
Activision Blizzard staff reportedly bracing for layoffs - Reedx
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-11-activision-blizzard-staff-reportedly-bracing-for-layoffs
======
notTyler
I don't really know if it's rose colored glasses but as a lifelong gamer it
really sucks to see gaming as an industry become more and more focused around
ROI rather than shipping quality games.

The latest Call of Duty and Red Dead games both shipped without
microtransactions so it wouldn't affect their review scores. Call of Duty in
particular has an absurd amount of them, pay to win mechanics (in Zombies),
and the battle pass is so grindy that you either have to no-life or pay (more)
money to get to the end. This is from a game that shipped with a 50 dollar
season pass. All of this on top of the fact that since CoD is a yearly
franchise anything you purchase basically disappears if you get next year's
iteration. It's like, no sane game developer that loves making games enough to
put up with the industry would ship a game like this. Someone ran the numbers
and said we can make x$ more if we make the grind harder.

I don't want to get into the narrative that the bean counters are ruining
Blizzard because I honestly don't know if it's the case. All the restructured
staff from Heroes have been rumored to be working on D4. Hearthstone is
hearthstone. WoW, I don't know. Overwatch is still getting regular content
updates and I would expect it to go F2P soon. I think some gamers have been a
tad chicken little about changes at Blizzard, but Activision is so far gone
that I refuse to buy any of their games.

~~~
ben_jones
The monopolistic triple AAA games industry requires large hit titles to
satisfy their stock holders. Whether the monetization model is MTX/cosmetics,
tradition sales, or the newer subscription services, games will continue to be
reduced to a lowest common denominator in order to pump user numbers. Kind of
reminds me of another industry...

~~~
zrobotics
Gaming is the farthest it has ever been from monopolized, though. The indy
scene is very healthy, releasing a game on steam is so easy that the real
problem is getting noticed amongst the flood of releases. It's also far easier
to publish to a console than in the PS1 days.

I understand your frustration with the large studio's monetization models, but
the solution is to just ignore them. I was dumb enough to buy Fallout 76, but
I treated that as an object lesson: even developers I 'trust' are capable of
releasing absolute trash. Plus, the backlog of interesting games on my steam
wishlist meant I could have very easily put the 60 bucks into 2-3 good games
that aren't trying to push lootboxes or microtransactions.

------
bhouston
A lot of the air in the games industry is being sucked out by Fortnite.
Indirectly this is the cause of these layouts. Fortnite directly completes
against Overwatch and it is taking away time that gamers would otherwise spent
on other A/B titles.

~~~
nerdjon
I feel like blaming Fortnite for this is a stretch.

When there has just been a noticeable decrease in quality of Blizzard games
since they have merged.

\- Heroes tried to to cash in on the loot box craze and from what I have seen
has been very negative

\- Diablo has basically been ignored except for their mobile app (which went
on to hurt Blizzard's reputation and just strengthen a competing game, Path of
Exile)

On the Activision side, there were reports that a good portion of this could
be tied to support staff for Destiny 2 no longer being needed.

Overwatch seems to actually be doing pretty well, and I would not be surprised
if it was the only team not affected by layoffs.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Whoa there. Heroes of the Storm has, by far, hands down, the _best loot box
model in the industry_. I'm still irritated Overwatch doesn't use it yet. And
please, tell everyone you know in the game industry to steal the monetization
model from Heroes. If Heroes is a failure, it's because it doesn't behave
badly to try to make you spend money.

Heroes hands out loot boxes like candy, I'd say you'll get three or four times
as many as Overwatch. And then Heroes _also_ adds a reroll mechanic, where for
a trivial gold (currency from doing matches and in-game quests) amount, you
can reroll the box up to three times. And as with Overwatch, of course, loot
boxes are cosmetics only (except for the very rare hero unlock, which most
people aren't getting via loot boxes anyways).

I've rarely been dissatisfied with a Heroes lootbox because I can reroll it
until it's good, and I've always gotten so many Heroes lootboxes I've never
even felt the drive to buy any. And then in addition to the ability to use
your duplicate currency to forge the exact cosmetics you want, Heroes is going
to re-add direct cash purchase for all skins, so you don't need to buy loot
boxes to buy skins. I've bought a number of skins over the years, but never
paid for a loot box.

Probably the "best" way to spend money on Heroes if you want to (though you
have really no reason you _have_ to), is you can get stim packs to increase
your XP (no in-game benefit) and gold generation.

