would cut down on some throwing IMO. Again I don’t like the idea of this either but paying for comp nope no way
That’s the job of the MMR system already. If people’s winrate is that far off neutral, then the MMR system just needs to be faster.
What the game does need is humans checking manual reports and requiring evidence for the reports, as well as a reworking the endorsement system with the ability to award players with positive or negative attributes. Some like “communicator/Silent” , “cooperator/solo-player”, “fulfilled role/bad plays”, etc. and only allowing ranked play with sufficient behaviour.
How would you even have lower ranks then? There are some people who legit lose that much, its what basically separates ranks… normally. That would also upset a huge amount of peoplee especially if you were to go on and random losing streak.
That’s why I’m saying it can’t be too bad in all honesty if you can win 45 % of your games somethings wrong. And sure it will upset people so will paying for comp.
I mean this is my 8th season all of which I’ve gotten 50 or over winrate, except my 6th season where i dropped to 45% win ratio through what i feel was a terrible series of bad luck and if i would have been excluded from comp from that i’d feels worse than i was that season. Besides if your out there getting a 55% win then theoretically in a way you are the cause for someone’s 45% win ratio. The better you do, the more likely you eliminate people from comp
Well that’s what makes it competitive lol besides you’d only get locked out for one season and you can always open que
True i mean it is possible and isnt necessarily a bad idea, but try convincing blizzard of ever implementing a system like that and risking/losing all that money. We already know they sacrifice competitive integrity for sake of their money. Remember when they made the punishments more harsher for leavers, a redundant move because everyone knows you could go on your Smurf account and then play on that one. On Xbox its even easier to have a Smurf account, that supposedly proactive move did nothing. They do anything but actually address the Smurf account issue. Unless we find another way to recompensate them the money they are a business after all it has to seem financially viable.