As if MS was good at handling studios, just look at what mess 343i and Turn 10 released after 5-6 years of development
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Wait and see I suppose. "let Blizzard be Blizzard" is maybe not what people want to hear after the "Cosby room", stealing breast milk, repeated sexual harassment and suicide due to bullying.
Though it seems possibly the people responsible for that culture are gone? (I'd need confirmation on that).
It is a weird situation as ideally if a studio "works", you leave them to their devices and if they aren't performing, then you should step in and make changes. In short - MS being hands-off should be a good thing, until it isn't.
Though it seems possibly the people responsible for that culture are gone? (I'd need confirmation on that).
It is a weird situation as ideally if a studio "works", you leave them to their devices and if they aren't performing, then you should step in and make changes. In short - MS being hands-off should be a good thing, until it isn't.
Im mad that MS isn't going to fire people that were already fired. Smh my head
Good thing so are the most toxic people they had.
Fun fact, some of your favourite Blizzard games were built by some of those toxic people.
It makes sense in the context of World of Warcraft doing rather well for itself lately, but I can't help but feel like it's a very tone deaf statement what with the horrible work culture and widespread sexual abuse at Blizzard. Especially with how often such things are brushed off as "letting boys be boys."
Fun fact, a lot of multimedia we've enjoyed were made by toxic people and that's never going to end.
Hayao Miyazaki is a shitty dad, Christian Bale is an asshole, Steve Jobs was a rotten individual based on his own daughter's word etc etc.
Fun fact, any of your favorite things was built by toxic people
Imo that's a problem with Xbox strategy, they just let their studios do they things instead of giving some creative direction and put a roadmap of future projects in place.
I get what you're saying but there's virtually zero correlation here. They're made by different teams and Blade was already in development prior to Redfall's release.
I personally prefer their strategy because it encourages more niche games and innovation.
Sony's strategy for the last 10yrs or so has been one word.
BLOCKBUSTER.
You are right that it then gave very clear direction to studios and tapped really well into what mainstream gamers lapped up, for the most part.
But to me, it meant their output started to look and feel the same. They also completely abandoned indies quickly after PS4 launched. Only recently have they began to court smaller devs again to any extent.
The point is that it's silly to bemoan the loss of "old Blizzard" when it's apparent that much of "old Blizzard" were explicitly responsible or at least enabled the worst offenses that took place within the company. Just going "yeah well lots of things are made by bad people" is a total cop out for this specific discussion.
Also, I think wanting them to take more control is a slippery slope. Their approach to acquisitions now is a direct response to their own mishandling of Lionhead back in the day so I think the positives of limited integration far outweigh the negatives.
Pretty much.
Sony let Bungie be Bungie until that first financial target whiffed.
Preface: I'm trying to not reply in annoyance nor vitriol.
Just like you (and the other user) I am aware of Blizzard's past troubles. Self-righteousness on a gaming forum doesn't solve anything in the past nor present. In fact, it's performative and as unconstructive, but unfortunately unconstructive performative replies are a big part of the Internet.
Derailing my point about output doesn't make you or the other person special or righteous. It just makes you both annoying. If you *genuinely* care about the topic, go donate to your local workplace protection group/program and make a post to encourage others to do the same over on off topic.
Brand power sucks, Blizzard is long dead. Having a hands off approach with them might not be the right call... give their IPs to better studios I'd say.
Normally, I'd say please elaborate, but I don't want to get into a childish back and forth. I'll wave the white flag.
Activision Blizzard was the most successful publisher that MS acquired, and outside of Bethesda a lot of their acquisitions were teams that probably might not even exist today because they weren't making the kinds of games that allowed them to be financially independent for much longer. It's good to want those kinds of games to be made, but as development becomes more costly and the return on investment is low or even is a net loss then something will end up changing. So the hands off approach only works when you can trust that your teams can deliver and not put themselves in the same position that were pre-acquisition.
Personally feel most of Blizzard's games are on an upward, especially World of Warcraft, which has surpassed the upward and is rocketing towards the moon right now. So I get it's easy to be snarky about this but will see if it continues I guess.
How is WoW these days? I've not heard a single peep about it.
They've been releasing content on a cadence that I have not seen in many many many years. Supporting multiple versions of the game at once through Season of Discovery in Classic, Cataclysm Classic, standalone experiments like the Plunderstorm BR mode, and the upcoming Pandaria Remix for retail. All while Dragonflight has been very very solid and leading into a great looking new expansion with War Within. I've been playing since 2005 and besides my high school glory days this is the happiest I've ever been with the state of the game, personally.
Interestingly, I don't think that's good for Blizzard (because of the terrible studio culture + development problems they've been having for almost a decade) or Microsoft (as this "free reign" attitude hasn't worked at all and has only been the source of a lot of problems).
But hey, if they're comfortable...
But hey, if they're comfortable...
well said. Looking forward to seeing some great stuff from the new Blizzard.
It's not a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" -situation. There are actual nuances between completely laissez-faire hands-off approaches and complete/ overbearing micromanagement and it seems MS have yet to find those nuances in handling their acquisitions to get reliable outcomes every time.
I suppose you can argue that MS are taking steps to mitigate the types of risk associated with dev costs.
- Not chasing the AAA banger budgets like Sony, with most of their exclusives
- Making more of their games multi-platform
- Encouraging smaller, lower risk games from their developers
- Making shorter, cheaper games that fit many of the AAA criteria (Hellblade 2)
Wait, what's wrong with Blizzard? Are they a bad company , what did I miss? (I know about Bobby Kotick but is there more?)