~~~
bliblah
As a Dota 2 player I don't understand how anyone is supposed to take that game
seriously when you have to _Pay to unlock heroes_ when the game tried to
appeal to hard core competitive players (at least with a ranked ladder and the
big tournament it had until recently). I am very surprised that League also
gets away with this but I guess it has more to do with how these games play
and who in your circle of friends play them than anything else.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
You actually can't unlock heroes with cash (unless you were to roll a LOT of
lootboxes). If you're doing daily quests, you'll get enough gold to unlock
heroes every week or so. This is one case where you'll be more successful
unlocking by actually playing than spending money.

------
protoster
I feel like I'm the only one who made peace with Blizzard dying as we knew it
shortly after Activision acquisition. They sold out, this happens all the
time. Everyone else seems to be clinging on to "old Blizzard" like it's an ex
they can't leave behind.

~~~
wsc981
I’m with you, but at the same time happy Blizzard will release WoW Classic
this summer. Some good old quality gaming.

~~~
protoster
Activision will release WoW classic, not Blizzard.

------
Taylor_OD
It sucks that hard working people lose their job due to decisions made by the
money people. Micro transactions are destroying the industry. Unfinished games
being shipped are destroying the industry. Shitty online play is destroying
the industry. These things are not up to a developer.

I havnt bought a brand new game in the last few years. Instead I just wait and
buy the finished version a year later for half the price that included all the
DLC on steam. If the game shipped in a good state and DLC became a thing of
the past I might think about buying games at full price again. But it doesnt
look like that's going to happen anytime soon.

------
izzydata
This might have been inevitable despite their mistakes. I get the feeling that
giant AAA titles are becoming less economical compared to the cheaper to
produce and cheaper to buy indie titles that come out every single day.

There will always be a place for massive games, but gambling with 100 million
dollars is much more difficult than 100 thousand dollars. Smaller studios can
much more quickly try out new ideas without potential losses.

------
ilovecaching
Question for game developers, has innovation been stifled by the the bar being
raised for making a AAA game? I assume making a game like Spyro or Diablo took
a lot of time and effort, but I'm wondering if the increasing demand for high
end graphics and extremely rich environments has raised the bar too high?

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Absolutely. Graphics get gamers. The lesson learned by Nintendo with the Wii’s
prev-gen graphics has not been forgotten by the games industry. When crispy
photorealistic graphics set the standard, you either have to expensively match
the industry or go cartoonish to smooth over the rough edges.

The golden era of gaming was during the PS2. Not only did it have
unprecedented market penetration, but the hardware was both advanced enough to
make decent 3D games while not being so powerful that a few deep-pocketed
studios could make stunning graphics that blew the completion out of the
water.

Those days are long gone. On one end of the spectrum you have the indie
market, which uses retro designs to make up for the lack of asset designers
(think Rogue Legacy or Shovel Knight), or you have the massive AAA developers
that dominate ad-spaces.

Anything in between (~PS2 graphics) isn’t taken seriously. So it’s either
indie or AAA. No middle ground anymore.

~~~
wilsonnb3
And yet Nintendo hasn’t tried to compete with the next gen graphics since the
GameCube and is doing quite well.

The wii outsold the Xbox 360 and the PS3. The DS sold 160 million to the PSP’s
80 million, the 3DS another 75 million to the PS Vitas 10 million.

------
ashelmire
They mention the poor sales of the latest Destiny 2 expansion.

I enjoyed Destiny 2. It's a great game. But I didn't have much reason to keep
playing after finishing the storyline. I did, for a time, continue playing and
beating the various events and multiplayer variants. But once you run through
each event once, there's not much point to grinding. It's not like grinding
crucible is really that interesting, compared to Overwatch where there's far
more variety in gameplay.

And the first expansion felt pretty... empty. It had what, a few hours of
(very repetitive) gameplay for $35? That feels like a bad deal. I get it,
there's a lot of visual and aesthetic content. But that doesn't keep gamers
coming back. Buying a second expansion would just feel bad after that.

------
coding123
I play ESO. Seems like I am constantly chatting with people how to do things
and how it's different than WoW. I think the big thing that changed over the
4/5 years it took to finally break into that audience was stability and
content and the sharding system. With how ESO places everyone in a megaserver,
a lot of WoW fans actually had to back step from time to time from their
originally chosen shard because they would be the only one online. And on top
of all that, it's free to play after you buy the base game.

~~~
xkgihu7r
BfA is absolute crap. I don't know who is to blame, but it really is the worst
expansion. WoW does not deserve to die like this. I suspect Blizzard believes
the game can't be redeemed so it's in life support.

