NEWS - Message from J. Allen Brack (Blizzard President) & Investor's Call Transcript

You didn’t even read the post, did you? I bet you understand nothing about managing too, but you just have to throw in a vomit comment…

They didn’t fire 800 people who can produce the kind of content they wanna produce. Most of those people have nothing to do with actual game development.

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Some of us do want that and, outside of enjoying watching the league itself, know that it’s the best thing there is to increase interest in the game, which it absolutely has.

No, OW was developed as an Esports title for a professional league from inception. It’s why OW even exists. It just makes business sense that you release the game itself first, in order to get players into the IP and then introduce the league after. OW exists for the league, not the other way around.

Also, OWL lives and dies by viewership, period. If 12 million people played OW but not a single one watch OWL, then the league would not exist. Conversely, if barely anyone played OW but loved watching OWL, then the gravy train keeps on trucking.

Development into OW takes OWL into consideration first and foremost, which does not always mean positive outcomes for the game that you and me play.

Thanks for the link. I wish people would make this important distinction. Larger companies generate larger revenues, but that doesn’t mean they’re making enough money to be the company they want to be. Hopefully trimming some of the fat will help Blizzard in the long run. I know they expect it to or they wouldn’t have done it.

That’s good news I guess, but it annoys me a little bit that they basically only talk about Overwatch League. If I didn’t know what was Overwatch and started to read this, I would think that Overwatch League is the main game and Overwatch is just a random project related to OWL.

In an effort to pull back the camera…

Have your mobile account with AT&T? They dumped 4600 employees in the past couple of months.

Get a caffeine-fix at Starbucks? They closed up to 150 stores last year (let’s assume each store has a manager and 4 workers) and laid off 350 at corporate. In 2017, they dumped all 379 Teavana stores.

Use a Cisco router for WiFi? They’ve dumped 5500 employees since 2016.

Use an HP printer at work? They are expecting to dump up to 5000 by year end.

BuzzFeed just laid off 220 people.

Job losses suck. But they are a part of working. Businesses open, businesses close, businesses succeed, businesses fail…

In case you don’t want to read through all of the text on seekingalpha you can hear it here https://static.seekingalpha.com/cdn/s3/transcripts_audio/4240392.mp3

Apparently they didn’t put much effort to prevent access to this file. (You are supposed to be a subscriber)

Call of Duty will never become a league if they keep releasing new Call of Duty games. It’s why I quit playing. You have to keep buying DLC and more games to simply play it.

welcome to capitalism, my friends. it sucks and it is awful.

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You also need to remember that the first priority in most publicly head company is to the shareholders, then comes everyone else.

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800 people, and you give ONE a 15$ million bonus

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Thanks for giving us all this information in one place.

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Well said Spunky. Let us now lay to rest forever the argument that microtransactions are a necessity that we have to live with to keep people employed.

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Does this mean we’ll finally be getting the game we’ve all been waiting for, Lost Vikings 3?

And this is why it was a mistake from the start to make Brack the president (among other, more pertinent reasons). The man’s a perpetual meme.

Gotta pay somehow for that parasitic CEO and his bottomless entitlements to bonuses and stock options.

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They better give me a hat in game for compensation once the game goes F2P!

(/s and what actually happened when Team Fortress 2 went free)

I’m seeing other reports that a lot of the new development will be mobile versions of their flagship games. The writing is on the wall, bring that Chinese fan based in via P2W OW mobile and keep them engaged with OWL. Sigh…

This is what happens when you are greedy.

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wish he didnt talk about owl that much… so finally i expect the focus will be on owl again and the base just may fund this. as a consideration they are allowed to play ow with the given aspects :confused:

when i read mobile … that gave me the creeps. srly, wasnt the boo after diablo mobile version was announced enough?^^