Blizzard cannot break off with Activision, it is not a partnership, since Activision are the actual owners. The only way SC3 happens if there is a trend towards a new RTS hopefully Immortal or FG. I don’t blame Activision though, they are a business, as all companies are, heck if I had Activision stocks I would definitely want for them to maximize profits. If you want to go the romantic route, the true villain is Mike Morhime for selling Blizz to Activision and then stepping back, or do you think he did that out of passion? Anyways I don’t blame him either, if video games were not a business, we would not have SC2 nor SC1 at all. nor would we get immortals or the next FG games, it is just the nature of the beast. Cashing out is 100% legitimate.
Right. Well that’s kind of the point…Blizzard HAD to be sold because their customers were done with the games and extremely pi ssed. People were getting ripped off by the company and stocks dropped massively. That’s what put Blizzard in the position to be sold to Activision in the first place. Blizzard is such a corrupted company and most of their actual GOOD staff members either quit or retired. It’s hard to really expect anything from them at this point.
Their wax wings melted under the intense heat of over centralized profit streams and now they’re plummeting towards their bottom line.
Like seriously; you have to diversify the portfolio and not over invest into those revenue streams so if one stream become unviable; you don’t end up losing a stupid amount of money. This is investment 101.
Kotick dun goofed up. Probably because he got drunk off his own success and became complacent.
Like all CEOs, Kotick just got so rich, he no longer cares.
Blizzard is a business, and Bobby made money off of it.
Not sure about that. they had a drop in player base sure. But they actually had better profits as well.
CDPR had better profits too after Cyberpunk was torn apart and Government agencies are still looking into fining them for their lies to investors.
Eventually the other boot will drop - and right now we’re seeing the start of that boot come down.
Or if the game needs a balance patch an organization could make a custom game addon with proposed balance changes. But alas, ladder would not have the changes. Blizzard abandoned sc2 like hots. Once hots got dropped it was just a matter of time until sc2 got shoved in the closet.
Sure, you never know what is going on, BUT, I have no warrant to affirm that they are actually lying to their investors. If I had several brands which I am spending money, on, and they are not profitable, nor do I have plans to exploit the brand in the future, I would pull out of them as well, and if my investment was in the line, I would demand that they did, and I think that was the case with SC2.
It pisses me off just like anyone else here because I love the game, but I do not blame their decision. And I think re-routing investments rather than lying about profits is what explains the rise.
The good news, is that this gives space in the market for smaller companies like FG to step in, who are smaller, thus can operate on lower margins since they have lower capital costs. So while it is a shame that Blizzard pulled out, it does not come without any gain for RTS fans.
I agree with you except such a mindset is myopic. The most profitable strategy is to partner content with compensation. When you just start flooding games with micro transactions you may get big profits short term but the lack of customer loyalty (and potential litigation?) will eventually come back to haunt you. With the money they are making though, they probably don’t care that they are losing loyal customers as long as they can hoodwink gullible people that just keep pouring money in with no reciprocal receipt of proportional content.
Nobody said they were lying about profits?
Activion is just messing up by over investing into single IPs while nigh abandoning ones which are pretty much in a sorry state because they made some really bad decisions.
HotS only failed because Activision failed to push their product well after Heroes of the Dorm and implemented systems which encourage smurfing, which was exasperated by a decline in player base size.
Diablo 3 was literally abandoned early with DLC plans being cancelled if I’m remembering things right.
StarCraft 2 suffered from excessively late balance patches and design decisions which very few people appreciated, primarily close to the end of life periods for WoL and HotS respectively.
StarCraft is a money maker franchise; do you know how well a PvE focused StarCraft 1st person looter shooter would do? It would sell big time, especially with recent hardware advancements allowing things such as DLSS, VSR for AMD and Ray Tracing for both in addition to a plethora of new physics-based technology in proven engine designs such as Unreal Engine.
Heroes of the Storm is also a perfect F2P free advertising platform that innately supports some form of micro transactions. Yet decisions on that IP regarding how certain aspects are managed have driven most players away. Again, totally on Activision’s inability to manage IPs properly.
