Oh, I totally think fans should be able to express their criticism to a company like Blizzard when things aren’t going well, or when something is broken.
It’s just that much of the “criticism” is just the most general, vitriolic and extreme type that isn’t actually helpful or useful.
What the current moment feels like is just people waiting for the next excuse to unleash a torrent of hate. It almost doesn’t matter what that excuse may be, the volume and intensity of backlash will be the same. That is the problem, in my opinion.
People need to learn to moderate their response to issues with an appropriate level of intensity.
When things are always turned up to 11, nobody is having a good time, and legitimate thoughtful constructive criticism is lost in a cacophony of anger and hate.
For example, for A campaign only player, I was disappointed that my Frozen throne save game was lost in the upgrade to Reforged. I wanted to finish playing it in “classic” mode, before I started on the Reforged mode to see the differences.
I can play classic, but I have to restart from the beginning of RoC now, and can’t just pick up where I was in the TFT story.
That kinda sucks, but I’m not angry calling for people to be fired, and using this disappointment as an excuse to spew hate at Blizzard.
I agree that it is not constructive but it is effective. The default stance that Blizzard has is to ignore negative feedback. Only when that feedback becomes very loud do they start reacting to it. It doesn’t really matter if the loud messages are constructive or purely hateful. What matters is that there is a lot of them. Sure it would be better if it was all well thought out and responsible but realistically there wouldn’t be a critical volume that way.
For example beta forums are always filled with constructive criticism that Blizzard ignores only to fix the problem after launch when the less constructive but much louder criticism takes over.
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…with the introduction of Call of Duty Mobile, we grew our player base from 40 million to 100 million players in less than a year. And we expect significant growth in the Call of Duty franchise in 2020 as compared to 2019, as a result of this and from other unannounced Call of Duty initiatives. Mobile, in fact, is now our leading platform.
Blizzard revenue was $595 million, lower year-over-year as growth for World of Warcraft and Overwatch was offset by a decline for Hearthstone and Diablo. Operating income was $260 million with the revenue decline more than offset by lower costs. Blizzard’s operating margin was 44%, significantly higher year-over-year due to mix and lower costs.
Note WC/SC wasn’t even worth a mention.
Activision business with the success of Call of Duty Mobile. Mobile is now our largest platform and you’ll continue to see us with not just mobile touch points, but all the other important touch points that we’ve now added into the business, expanding the reach of our franchises, the engagement of our franchises and the monetization of our franchises.
Listen to the earnings report, there is no hiding where the money is made. Warcraft 3 pushed around 3 million units back in the day. CoD pushes 20-30+ million units every year for the past 10+, plus money from micro transactions. Overwatch/WoW/Hearthstone/Diablo are the pillars of what currently make Blizzard money, two of which are currently declining in profit. Diablo being the most logical, hence D4.
WC and SC are just side projects…RTS is a niche genre, PC only (mostly), with a ver small playerbase. From a business standpoint, RTS is a waste of money. But there are developers that still want to do it, even if their budgets are going to be tiny compared to the proper money making titles.
Your claim wasn’t that WC3R is a small project. What you claimed is that it is being made at a loss compared to just shutting everything down and not making any WC games at all. You haven’t substantiated that because showing what their big franchises are doesn’t say anything about WC3R being in the green or the red.
It’s a loss compared to working on projects that have potential to make much larger sums. From a business standpoint they are wasting their time, even if not in the red. But /shrug.
People can want Activision “Billion Dollar Company” weight behind RTS games, but it’s not going to happen.
Then why wouldn’t they just move all their employees to the game making the most?
It’s not that simple either. Just because they are doing a small project does not mean that the big projects are suffering from it. This is an outsourced reskin so the budget was probably tiny compared to something like WoW Shadowlands with 100+ local employees. Moving those resources to WoW wouldn’t have achieved anything but selling a cheap reskin for $30 or $40 seems almost guaranteed to be profitable.
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But why not all of them? You made the argument that having more people on a team means more profits, so why not find the game with the most potential profit and throw everyone you have at it?
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Or you go the other way and just lay people off. Did they not do that last year?
How do you make profits with no employees? I mean Traja literally answered a few posts up, I just wanted you to say it.
For me, that would just show how out of touch they are.
This game has been running for the last decade due to it’s community and how people love the game, what more when the announcement was made they should have noticed the reaction of people in and outside of blizzcon. People were making videos, dusting off their copies of W3 and playing the custom maps, Mods, etc, news was blowing up about it.
imho, i think they did notice, but they were hoping to do as little as possible and reap the rewards from it.
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They literally said that in their “Sorry”
Quote here: “First off, we want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted,”
This is politician level of being insufferable.
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We expect what were advertised… Even put at least a 10 year old shaders and a game free of mayor bugs is not amazing by any means. Amazing is what Square Enix is doing with FF7
We expect more because is the Blizzard logo behind, that were producing amazing games in the past. Seems that the only thing that it can be expected from Blizzard now is just more mobile games
BTW seems that not only the community were the only people that expect more, look at the critic score in general
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cod earns more. but how many cod are.
imagine the level that W10 would have if they had been improving with each one.
I read the article you linked, and he doesn’t say that. What he actually says is they didn’t reach the bar of excellence we are used to from Blizzard.
He said that we said that they didn’t reach the bar and not that they didn’t reach the bar. There is a subtle but important difference there. One is admitting poor quality and the other is only acknowledging feedback but not admitting anything.
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And when you say you heard your community NOT being happy with the product, this means you don’t care?! That’s the most pathetic excuse to read between lines.
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That is true that would be crazy to say because of course you can care even if you think that you did everything right. Luckily I didn’t say it but it is interesting that it is the first thing that you imagined that I said. Are you perhaps yourself doubting if he cares or not?
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Not really, they never really admit it.
"and we’ve heard from them that we did not achieve that bar,”
Which goes into,
“But we stand behind our games"
So in short it’s saying, Players don’t think we hit the bar, but we think we did. That’s not really admitting to their mistakes. If the said, “But we agree, and feel we could have done better” then that would be them owning up.
Again blizz are being so vague. Feel like we’re dealing with a politician than a games company lol
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