Thankfully, Classic is around the corner.

~~~
Jhndb
As a RuneScape player I'm astonished at how well Jagex have done to revive the
old RS community by bringing back the old version of the game, and then
polling in new features.

Hopefully Blizzard can take notes from this with WoW classic

~~~
swarnie_
People give Jagex a lot of abuse for treating Reddit and Twitter as a support
channel, personally i think its great community engagement.

It could work for Blizzard too, they share a customer base with similar
outlooks and mentality... to put it politely.

~~~
livueta
It's great community engagement for certain values of both "community" and
"engagement". Personally, I find that (largely as a function of the consensus-
manufacturing effects of Reddit) it leads to a distressing loss of diversity
in the ways the game is enjoyed. In short, you get a feedback loop. A blob of
players vocally supports a particular paradigm of gameplay (call it the
PvM/ironman/slayer industrial complex), so they talk about it on Reddit. It
helps that this approach is attractive to newcomers and inexperienced
returners. The developer notes this and produces content accordingly. More
players are attracted/kept around by this additional content, leading to
requests for more of the same. Rinse and repeat.

As a result, the more fringe communities (which tend to be correlated both
with emergent forms of gameplay and experience with the game; skilling and PvP
being the big examples) get starved or actively harmed by the course of
development. As a result, those players leave or become less engaged,
furthering the cycle and leaving the game a less-interesting place.

Back in the day I never thought I'd whine about Jagex becoming better at
listening. I guess it's sort of similar to issues that can be had with A/B
testing - when engagement is the name of the game and you have easy access to
knobs and feedback, you can end up overfitting. In the terminology of this
thread, the bean-counter approach makes you long for the touch of the auteur.

disclaimer: 20k-hour multiply maxed get-off-my-lawn grump with several axes to
grind

------
wpdev_63
Blizzard is one of the most competent developers out there. They understand
the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2,
overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly polished.

Right now the game market is getting eaten by these f2p games(fortnite, lol,
etc) and they haven't found a space to expand into. If there's one place I
feel blizzard could innovate in would be in a star citizen like game. Imagine
an epic mmo game that had the expanse of no man's sky, the economy of eve
online, and the shooter mechanics of overwatch. It would be an massive
undertaking but there's definitely a massive market there as you can see with
star citizen.

~~~
ianleeclark
> They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree
> (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly

You and I know two completely different companies then. World of Warcraft BFA
is, anecdotally, causing players to hemorrhage, and the only reason I have to
report this anecdotally is because Blizzard stopped reporting their subscriber
numbers after hemorrhaging players for boring and bad content. BFA was
incredibly buggy and not even a half-finished game when released.

Their development process feels spreadsheet-driven and concerned primarily
with keeping their subcount high through tedious content which takes long
amounts of time, rather than keeping their subcount high with quality content
that keeps the playerbase engaged.

------
PopsiclePete
Here I was, eagerly ready to drop $60 on a new Diablo, but no, I have to
endure cartoony multiplayer "Battle Royale" crap, because all gamers are
spastic high schoolers I guess? The only way Blizzard can sink lower is if
their next game is a multi-player only zombie survival + shooter + crafting
DayZ wanna be. Because it's what all the kids are raving about on twitch?

Screw it, I'll give my money to indie studios, they can still deliver.

------
lapnitnelav
Looks like being / going "mobile" is the new thing @ Blizzard.

~~~
seattle_spring
I mean... don't you guy have phones?

~~~
jrockway
In some sense, this is reasonable. If you want people to spend money on your
game, preventing that by requiring they first buy a $1500 PC seems sub-optmial
when everyone does in fact have a phone.

For everyone that won't play mobile games (like me), there are probably 100
people that will. And they only have $5 for an add-on, not $60 for the entire
game. That's the economic reality these days. Computer ownership is becoming
an obscure niche thing.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> If you want people to spend money on your game, preventing that by requiring
> they first buy a $1500 PC seems sub-optmial when everyone does in fact have
> a phone.

This is a strange way to look at it considering that Blizzard is primarily a
PC game developer, and the extreme majority of their customers are PC gamers.
They will already have the PC.

Blizzard is a AAA developer. Mobile games don't exactly have a reputation for
being AAA quality. PC gamers often scoff at mobile gaming, and the Blizzard
fan base has been hoping for a Diablo 4, so for them to announce a mobile
Diablo feels like a slap in the face. It feels like they're abandoning their
core audience in favor of the mobile world, which is frequently ridden with
microtransactions.

------
sadris
Turns out hiring people based on things other than merit results in your
quality of product dropping as the quality of employees drop. It's a shame.

