Literally what you did.
Everyone has an MBA in business all of a sudden lol…
Would be interesting to see what kind of empires people could build if they didn’t spend so much time playing wow.
While what you say is true, there is also credible journalistic reporting that employees within the subsidiary feel like ATVI is exerting more direct control, most obviously via a former Activision finance girl coming to Blizzard and having her department participate in planning sessions previously outside of finance’s purview.
Activision Blizzard’s influence over Blizzard’s operations is felt by Blizzard employees whether the parent company intends it or not. That makes the influence real.
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Some people in abusive relationships make excuses for the abuse they receive…
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Let’s be honest here: Activision is definitely better managed than Blizzard at this point.
Their Wotlk defence is weak. A merger of that size, you don’t devour your aquisition in a day you let time go and you adjust and you take over slowly. So Wotlk (my favorite xpac and same with many players, is still a Blizzard thing)
That is why Best buy kept Future shop in canada when they bought it : Brand Value. Once well established, best buy closed future shop stores and kept only the Best buy ones or convert some FS into BB.
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When people say Activistion is micro-managing or influencing design decisions, they don’t mean there’s some suit there telling Blizz to not implement flying or to further prune classes. They mean Activision is telling Blizzard “You need to change your model to increase MAUs”. They aren’t telling Blizzard WHAT to do to get MAUs up, but they are telling them that they need to get them up in any way they can. Then the Blizzard developers go back and come up with some way to drag content along to keep us subbed.
Look at HotS. Do you think it was the developers decision to basically axe the game? No. But an edict came from in high that it wasn’t profitable/profitable enough so they canned it without telling their own developers. You can cover your ears and shout to drown out the noise all you want but it is very clear to anyone looking at what’s going on at Blizzard objectively that Activision is beginning to exert more control. Just because Blizzard is an independent subsidiary doesn’t mean that they’re immune from their parent companies influence. The fact that some of you can’t see how much this company has changed for the worse since 2008 speaks to high levels of Stockholm Syndrome.
Blizzard has been on a slow decline SINCE 2008. Many of their fans are only JUST NOW beginning to realize it because it took a decade+ for Activision to corrode what was there and for the people holding the ship together to leave for greener pastures. The people that made Blizzard great are almost entirely gone. The ones that remain are shells of their former selves. The company actively and openly derides its own community. Blizzard has openly discussed moving their focus to mobile gaming (for the Chinese Market).
Stop trying to act like Activision has no hand in any of this. Stop trying to act like the current people at Blizzard are innocent and at Activision’s mercy too. They’re all in it together to make as much money as possible before it all blows up and they repeat the process with another developer.
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OP, this game has gone from “made by players for players” to a money-greedy company with the sole intent of making their shareholders happy. Nothing more. They try and stretch your sub as far/long as they can with their timegates, rep grinds, RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG, “See You Later” Disney Vault sales, to where now they’re selling a red dot over on CoD for $1. It’s pathetic. They keep making promises of better communication, and like a fool, I fell for it. No blue names respond to anything except if someone makes a forum thread asking what your favorite flavor of ice cream is. Players then get snarky because they’re tired of no communication. I guess it’s easier to go on Twitter and call the playerbase dick bags instead of coming on the forums communicating with everyone, right Lore?
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Thanks DeVry!
Is that why WoW was so buggy when it was released? Was that why D3 was released in the condition it was in?
While I do find all these speculation threads interesting, I honestly think developer group B that gave us WoD are the ones handling Bfa. Unsub or struggle through till next expansion when developer group A that gave us Legion comes back.
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Dont let that well put together thread distract you from the fact that Blizzard, is now being ran by corporate.
Sure might not be “Activi$ion” per se, But you can clearly see a shift from gamer oriented design to meeting empty content on a yearly schedule.
something very much akin to another game under acivision’s wing, Call of Duty, gold turned into dun.
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The fact is, is that even if Blizzard kept to themselves and just grew into a huge, stand-alone corporation, the shift that people are seeing (or think they’re seeing) would have still happened. It happens whenever a game company (or any company) gets big enough to start worrying how to keep the snowball of success keep rolling on, to get bigger and bigger. You can blame activision or whomever, but really its Capitalism that’s the problem.
Any type of Artist loves their Art (whether its a game or whatever) but they love money more.
I and many others who have a combined knowledge base of information that is publically available and what Bliz has interjected here occasionally over the years have been trying to combat the blame shifting for years.
It’s nice to see other trying to as well, but rest assured, it’s completely in vain. There’s just too many who believe they know better. A while back, I decided to give up and let those just have their personal scapegoat.
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No, you just read it as political because you wanted to. Nobody cares about your team or your virtue signaling.
I don’t see what you really get out of that blog post you shared. It’s super general and there’s no evidence that the person corroborated his or her assumptions about the Blizzard/Activision relationship with anyone who actually works at either company.
On the other hand, we have a researched Kotaku article, written after interviews with various internal sources, discussing (among other things) how Activision’s former CFO came to Blizzard as their CFO and pushed cost-cutting. Now HotS eSports is no longer a thing and customer service reps in Ireland are being heavily pressured to take a buyout and not work there anymore (the latter via Eurogamer).
So… yeah, I do think there’s enough “not fake news” out there to show that Activision definitely has influenced Blizzard operational decisions.
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Activision is twisting Blizzard’s arm because as someone mentioned, Blizzard is basically the goose laying out golden eggs: you’d have to be an idiot to interfere with the creative process.
However, I would suggest that Activision’s profit-driven corporate culture is definitely poisoning Blizzard, whether they want that to happen or not. It’s like putting a bull into the proverbial china shop: they do damage just by being there.
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Completely disagree. Leveling in BFA you lose the artifact ability and subsequent passive traits. Tier set bonuses are effectively removed and not replaced by anything. Legendary items become disabled. Secondary stat squish makes your character effectively weaker to same level mobs as you progress. GCD changes deliberately slow down combat. Another round of pruning leaves specs more bare bones than in Legion.
And what do you gain while leveling in BFA? Azerite traits. Thats it. Random passive DPS procs. Leveling in BFA is objectively the worst it has been since vanilla. You could not be more wrong if you tried to be.
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I have felt that leveling in BFA is the absolute worst out of all the expansions. The questing is ok, But it is the feeling of getting weaker and losing power . The purpose of leveling is getting stronger. Gaining abilities i Never had before. Reaching a new level of power. Thats gone in BFA and was more or less gone in legion if not for Artifacts and legendary.
Its one reason I have yet to level all my alts and I doubt I will this expansion until the very end with all the catch up mechanics, if they do that . Now the only feeling of getting more powerful is crap items with a slightly better ilvl number.
I dont kill mobs any faster at cap level.
I dont learn new talents or abilities.
I dont feel like the Champion I am supposed to be and get called.
I dont feel anything at all .
If you truly believe activision isn’t starting to take more control of blizzard you are dead wrong. Just look at when mike morheim stepped down. Brack took over from him but he isn’t CEO and president like morheim was. He is just president effectively meaning blizzard no longer has a CEO.
As for the parent company of activision-blizzard for all intents and purposes it is just activision. Activision is both the sub company and the parent company.
activision shareholders and board directors are not interested in long term financial gain. they want as much money as they can pump out month by month because they don’t plan to stick around. They are there to make a quick buck and hop out.
It would take time to set up the long term gain but in the end if they went that route they would be making a lot more money per month because they could easily maintain a population of 10 million+ players. They started losing the population when they started changing the game from the old ways. The players don’t like it and as things got worse and worse people lost faith and started to leave more and more.