Activision is the short name for the parent company.
It’s not a trendy boogy man, it’s a lack of tolerance towards large publicly traded companies. Through investigative journalism we are able to get snapshots of the culture change that’s slowly going on in the Blizzard side of things which is blatantly unhealthy for an MMO that derived a name for itself with a high quality standard.
Is that to say the buildings on fire yet? No, but it is setting off the smoke alarm and we arn’t sure whether it’s just something in the oven or the beginning of a fire.
The concept of a publicly traded company is fundamentally unhealthy for the video game industry. The company reports to stockholders and delivers profit, but they also need to deliver an enjoyable experience to the users. How enjoyable does that experience need to be? The bare minimum to keep people resubbing and putting in the least amount of workring hours possible to deliver that product. That is blatantly against the interest of the gamer that wants the best experience possible. Private companies don’t necessarily face that issue in the same way, they arn’t required to dole out dividends and can instead entirely focus that profit back into the products that their user base are paying for. Assuming its adequately managed, they deliver a superior product. This is how Blizzard got it’s name, and the more that the publicly traded company culture seeps in the more of a shell of a game WoW will become.
It’s not a defense, I don’t agree with a lot of the decisions they’ve made, and frankly think they are crap. But that also doesn’t detract from the influence of the parent company which was what you were doing to the post you responded to.
If you think the corporate level people at ATVI don’t approve the budget, don’t tell Blizzard when they need to cut costs, and don’t greenlight funding for future projects, I’ve got a helmet to sell you, because you probably shouldn’t leave the house without one.
Micromanagement or not, they (corporate folks) have a great deal of influence over the game. They’re not standing there telling Ion to buff warlock dps or whatever, but they can absolutely tell him and Brack that they need to reduce customer service expenses or server expenses.
You guys in college? Does it have a business school or offer a finance degree ? Maybe take a class or two?
I would propose you should not use a short name for the parent company, when the short name is literally one of the other holding companies underneath the parent company.
As the parent company Activision Blizzard is akin to, well, a parent. They have the capacity to fire directors, and vote out board members in their subsidiaries. However, they act more like stockholders than direct controllers.
And this line right here is why Activision has more control over Blizzard than anything else. What it ultimately comes down to is that YES, Blizzard has ALOT of autonomy on what they do, BUT at the end of the day Activision, and namely Bobby Kotick and friends could fire or force out anyone from Blizzard they wanted to.
It is THAT pressure how they force Blizzard to do their bidding. When the guy who can fire you tells you he wants something done, you do it, or you risk getting fired.
So, while Activision may not have a say in the day to day operations, they 100% have a say in the overall scope because if Bobby wanted J Allen gone, he would be, and because of that, J Allen will do what Bobby wants.
Who’s decision was it to make everything cloud/phasing/shardy? Fire that team.
Who’s decision was it to do away with talent trees? Fire that person or team.
Who’s idea was it to scale the entire world? Fire that person or team.
Who’s decision was it to greenlight Cata and completely blow up the barrens and 1K needles instead of adding new content to the older zones?
Who’s decision was it to “turn off” the ability to ride dungeons to max level alts? Who’s idea was it to prune characters to extinction?
Who’s decision was it to base leveling zone mobs on ilevel?
Who’s bone-headed idea was it to ruin the way old raids were farmed for xmogs, or end-game raiding guilds handled drops, by micro-managing the drop-systems?
There are so many fire-worthy ideas in this game. Activision or Blizzard, it doesn’t matter when no one ever gets fired for ruining a cash-printing machine.
If ANY other company out there tried to survive this much incompetance by keeping people instead of firing them for provable bone-headed moves, they’d be out of business far more quickly than what seems to be the trajectory for Blizzard. If anything Blizzard, like Comcast, enjoys a large swath of customers that stay no matter how much abuse is foisted upon them.
It’s clear that Blizzard isn’t grateful and has no respect for them though. Just look at how they were going to turn off the ability to turn off XP. “That’ll show those pesky customers that are having fun!”