Interesting. Though I avoid the genre because of the time and emotional investment, it's cool to see WoW players satisfied again after years of not being.
It would be cool if Microsoft one day ports the game over to Xbox to get a boost of new players, which would be the financial reason to support the game even more.
View: https://youtu.be/xchYEdQv2II?si=12itaLcF5x6rX8N8
For the past year multiple Blizzard teams have been working double time to course correct a lot of woes for their main games(WoW, D4, and OW2). The evidence is readily apparent that they are all on the upward swing. WoW has not seen player engagement and retention as they have now and that's a direct result of a lot of hard work on their end. I don't play D4 as much but I hear good things and I keep hearing people looking forward to the coming changes for Season 4. OW2 is a night and day difference from a year ago as well. People not liking in-game stores aside, the game has imo never been better.
So as it stands, all these teams imo are earning a chance to show what they CAN do without the presumably many constraints they were working with before(this especially applies to the OW team). Anyone who looks at WoW today cannot sit with a straight face and claim that team hasn't done a full turn around with multiple back flips in-between because they're feeling froggy.
Yup. It's still super trendy to shit on Blizzard as a whole, unfortunately. I've talked to plenty of devs who are super happy with how things are going right now.
And yeah, WoW is probably in the best state it's been, like, ever?
I mean, sure, but having to work double time just proves how their management and planning for those games just fucking sucked. I don't know if it's a waking call from the same teams that released those games, or it's just new blood that added new velocity and abilities.
Lotta silly responses in this thread. I don't think Holly Longdale, the first and only female executive producer in Blizzard's history, is lamenting the days of boys club culture. The actual subtext here is that for the last decade, Activision Blizzard has been taking a larger role in Blizzard's operations, leading to a whole lot of battles that have nothing to do with the company's issues with sexism and misconduct. (I hear someone wrote a book about it.)
Blizzard has had a lot of turnover over the past years that it's likely a healthy mix of both, which isn't a bad thing imo because they have been historically dysfunctional. Good riddance to whoever was holding back the WoW team so damn much.
Schroedingers Xbox management - both meddling too much and also too hands off
Whichever statement makes the incompetence sound correct
Curious to see how this works out and if they can actually do well being more self-run. Blizzard had a long history of burning money on very long development periods, sometimes for games that would never come out (Titan, the survival game) so I could see this backfiring and MS having to get back involved, but at the least it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
There were articles about how much being merged with Activision and under their thumb harmed Blizzard. Microsoft freeing them from that relationship sounds like a good thing.
There were articles about how much being merged with Activision and under their thumb harmed Blizzard. Microsoft freeing them from that relationship sounds like a good thing.
People are missing a thread in this story. Blizzard sees this as a good thing because before they had Activision management and Kotick mucking things up on the regular. Now they don't and people are seeing this as a bad thing because of their perception from the outside. Obviously there is a larger story going on behind the scenes that we're not privy to; has been for years.
Yeah...that's not necessarily a positive thing. The best part about the acquisition was the ousting of Bobby and the other higher ups that cultivated a shitty culture at these studios. If we're not taking a critical look at changing these studios for the better, the benefits of this acquisition is severely lost.
They kind of didn't. They pressured for releases that were not ready, with BFA, SL, DF, WC3R, and D4. Activision influence could be seen early with the WoW cash shop.
There's no reason to think these studios haven't already been doing that. The layoffs and priority shifts(game cancellations) are very much a part of that process to focus the teams better.
That's not an excuse for layoffs mind you.
Yeah, they probably burned some money on Project Titan. Then they turned Project Titan into Overwatch which made over $1 billion in it's first year and had 50 million players in 3 years.
So, I'm pretty sure they made the money back.
And they could probably do the same with Project Odyssey if given a chance. But, Overwatch was all Kaplan and they might not have someone like that for Project Odyssey.
Indeed. I also took it as she's primarily referring to WoW's direction, her domain, and not speaking to stuff like Odyssey being cancelled. Maybe a little tone deaf in that sense or too early but it's good to be optimistic..
I don't think you can rely on taking failed projects and rebuilding their corpses into successful projects. That's a massively risky thing, because there's absolutely a world where Overwatch didn't pan out and they burned money twice over. They were an RTS and MMO studio that tried their hand at making an FPS. That's not a safe bet, even if it paid off massively this time.
Like, "dev hell for years and then try to salvage it into a different game" isn't a viable or healthy modus operandi for a studio. Ideally you'd want to have the management and structures in place that it works out the first time.
Yeah it certainly makes sense that she would personally feel good about how things are going, because WoW is her thing and it's in a very positive place right now overall. There is probably a good deal of "if it aint broke don't fix it" going on from MS, but as far as Blizzard goes it's hard to say how far that extends beyond WoW (strictly talking about development/output, not culture issues). D4 is also on an upward tick given what we've seen about the next big update, but it does still feel like they are doing a lot of figuring out what does and doesn't work instead of executing a specific, winning strategy, and I don't even follow Overwatch anymore.
People who keep saying this should actually state what they think being hands on actually means for MS.
yup, not all of them. some of them for sure.
View: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxL8ijR7sItSt6J3nHGDZTcGG-CxrLsOEh?si=DwOqHPG2uaSChk0c