Thought some of you may be interested in reading.
…www.ign.com/articles/special-report-the-inside-story-of-blizzards-departures-and-a-company-at-a-crossroads
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In late 2018, Blizzard announced that it was spinning down Heroes of the Storm, its erstwhile competitor to League of Legends and Dota 2, moving developers to other projects and canceling its Heroes of the Dorm tournament and the Heroes Global Championship. It was around this time, our source tells us, that Blizzard also became much more conscious about spending. This is corroborated by similar reports from Kotaku. “The company went from, ‘No, don’t even think about money. Spend whatever you want,’ to, ‘Oh, s***. We need to cut costs.’ And that happened around the time of [Mike Morhaime] leaving and [J. Allen Brack] taking over.”
“Realistically, the way big companies work is ‘if you make them money, you set the culture.’ And Blizzard doesn’t make them money. Call of Duty does, and they set the culture,” a source within Blizzard says. “So, if anything, unless Blizzard actually starts delivering more money, I think it will continue to trend in that direction.”
“It feels like the company is just bleeding and taking punches, and realistically, the only thing that is gonna stop that is shipping Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2,” says a Blizzard source. “We talk all the time about like, ‘We really kinda messed up long-term planning, you know? Our release slates and things like that.’ If you look at how long the games take to make, and Diablo 4 and Overwatch are probably shaping up to ship roughly around the same time or in successive years, it is hard to imagine this not happening again to Blizzard.”
the only bits i really found new or interesting, personally. most of it is just a consolidation of things we already knew
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I suppose it is. Some of it seems new to me… article seems to be trying to string together some negative thoughts… most former employees are not burning bridges though.
Still its a very good panoramic view of what people have thought has been going on for years.
Its such a shame that the presiding narrative seems to support a “Wow will be fine… put money elsewhere”.
I follow alot of the devs on Twitter and have seen many voices from Blizzard saying “my last day at blizzard I’m going to _______ studios”. Passionate people who I’m sure would prefer to stay but with Blizz changing bonuses and paying the least in the industry, what choice do they have?
Especially when you see upper executive’s like Kotick making ghastly amounts of money.
Its too bad they didnt start a Wow2 years ago.
Here is the link:
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That was a very interesting read. I’m not sure quite how to feel about the incessant “we’re at a turning point and things will be getting better!” I know it’s upper management’s role to try and placate concerns, I just don’t know how well that will actually go given a lot of the current issues with Blizzard games.
I do like the fact many are looking to these other studios with ex-Blizzard employees. There’s honestly just a lot you can infer from just that evidence alone.
I’m not saying Blizzard is…in trouble, but there are definitely concerns that I have with it as a staple of the gaming world.
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Its been obvious for a while that Blizzard has been trading long term stability for short term profits. That strategy always comes back to bite you on the butt.
Their number one priority should be sub retention- not profits. Maintaining subs will lead to profits, but focusing on profits will not lead to retaining subs.
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Interested read though you know what I’m more concerned about?
The fact people are treating Blizzard like it’s their spouse and WoW like it’s their baby or their relationship. The way some players talk about things and just how emotional they get feels like they’re talking about their relationship with a partner and that relationship suffers from both partners being horrible at communicating concerns in a respectful manner 
I mean, I get that people care a great deal about this game; however, I’ve never really felt the need to try and analyze the motivations of a company or specific people within a company that was responsible for a product I like(d). I just judge the product and criticize that and if I dislike it more than I like it at some point, I abandon it.
The intensity of the rage and frustration some people feel whenever Blizzard does something with a game that they disagree with actually reminds me of addicts who suffer from withdrawal symptoms or people in an unhealthy codependent relationship who can’t seem to get out of the relationship.
And I want to make it clear I don’t mean criticism in general. Just the intensity of some people’s emotions with regards to the game and the company doesn’t seem healthy.
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The woman who wrote this article looks like being another Jason Schreier - which is good, we need more of those 
The article points to 2018 and on as where problems started, but I’d wonder if perhaps they should be looking further back, to the very, VERY troubled development of WoD, which is when things went from “one of the best patches ever” (5.2) to a content drought of over a year then an expansion with almost all of its substantial content left on the cutting room floor.
It’s funny, I was just thinking the other day about how, when I started in early Cata, if you put a support ticket in and you were online, a GM would pop up to talk to you; if you called them, they were incredibly friendly and helpful and made you feel like you were valued, and part of something special.
