Let me introduce you to Wizards of the Coast
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Gaming
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Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don't think I've bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don't play a lot of games nowadays.
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They lost me before this line, but I will never forgive and never forget:
"What you guys don't own phones?"
It was evident that they had completely lost touch with their player base at that point
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Even if Blizzard games haven't had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.
Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.
Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan "free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times", which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.
It wouldn't be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard's actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren't just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government's oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard's morals and principles, or lack thereof.
That's the event that gave me the push I needed to request deletion of my account with them. I won't give them another dollar for as long as I live.
Same! Still kinda miss hearthstone but in the end it was just a game.
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Review bombs are stupid and pointless. Especially in this case since most players are going through bnet and not steam.
24M active players.
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CDPR? admittedly they're really good at gaining it back again, kinda homer simpsons vibes where they repeatedly fuck up but then make an honest attempt to make things right only to repeat the cycle all over again.
Hopefully their transition to unreal engine 5 gets away with a lot of their launch issues I genuinely love all of their games but their release dates being "game launch +1-2 years" hurts me.
CDPR mistakes can be corrected, but blizzard games are designed from the ground up, with purpose, to be fuckup games in order to milk as much money as possible from it players. There is no correcting the boat for blizzard because for the managers of blizzard the boat IS correct
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If you think that's bad, wait 'till you hear about the working conditions.
In their defense their just keeping up with the standard in other publicity owned companies. Don't wanna rock the boat you know.
(This is a joke, please join a union in your field. Union strong motherfuckers!)
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Blizzard is dead. At the time they were Activision. Now they are Microsoft. The blizzard that existed to make StarCraft, warcraft and diablo only exists in name.
I don't know, the World of Warcraft dev team recently unionized and got Chris Metzen to return as creative director. And, personally, as a current WoW player (War Within is great so far btw) the whole feel of the studio is so much better than during Shadowlands when things were bad and I quit the game. I think that Warcraft at least is having a bit of a comeback now.
Overwatch 2 is awful tho
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I miss the Warcraft II and StarCraft days. You could tell they were serious by their cutscenes, but also knew they were having fun, and wanted the player to as well, by the gameplay and Easter eggs. “Line must go up” took over, now it’s all cash grabs. I will not buy a game from them at full price again.
Their cutscenes still go hard honestly
Meh, they are what I expect from a company that is that profit centric. Looking good is top priority for selling, after all.
It hasn't been the same company that delivered that gaming magic in the 90s since, well, the 90s.
It’s a cultural issue.
People at Larian had one objective the entire time - making a genuinely good D&D based game. If the money comes, that’s incredible. And it did come.
People at blizzard make games with the goal of making money. The era of making something fun has been long over in this studio
I don't buy or play their trash any more. It ain't the 90s or 00s any more. Blizzard is ass.
Ea, ubisoft, Blizzard. The games aren't even that good
Yeah, pretty much. A lot of their games appear on a 80% sale half the time, and even then it's still not worth it. It's not even about the money, it's about being disrespected by the dogshit they continue to release.
I would rather give my time to a passionate indie studio, where the people put together a genuinely unique experience
It seems that publicly traded game companies simply can't help themselves from becoming this (e.g. Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA).
It's very sad, but at least there are still a few private AAA companies and indies who seem to make fun games for the sake of fun games.
That’s what happens when MBAs start making too many product decisions at a tech company, and game companies are no exception.
Once you go public, you've practically forced yourself into aiming for infinite growth. "Just enough" revenue is not in the vocabulary of these people
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It's a shame, I liked OW1, even with the tired meta and 6v6 more than I liked OW2.
The loot boxes weren't predatory, allowing unlocking of skins and content without spending anything extra was a nice balance in my opinion that I wish more games did.
They took OW1 and bastardized it, it deserves the rating it has. It used to be that new versions of games were better.
The loot boxes weren't predatory
Ehhh, they were basically the same thing as a slot machine. The battlepass is certainly worse, as it just encourages rampant (not so) microtransactions, but just because the current battlepass system is really predatory, doesn't mean the old loot box system wasn't predatory at all. It was just less predatory.
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It really is a shame. I played so much OW1, and then suddenly it changed to be like all the other modern games with sleazy monetization that I avoid.
It used to be that new versions of games were better.
I for one am very interested to see the quality differences between worker owned game studios and corporate studios. But last I heard they had only just started unionizing.
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
unions are a harder sell in an industry like tech where it's common to have a diverse skill set spanning work that could arguable each be it's own union. does a full stack dev have to join the database admin union before they can write sql queries?
those diverse skill sets also make the individual value of workers fluctuate a lot more as well.
I still like the idea of unions but I just don't know how you can make them work for tech;if anyone has any good resources on the subject I'd love to read more about it
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