You should look at Blizzard’s publicly available finances from the period before they merged with Activision to see just who was being carried.
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That’s the past, you should look at the current Activision’s confidence in their product
https://comicbook.com/gaming/2019/01/09/-call-of-duty-more-revenue-star-wars-marvel-cinematic-universe-activision/
Compare that to Blizzard that hides their game revenue because its too shameful to even announce how garbage their game currently is.
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Well I know I log onto WoW because of my perceptions of upper management and the financial aspects of their partnership with Activision. That’s what keeps me going. Sometimes, when I’m feeling sad, I just pull up the board of directors and crank one out.
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I’ve been a Blizzard investor for a decade. You are talking out of your butt. They don’t hide revenue from investors, they hide the subscriber numbers from us and have since Activision got involved. Because Activision judges the health of products based on how much time/money you spend because they’re an idiot company that would rather one person grind for 48 hours in WOW and stay subbed than gain 3 new subs who might quit next week.
Activision are literal goblins, time is money friend.
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The game is garbage right now yes, but it was at it’s best before the Activision merger. Activision ruined Bliz and WoW the way EA ruins everything they touch (Bioware especially, as an example).
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Lol no.
Call of Duty has become one of the most successful entertainment properties in history. As a franchise, Call of Duty has now generated more revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the box office, and double that of the cumulative box office of Star Wars.
Stop blaming Activision for Blizzard’s incompetence.
Ya so what? It has NOTHING to do with WoW or Blizzard and Bliz and WoW would have done just fine without the merger because WoW made MMO’s mainstream and was huge well before the merger. WoW is also a completely different game and genre from CoD so CoD’s success has NOTHING to do with WoW!
WoW was a much better game pre-Activision merger!
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Yet you said Activision ruined Blizzard when in reality its just Blizzard being garbage.
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Bliz was NOT garbage prior to the merger, they have been slowly going downhill SINCE Activision and anyone who has played Bliz games from the start know this. Bliz was much better and suffer now because of Activision.
Anyway, you’re very naive and ignorant… that or you’re just trolling but either way I’m done with this conversation.
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quit making Activision the boogeyman. Blizzard can make plenty of their own mistakes without Activision being the sole reason.
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The differences between CoD and WoW are substantial.
CoD is an easy asset-flip product that can meet 2 year release cycles. There is little writing, little dialogue, fewer assets than WoW by far.
The issue wasn’t Activision specifically but Blizzard trying to match Activision release cycles.
An MMO is a very time consuming, very expensive product that requires more than a 2 year release cycle.
In order to fund that they should switch entirely off of 2 year gate sales and onto periodic microtransaction releases. This way they aren’t trying to finance in 2 year chunks but maybe 3-6 month chunks with the product evolving over a similar period. NOT large sweeping expansion-level changes but incremental 6 month changes to classes, stories, etc with each 6 month release carrying some new shop items. So that 2-4 years is smoothed out over the period, culminating in what would ordinarily be a gated release of content.
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They have always been garbage, they just lucky they manage to gather Pardo, GC, and Kaplan in 1 place.
Real company like Activision dont use excuse like that, they deliver instead of making excuses.
Exact figures weren’t given, but Black Ops 4 has been outselling Treyarch’s previous release Call of Duty: Black Ops III on a 3-to-1 ratio, even without the series’ traditional single player campaign. The game also did extremely well during its launch month and continued to be a huge hit through the holidays.
They didnt pull garbage excuses like “Traditional FPS is dead and people just play Overwatch or Fortnite”.
If anything Blizzard should learn from real company like Activision.
Jump ship and …
Take venture funding from a Chinese mega-corp?
That’s what Bungie did.
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For me … 100% this.
I don’t need a mainline drip feed of scheduled Blizzard releases. Those are never the games I fall in love with. Well-crafted games that are put through their paces and then released with impeccable quality are.
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Activision bought out Vivendi’s shares after the merger. They own blizzard
Really tired of reading this stuff on here.
Activition owns Blizzard. They may not be exerting all of the power they can, and may have left them largely alone but make no mistake about it at all. When you are acquired by another company and merged with them, you are under control of them. Whatever power you have is given to you by that entity.
To look at it another way who in the situation has more control the CEO of Activision or the CEO of Blizzard? I think you know the answer to that, and it should tell you where the power lies in the structure.
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just to add to your post.
" On July 9, 2008, Activision merged with Vivendi Games , culminating in the inclusion of the Blizzard brand name in the title of the resulting holding company. On July 25, 2013, Activision Blizzard announced the purchase of 429 million shares from majority owner Vivendi." also blizzard doesn’t have a ceo anymore. Brack is just “President” now. Mike Morheim was the last CEO.
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Also lets be real here, Activision could probably swallow Blizzard whole if they wanted to, but they’d rather Starcraft, Warcraft and Overwatch retain the Blizzard logo just to preserve customer’s morale and good will.
It’s amazing, but when a really great game is released people spend the money on things attached to it. Sure I’ll maintain my sub, the game is great. Sure I’ll buy that extra DlC why not, I love this game?
They have to get away from the ROI/SVA model a bit, focus less on quarterly PR statements and focus solely on their #1 mission statement making great games.
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This. Also its been this way for 12 of wows 14 years.
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