The following information comes from a tweet from the Overwatch producer, Tracy Kennedy, after Kotick blamed the share price conundrum on the delay of Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4.
“Bobby, tell everyone about the random projects for OW1 you all would shove on us, the team would do OT [overtime] for only them to get cancelled and for months of OW2 dev [time] to have been lost. Or how almost entire teams are turning over and citing you as the reason. Don’t be shy.”
and
“Oh wait that’s right you hide behind scapegoats because you’re a coward, my mistake. The entire world will remember you to be a greedy joke, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. We outlasted you and we won. Byeee ! ”
Essentially, Bobby would plan content for Overwatch 1 after Overwatch 2 was known to be in production; he would then cancel his own proposed content and cut into Overwatch 2 development time and resources. Do we think something similar could explain our lack of content for WoW during Shadowlands’ life cycle?
The pacing for the content we have received during this expansion is not that far off from normal. And yes, I am aware it is slower, which is why I said not far off. They will just blame covid like everyone else, though this industry is literally almost completely unaffected by any virus.
Perhaps content and workforce were getting cut and that affected the overall quality of the final product? Or maybe this is baseless assumption on my part. Who knows, I don’t. I’m just a noob.
Seeing what they did to WC3 : Reforged, what he’s saying seems very plausible.
I would call it more mismanagement. He probably didn’t give them enough resources for these grandiose projects then inevitably had to scale them back leaving them in a state of total disarray.
Unfortunately for Tracy Kennedy, I think he’s wrong. Bobby is the winner who exploited his employees, betrayed the trust of his customers, and now gets to laugh his way out with a ludicrous payout for a legacy he had no part in building.
Bobby: " Are you-- I mean . . . Ohhhhhh, you got me! Nothing left for me to do now but tuck my . . . $400,000,000 dollars between my legs and sneak home to my floating castle in the sky aboard my helo-yacht."
Well first of all, we don’t even know what really happened in regards to what Mrs. Kennedy is talking about. We have one side of the story, but that’s about it.
I will say, I don’t think it is professional to publicly bash and accuse your boss of things. I certainly wouldn’t want my employees doing that type of stuff to me.
especially when it makes them look like teenagers - I don’t care if he wasted resources but hiring childish brats ends up reflecting on the games. Not that I play overwatch, maybe that is why.
I would be pretty emotional too if the CEO of my company kept wasting my developers’ time and then went public and blamed us for the stock price falling.
No one who has worked for the guy has ever had a nice thing to say about him. Like, trying to paint those who have called him out on his behavior as childish, is seriously deflecting away from the total trash human being he is. Like, Tim Schafer was saying much worse about the guy in 2010, and Tim Schafer is probably THE most respected figure in game development among developers.
Oh I agree, I don’t necessarily agree with the delivery of the second part of her tweet, but I posted it for the full thing. I feel cutting it out would be disingenuous.
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