Just as I said when he left. But people called me an *******. Well I like to say I told you so. So I told you so.
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I still hold that ALL Blizzard products appear to have gotten their budgets slashed to a pittance of what they once were sometime between 2016 and 2018.
Which is why there was literally zero content from any Blizzard title in 2019, and both of their Chief Financial Officers quit.
Jeff could be the best producer ever, but you canât make blockbuster gold, with a shoestring budget.
Looking forward to the Microsoft/Blizzard merger, where these teams can finally get some real development cash again.
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The thing that came out of this that i been saying for a long time in these forums is that OW1 was never meant to give players free content forever for the $40 you paid once back in 2016.
This was never the plan and the plan was to stop releasing content for OW1 eventually and then release OW2.
And that OW1âs business model is outdated and doesnât work anymore for how the gaming industry has evolved.
OW needed to evolve or be left to die.
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I meanâŚ
They were basically copying Team Fortress 2. And that went F2P with a cash shop and paid keys.
10 years agoâŚ
Care to write a summary?
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All the games at the top right now have massive playerbases because they are free to play and all have microtransactions or a battle pass system.
Doesnt mean OW2 has to copy these systems completely, but have something similar.
Loot boxes stopped making Blizzard significant money by the second or so year. And what OW made in lootboxes in its whole existence is small time compared to what games like Fortnite, Apex or Valorant make with their battle passes and microtransactions.
More revenue for the game studio means more devs to hire for more frequent content.
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maybe but jeff had personality compared to any of the marketing or devs in blizzard/activision. dude was dripping with charisma. did he make mistakes yea it looks like it but he was only human and a showman. maybe the game could have been better if they let him have more decision making or free reign?
im sure he had to do what the uppers told him to do or the suits? maybe? lol who knows we arent part of blizzard or weâre not behind the scenes and who is to say this âinsiderâ is 100 percent correct?
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- Jeff: I want to make quality games or I quit.
- Kotick: Best I can do is cut your development budget in half and have you work on 3 spinoffs
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I still take things like this with a grain of salt. A guy of a guy said this, translated from that and that.
Could it be true? Yes. Could it be false? Yes.
But why leak this now? Jeff left a bazillion years ago.
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Itâs Jeffâs fault in the sense that heâs a dying breed in the gaming industry. As in, the ones that actually care about the quality of the work theyâre putting out.
Overwatch 2 is a special case in that it was the perfect storm of crap. Everything that possibly couldâve gone wrong did go wrong, so I donât blame them for taking this route. But this is by no means a good thing. It just adds fuel to scummy business practices. Donât be complaining in ten years when theyâre charging you $80 for an alpha and advertise it as âlive service.â
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More money doesnât mean jack
Apex makes it by the boatload but that game still sees severe issues in development constantly
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I donât buy the âow was a complete game on releaseâ philosophy. You donât plan a competitive league system YEARS in advance for a game you arenât updating.
No one saw the only available modes of qp, vs ai, tutorial and weekly brawls with a total of 3 healers as the final version of overwatch. If they did see it as the final version than they would not have invested so much into the eSports side of things that are planned YEARS in advance.
Iâm gonna call bulls-&t on this whole reddit post.
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Every company is different but why would any company get by giving free content forever, especially that the player base is getting lower every month instead of climbing. And even if the player base is increased by releasing yet even more free content, its not more money for Blizzard , its old players coming back to play the free content for a bit then leave again when it gets old.
Devs are not working as volunteers for free. Its just an old system that isnt relevant any more.
Of coarse players want everything for free (including me), but it isnt smart business for Blizzard.
So after watching the video, why the hell are you so confident about your conclotion? LOL
Literally, there is nothing said in that video that can be considered a 100% fact.
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Thank god OW never went f2p, that ruined TF2. Apex is the only f2p game that isnt festering rotting garbage, and that has itâs own issues due to being f2p.
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Except thatâŚitâs really not? Thatâs the lie the game industry keeps telling you because they want excuses to make more and more money as they allow their own budgets to explode.
Plenty of games, from indies to AAA releases, just release once for whatever price point and do fantastically. Sure, for an online live service game, itâs a bit more rare, but itâs not like itâs never been done before.
My issue with Apex is that the servers feel like trash a lot. So many hit-reg issues that have gone unfixed for several seasons. Plus the audio mixing is maybe some of the worst in any AAA release Iâve ever heard (enemy footsteps are basically unhearable over the way too loud guns and way too many other effects)
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âŚwhat exactly did you say was his fault?? Because most of what I got from this article was that Jeff wanted to make an actual good game and take time on it and blizz said âno lolâ.
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F2P was great, until after they basically stopped development and there was a lot of malicious bots.
But it worked for like 7 years.
Thereâs a big difference between what the leak says and the clickbait interpretation shown in the thumbnail.
âFaultâ suggests something was done wrong. Jeff supposedly wanted to take the James Cameron approach; work on something forever until the fanbase stops caring and moves on, then eventually release a product so mind-blowing it reinvigorates fansâ love for the property.
Others wanted to release imperfect content now. I prefer this approach. Iâm not gonna live forever. Give me something to play already. But that doesnât mean Jeffâs approach was wrong. In fact from a commercial standpoint, it may have been better. Negative reactions to the beta show how incapable people are of judging a WIP (guessing most havenât played a beta before). Waiting until the product was more complete before allowing people to test it would likely have gotten better reactions.
As for putting OW1 on life support, that was an inevitability many of us saw coming years in advance. The game was dying and bleeding customers fast. Blizz isnât a charity. They have no obligation to continue dumping funds into it if thereâs no longer an ROI.