I think youi need to get over your self quite frankly. Everyoneknows what others mean when they say Activision. You are just being belligerent and trolling at this point
What this glosses over is how Activision can and does have an indirect (albeit strong) impact on the game–all via money.
For example, Activision tells Blizzard to reduce development costs by 30% for better financials. As a result, Blizzard reduces the number of developers working on the game, reduces the amount of time to launch, reduces the amount of testing and also falls into a pattern of copy and paste to leverage efficiencies whenever possible. Does any of this sound familiar when you think about feedback on BfA thus far?
The thing is…many people do sincerely think Activision (the people that make CoD, not the holding company Activision - Blizzard) are the ones pulling the strings at Blizzard. This is the internet. There is no opinion so outlandish that there won’t be a sizable population that believes it.
Just one example of how cost cutting mandates can directly impact game design:
We’re getting loot trading in Classic WoW. Do you know why we’re getting loot trading in Classic WoW? According to Blizzard, it’s because it reduces the amount of tickets they need to process related to loot issues. You no longer need a GM for approval to transfer a BoP item from one player to another, and Blizzard saves money on customer service.
In an effort to reduce expenses, there has been a change that directly impacts the game’s design.
Actually, population growth in Western countries is slowing. I’m not sure what that has to do with the subject of whether Blizzard or Activision is more to blame. I’m also not sure about any arguments you might be having in your head, but my comment was alluding to the fact that as companies seek ever-greater growth, it’s inevitable that the quality of any given product produced by said company will suffer.
Tl;dr: it doesn’t matter who is to blame, because the BfA still sucks.
People who try to turn everything into a grandstanding political argument are what is wrong with our society.
Good lord stop with the WoW 2 stuff. It isn’t going to happen. There are only TWO new games (not counting mobile) that are being worked on which is Diablo 4 as they have said already and another fps game which I thought would have been announced at Blizzcon but guess not.
Either way, Blizzard is not going to make a WoW 2 ever let alone, likely not another mmo. MMOs can take at least 5-7 years to developer and hate to tell you this, but there is none being developed.
I like how you say “diablo 4 PC or wow2 ; nothing else would do it” yet, correct me if I am wrong but Overwatch was a brand new IP and sky rocketed for them and continues to do quite well (and trust me, myself and many others have tons of issues with their Comp mode but that is for another thread in OW).
So no, D4 or your fantasy of WoW 2 wouldn’t be the only things to do it.
edit: Thank you OP also! Definitely keeping this link so I can just paste it to all of those delusional people who think Activision in running Blizzard and WoW.
Sorry, I have to say something here because I agree with your post but come on. Hate to break it to you but this expansion has been the best leveling experience of all of WoW. Yes it can be subjective but it is far from sub-par. It was a great experience. As much as WoD gets a bad rap, I think t hat is the expansion that actually made leveling fun again. Vanilla was only great because it was brand new for those of us who played it and likely for some their first mmo. (Mine were UO and SWG which neither was like WoW)
The only other mmo that has a better leveling system is SWToR (mostly 1-50 with the unique class stories). I have played Rift, UO, SWG, Aion, FFXIV, LotR, STO, TSW, Tera, GW2, AoC, Warhammer all to max level and none of them had as good of leveling experience as WoW WoD-BfA and SWToR. I likely forgot a couple of mmos in there too.
Yeah, I didn’t edit that correctly but still, he and his buds grabbed 25% of it which, at the time, was the largest lump of shareholders.
And say what you want about the guy, good or bad, he calls a lot of the shots regardless of what gets published or rumored. But that’s his job as CEO.
~https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-transformative-purchase-shares~
The executives at the top of Activision-Blizzard came from Activision.
The merger involved Vivendi Games being folded into Activision, which was then renamed Activision-Blizzard. So the continuity of corporate identity was from Activision, not from Blizzard (or Vivendi Games).