Activision Firing people faster than they prune

Community General Discussion
82

No, Blizzard died a long time ago. It is just a name in Activision’s pocket with a few IPs that are going nowhere in terms of development, other than mobile.

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Quick comments inline:

Activision transferred publishing rights for Destiny back to Bungie earlier this year.

Blizzard had 35M MAUs in the quarter, as Overwatch and Hearthstone saw stability and World of Warcraft saw expected declines post the expansion release this summer. — That’s a big decline from 40 million a year ago (Q4 2017), and 40 million back then was already considered to be poor, previous numbers were higher.

Activision Blizzard wants to de-prioritize games and initiatives that aren’t meeting expectations — Hold this thought.

Activision Blizzard will be reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs — That’s a warning regarding future layoffs on top of the 8% just announced.

Investing more for biggest, internally-owned franchises. — Mostly this means: no new IP.

More upfront releases, in-game content, mobile, and geographic expansion.

Investments in esports leagues and advertising — Remember I asked you to hold a thought? This is an exception from the rule of not investing into things that don’t meet expectations. First off, we are talking about mostly OWL, other leagues are peanuts. OWL could not meet expectations yet, Blizzard invested too much into it, they didn’t have time to recoup the costs. But it is precisely because they invested too much into it that they don’t want to just lose it. So they will try to make some profit here. That’s why we have esport leagues here. It’s mostly OWL, no other leagues will get much of anything. Whether or not OWL will be a success in the end is unclear, but they will try.

20% increase in development resources in aggregate for Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Overwatch, Warcraft, Hearthstone and Diablo. — Quite a bit of that is pre-written in the items below and from what we already know - for Warcraft, we have WoW Classic and Warcraft 3 Reforged, plus likely a mobile title for pet battles.

World of Warcraft already has a regular cadence of releases and content. — Could mean that things will mostly continue as they do now, as in, no big new developments. Have to look at how big 8.2 is and, more importantly, how big 8.3 is.

Diablo’s headcount will grow substantially, as the teams work on multiple projects. — If that’s a PC game, it’s not going to be released in 2019.

There are multiple mobile projects underway across Activision Blizzard. — Yup. Note that they say specifically Activision Blizzard, not King (for which mobile is traditional). That’s where some of the new devs are going to be.

Roughly 8% of staff were laid off. — Not the end of the layoffs, see the warning above.

In sum, I am happy they didn’t wrote WoW off and am willing to wait and see what’s going to be in 8.2 and further, but it’s pretty mixed. It’s good that they are trying to get out of the hole. Let’s see if they will succeed.

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When you say “died” you talk as if you don’t know anything about the company structure.
Blizzard are a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, whcih acts as a parent company for several subsidiaries, including Activsion, which is a publisher and not a game developer like Blizzard.

The more you know, right? :expressionless:

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85

Many don’t seem to understand the structure or just want to lay all blame at Acti’s door no matter what the individual games developers have done or failed to do.

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86

Blizzard changed from “kick the guy who is leeching gear” to “epics for all” in the spawn of 1 expansion since Activision “merged” with them. So, please, tell explain to me how Aactivision had no pressure over WoW.

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87

You’re looking for cause and correlation where there is none.
Your quarrels lies with the designers on the WoW team, not the financial management team at Activision Blizzard.

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Blizzard was better when they were on their own, that’s a simple fact. Activision is holding them on a leash. Suddenly the developers have to aim at profits exclusively and we’re stuck with the customer milking machines of today.

Would it have been different had they not merged? Who knows. But what I do know is that all these big publishers are a plague upon the industry.

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89

And when was that? :thinking:
Adham, Morhaime, and Pearce sold the company after 3 years to Davidson & Associates. Ever since then they’ve always been owned by someone.

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“You must cut costs”

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91

Blizzard’s own CFO, not Activsion Blizzard’s CFO.

So yeah. Blame Blizzard for Blizzard’s own strategies.

92

Blizzard was on it’s best when it was still Silicon&Synapse. Ever since then it has been downhill.

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Making ports for the Super Nintendo was the height of the company. :roll_eyes:

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Activision Blizzard has existed since 2008. Later they bought out Vivendi completely of their share of the stock in 2013. I really don’t see how that relates to what you are saying.

TF was a concept introduced in Legion. The old WF system that was introduced in MoP only gave a few item levels and we also had a token system for upgrading our gear.

Anything I dislike about WoW today I lay firmly at Wow Devs door. Not blaming some evil overlord.

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Sure but Davidson & Associates left them to their own devices. They had no knowledge of the gaming industry, at least not on the entertainment side.

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So Classic and TBC?

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That was also easier when Blizzard were a small game developer that didn’t amount to much in regards to the entirety of Davidson & Associates’ business.

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The link is, executive greed and people arguing that the money from micro transactions etc. goes to the employees, which apparently it doesn’t. This is an example of how, the profit a company makes and the quality of life for its employees are 2 separate things.

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99

I’m not talking about the TF system. I’m going back to the summer of 2008 at the start of casualizing WoW during Wotlk. Wrath was a great expansion, raiding the momentum of TBC, but it was far inferiour with a lot easier everything. During Wrath players started leaving and Cata just continued the ball rolling downhill. There were sparks of creativity up to late Pandaria, even Legion, but the core mentality of the game changed after the merge with Activision. Do you really think that had nothing to do with the prouning and casualizing of the game?

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It’s largely a US thing. In the EU it’s not so bad in that regard. In the US they don’t have unions, so the senior management just get crazy salaries and bonuses, whilst the regular Joe gets the crumbs.

The US is a crap country in that regard. But that’s for themselves to figure out. But then again, looking at their president…

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101

Can we stop arguing about ownerships and such and focus our anger towards at these stupid acts that are done please? :pleading_face: Need more rabble here!

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