no
you and him are wrong
in 2013 Activision bought out Vivendis majority controlling shares… they…own…blizzard but keep it separate to preserve the brand.
if they didn’t own it why would their execs pressure cost cutting… why is blizzard so compartmentalized now that communication is an issue… because Activison blizzard… the holding company, is basically Activision so they control activsion and blizzard in the umbrella.
This is a semantic filled argument and it’s not what people are arguing. You’ve essentially tried to draw a line around publishing and say that both of them are peers under the same umbrella.
There is a marked difference between what is happening now and ATVI really can do. ATVI can take away any publishing from Blizzard they want. That doesn’t mean they have or will. That is the power structure.
A similar situation happens for others at work nearly every day. One day you have a great boss who lets you work with autonomy, and the next day you have a micro-manager telling you what to do. You seem to be saying because ATVI hasn’t influenced them yet that they can’t, and you should really clarify that…they can do whatever they want.
Just to add the correct context: In December 2007, it was announced that Activision would merge with Vivendi Games which owned fellow games developer and publisher Blizzard. That means Blizzard is owned by them.
That is arguable. They are the same company. What isnt arguable is that wow doesnt make as much now as it did pre mop. If the accountants were really making decisions about the game I believe they would be pushing the devs to make wow more like it was when it was making more money, not move away from that.
1st off… accountants don’t tell anyone what to do. We’re just there to run the numbers and make sure the company is running the way a company should run. Accountants do not dictate the direction of a company. That’s up to the CEO and the 5-8 people who hide behind the shadows, and they are called the board of directors.
Activision-Blizzard was a holding corp that previoulsy had 2 owners. Vivendi and Activision. They decided everything for their companies which were… activision and blizzard. They were a lateral partnership.
In 2013 Activision Blizzard (or more accurately, the activision side), bought out vivendi shares. So now the Activision part owned both activision and blizzard.
Notice how J. Allan Brack was never named CEO of blizzard? He is listed as president… Blizzard is now under the CEO leadership of Kotick. it is no longer a seperate entity.
All the reports coming out from the diablo team about Activision CFO pressuring cost cuts… Morheim leaving and cutting ties…
you gotta be as slow as a rock to think Activision doesn’t control the majority of blizzards actions.
I dont think activision is whats wrong with wow. You seem to be implying they are. (Correct me if youre not) Wow is one of atvi’s highest grossing IPs. If they tried to change it (wod) and it wrecked profits.(it did) Dont you think they would have done a 180 and tried to put it back like it was?
Bottom line. I dont believe activision is at fault for wows current state. I blame incompetent devs. One in paticular.
Sure some of the blame comes from the devs. But it is mostly activisions fault. Dev’s are not some gods that rule over themselves. They have bosses, and Activision is a company that grows based on investments. They use metrics like time played and active users over subs. they dictate the direction of the game.
For instance. Tokens were 100% activision. they are the equivalent of EA’s loot boxes.
The fact Tera was scrapped for OW was most likely an Activision decision seeing as blizzard had 0 experience in FPS and activision did. They wanted a loot box game.
Canceling Diablo 3’s second expansion was an activision decision.
All of BFA’s issues are because of most likely cost cutting pressure to make stat squishing easier and faster.
Employee accounts actually reference the pressure from Activision…
Gonna be straight with you man, Activision is not the source of blizzards problems just the scapegoat you guys use to justify how blizzard could possibly have made the game this bad. In reality when and if they leave the game will still be the same
ATVI was formed from the merger of Vivendi games and Activision Inc. They had no owners prior to being formed.
This is you misunderstanding what actually went down. ASAC II an investment group lead by Bobby Kotick & Brian Kelly put up a lot of money in exchange for a roughly 23% share of the company. That was 5 years ago and their shares have since been sold off.
Obviously people are just going into mental gymnastics mode to justify blizzards actions. So what if Activision pushes for deadlines. The shop and the deadlines aren’t any reason why this content is so bad all the expansions had equal spacing correct me if I’m wrong so I don’t see any major rush going on just incompetence from blizzard defended by its player base saying it’s mean mean Activisions fault
Blizzard “owns” all of their own intellectual property. So if Blizzard ever split, all of the games Blizzard published belongs to them (Blizzard).
Interesting to read the insider scoop that said Bungie employees all cheered at the announcement and the rigid development cycle Activision forced on them wouldn’t be missed.
The rapid release of BfA and the dismal failure it is (imo) reeks of someone saying “get something out they’ll pay for asap and then just work on it as you go.”
This is deceptive.
Bungie didn’t “dump” Activision. It was a strategic decision designed to actually help ActivisionBlizzard with the patent lawsuit they’re facing over World of Warfract and Call of Duty. Destiny 2 was added to it and Bungie just lost in court about being a “real party in interest” to the case and thus their partial victory before the Patent Trial & Appeal Board was vacated and remanded back.
I am 100% in agreement with this. Too many times ive seen the mega companies get involved with smaller ones or game franchises and utterly ruin them or push them aside for those they want people playing, See EA involvement with Bioware and lack of support for SWTOR for example.
Im really quite concerned for the future of WoW with the bulk of the people that made it great and cared about it no longer being involved leaving it to the bean counters that have no investment in the franchise… i very easily could see the same treatment happening to WoW in favor of the portable games with cash shop nonsense all the major companies are trying to shove down our throats.
Please read the syntax and style guide pinned at the top of General Discussion.
To post a link put marks before and after it, no buthery required. The mark is the ~ key without pressing shift, usually next to 1 on most keyboards.
What I find curious is why this announcement caused a 10% loss of stock value?
Look at the sec reports that insiders have to file when they sell or buy huge chunks of stocks they are an insider for.
I think much of what is going on at blizz is just sheer apathy. They simply do not want to do the kind of hard work that created a game that once 12 millions played.
It’s taken a while for the stockholders to catch wind of the stench that apathy leaves behind but now they are aware they are dumping this like they would wet stinking garbage.
I wonder how it feels to create content that loses your company 100’s of millions in annual revenue? And now even more money down the drain and gone forever as the stock value collapses.
You have to escape symbols. To the ` you need to escape it with \.
So you want to surround a link with ` and ` in order to define it as in-line code per the Markdown standard.
I mean… it’s not like I’m an investor , CPA and Auditor or anything that knows nothing about how the structure works.
Acivision was a seperate company, Blizzard was a separate company under a privately held holding corp for Blizzard.
When they merged they became Acti-Blizz Holding corp and the Actual companies under it were Activision and blizzard. Both of which were controlled separately.
Kotick and Kelly didn’t buy all the shares. It was an 8.2 Billion dollar deal to buy controllership of Actvision and blizzard from Vivendi. Kotick and Kelly spearheaded the investment group but only contributed 100 million. The bulk of the deal still resides with Activision.
https:// www. forbes. com/sites/erikkain/2013/07/26/activision-buys-back-its-independence-with-8-2-billion-vivendi-deal/#62c984f35851
Bungie had to deal with releasing unfinished games and micro transactions , things they didn’t want, which Blizzard is also dealing with right now, (BFA) we can agree 8.0 was unfinished and still unfinished in 8.1, and more micro transactions and cutting costs.
The bad news are that Blizzard has no choice and can not leave Activision because it is not longer Blizzard, we might as well just call it Activision, and they will try to milk this game as much as they can until it dies (1 or 20 years who knows)
I fear WoW will suffer the same fate as the Half-life series under Valve.
The company gets too large, forgets what made it great, focuses on smaller transactions instead of big releases… and the game series is completely pushed aside. HL3 never gets released.