Then they purged hundreds of customer service people, and presumably most of the GMs, and after that, ticket response times got longer and longer eventually ballooning out to days, with copypasta template responses instead of human interaction - and GMs didn’t chat in game any more (I remember one ticket response that said they tried to contact me in game but I wasn’t logged in… except I actually was!)
That’s one sure way to make sure your customers can FEEL the decline.
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You make it sound like it’s really easy to maintain subs.
But if you were trying to plan your business and your subscription revenue naturally declined every expansion due to regular attrition, wouldn’t you try to introduce systems in to reduce the revenue volatility?
And also - if the priority is not profits - what’s the point of having a business?
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アラー, アッラー
IGN
アッラーフ
10char
the shareholders do not agree, apparently
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Yes! Jason Schreir is someone I definitely respect in the gaming news industry. So having more of him is great.
Real talk, I’ve been missing TB something fierce as of late just with all of the issues going on…
The worst part about being on the outside is I wanted to find root cause of how something like WoD (and Shadowlands) could have happened. I would believe the COVID explanation, but other studios (including other MMOs) have been able to put out patches and content after working exclusively from home. I want to find root cause and to just understand how and where the failure points are occurring.
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Kat has done excellent work before too on console and nintendo related articles. Actual game journalism vs the twitter quoting krap we see nowadays.
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So I’m guessing you’ve never seen fans from various fandoms… whether it’s a book series (Harry Potter as an example), or TV shows (GoT), bands/musicians, celebrities, football teams, or pretty much any form of entertainment? Never seen them react to say… An author who decides to “retcon” or explain some stuff after the books are written and the movies are out?
Look at religion. The military. Politics.
Really? This is a shocking way for human beings to react to something?
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Attempting to be positive towards some of this: I agree with the statements regarding the potentially massive releases of OW2 and Diablo: Immortal. They look quite promising, and could provide Blizzard the wiggle room to expand teams and increase development as a solid department (instead of being in CoD’s shadow constantly).
Also with WoW, imo SL was quite an improvement over BFA. And with the success of both Classic and TBC, hopefully they analyze them both to understand how to implement changes that could improve retail in future expansions. SL was likely in production since the release of Classic, so the potential changes to retail (from the success of the classics) may not be seen until 10.0 or 11.0
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Does “profit” even matter anymore for big global corporations? This isn’t capitalism where two local pizza shops compete to give the best product and service at the lowest prices, and the consumer gets to decide. This is corporatism, where money is printed, and investors decide how much the banks earn back on their loans.
The bank loans will keep coming as long as the people in charge wear their masks, donate to breast cancer research, promote “awareness” causes, support the troops, celebrate pride month, etc.
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What?
Of course profit matters! If you tell investors you are going to lose a ton of money, they are going to sell your stock
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They had something like 12 million at one point- all they had to do was keep people happy. The hard part was already done.
Not if I felt those systems would worsen the attrition. One person paying their sub steady for two years is more profit than somebody buying a few cash shop goodies and quitting in six months.
Of course the point of a business is to make money, but making money comes from happy customers. That’s why Walmart will allow you to return anything and will gladly price match any competitor’s price. THey want you happy. Not because they care about you, but because they’re smart enough to realize losing 10-20-50 dollars here or there is a fine investment to ensure you spend several hundred a month on groceries and general goods every month for the next several years.
I have seen it multiple times where a company will bring in a “consulting firm” that guarantees they can help that company boost their profits by XX% in the next quarter. And those firms are right- they can.
What they don’t tell you is that the tactic they use essentially amounts to bleeding the customers dry. That does boost profit into the next quarter, but the next quarter or two after that it will fall off a cliff because of the number of customers that didn’t come back.
And that is exactly where Blizzard is at right now. To keep profits respectable they keep trading the long term to boost the short term. Each time they have to squeeze a little bit harder. If they don’t change their approach they will eventually run out of long term to steal from.
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These are all things most logical and educated people already came to the conclusion of quite awhile ago, but it’s nice to see IGN doing an article about.
Edit: I will say to read the actual IGN article, WoWhead just tries REALLY hard to put a positive spin on it.
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You’re right about the WoWhead spin, it is pretty apparent. It makes sense though, if wow goes under, so will wowhead.
But definitely just read the ign article.
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Definitely would recommend it over the WoWhead version.
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