Diablo 3 imo was more on Blizzard. Around that time Blizzard was into this “YOU LIKE WHAT WE BLOODY WELL SAY” mentality and thus we ended up with a tone which didn’t fit the franchise whatsoever, a marketplace system that was so over-monetized that they had to scrap it almost entirely and lead devs who were so rude to the fan-base it caused controversy. If I had to point to any point in Blizzard’s time when they had some form of autonomy as the straw which broke the Camel’s back in Activision’s eyes; it was that period of time…problem is Activision sucks at IP management. Blizzard had hubris problems, they got drunk on the WoW success and the initial SC2 success…but they always managed their IPs. They didn’t just throw it all out.
I would love to see more coop missions, honestly. It’s a pretty cool concept and is pretty fun.
But I guess we’ll have to switch to a different game, if we want more content.
Or make our own 
I would agree with you, if we did not have had games, such as LoL, that have been going with micro transactions for well over 10 years, and had not only short term success but also long term success that stands even today. MT is a legitimate monetization model, that can be well implemented, or botched as in several EA games.
Also loyal customers are only good as far as you can monetize them, whether it is by them directly buying, or attracting potential paying customers. A good example is Spotify, I think the paying customers are somewhere around 10%, and they sustain the other 90% (if I recall correctly, Ads don’t do much more than cover some of the costs). The 90% is important as it makes the platform more attractive, and brings in potential new customers, but of course there is a limit to how much you are willing to put in to retain customers that are not profitable, and not all of them are. Furthermore, non profitable customers, can actually be a cost as you are still supporting them.
Anyways, ultimately it comes down to the metrics they have, which I am sure that Blizzard/Activision are considering much more than we are. If they were right or wrong, only time will tell.
Disagree with that. I see them actively supporting (really supporting), CoD, Diablo IV, Overwatch 2, WOW. Not to mention several stand alone single player games. Having 4 major online games is a VERY diverse offer of online games, I would like to know what other company has this amount of AAA IPs in development for online gaming. There is also a thing as having too much diversity, which I think is part of the reason why they have been dropping games like HotS and SC2.
Also, because opportunity cost is a thing, just because a game is making money, does not mean it is a good investment, especially for a company as big as ACT/BLIZZ. It is much more about your return rate, and how much would you have made if you had invested your money elsewhere.
I think the HotS drop, was very justified and it was a mistake to make the game to begin with, as the MOBA space was already dominated by other franchises, that Blizzard had no real hope to compete against, and for f2p games to work you need a massive user base, because you only monetize a small percentage of it.
I am somewhat baffled that they are not pursuing another RTS game, as Blizzard is still the dominating name in this space. And I think a more casual friendly RTS would take the industry by storm. But I also understand that the opportunity cost is a new Diablo and Overwatch game which also have big interest.
BTW, you implied they may be lying to investors, when you made the parallel with CDPR.
CoD is arguably the best example of this gone wrong though, no? They’ve invested heavily into that franchise, not as a yearly release but as a FN clone when we’re in the age of microtransaction scrutiny. It’s like Activision points at the competition and says “we want this” 10 years too late. That’s another big reason as to why HotS failed and is basically dead now; they took way too long to release and by time they did, the days of extreme popularity for mobas was on the decline.
Diablo 4 and OW2 are basically the only other 2 IPs which are doing well right now. WoW is hemorrhaging players during a pandemic, when lots of people are stuck at home…not sure that’s a great example xD.
I think Blizzard isn’t going after RTS because RTS is a massively niche genre and honestly…they kind of messed up with StarCraft 2 for the reasons I mentioned previously.
I mean NOBODY asked for tankivacs, super Infestors, Archon Toilets, Turtle Raves, Tempest Shield battery spam Protoss, etc. That hurt the popularity of SC2’s branding imo. Enough to justify maybe branching off into different genres with the IP for a while as RTS games really, really need level headed design and balance. Not crap like ObSeRvErZ ArE Op CuZ I DiDnT ScAn PrOpErLy lol.
Well, that’s the thing about assumptions. Sometimes you’re wrong. I didn’t imply as much as I made a parallel between two inevitable outcomes. Cheers!
Im starting to want them to be done with it but they kind of are already.