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
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.
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
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, was just starting wow classic with my partner as she’d never played wow before, that made us both cancel immediately and never give them another cent.
There are a couple of VERY GOOD classic pservers out there which are not only better maintained than the Blizz servers, these have also much less bots and way healthier populations and economies.
I’d forgotten all about that.
All the sex pests felt like a “good” reason to quit WoW but I’d say my real reason was it had become a piece of shit that didn’t value my time, and I’d honestly been looking for a reason to quit for a long time.
The removed a bunch of portals from WoW in order to “make the world feel big” (make you waste more time traveling instead of doing fun things).
I might just be too casual, but I remember that half the fun of WoW was traveling. Of course, I never got into raids or pvp anyway, I leveled up and did dungeons lol
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.
I’m seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there’s no actual law requiring that. It’s just an excuse they use to be greedy.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because most of these MBA fucks don’t understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
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.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen much. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
it’s a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
They lost me before this line, but I will never forgive and never forget:
“What you guys don’t own phones?”
unpopular opinion: this phrase is right, sometimes. In that context, at that conference, bad call. But sometimes… people think they want something until they get it, and then they realize they don’t want it.
How you phrase things is also important. Never having played WoW, they came across as arrogant and out of touch. Something that’s only been reinforced by their further actions. The “Do you guys not have phones?” comment is just the sequel. The issues only be more and more serious since then.
They made me sad with Diablo 3. But they lost me at StarCraft 2.
D3 got better after years of updates. StarCraft 2’s story was hot garbage and they turned a single full game into three smaller games.
Seeing Blizzard fuck over Overwatch fans was not a surprise to me.
It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.
Unfortunately every other RTS only tries to copy the sweaty multiplayer 1v1 experience. Like playing guitar hero on expert mode on your mouse and keyboard while also doing strategy at the same time.
Even more unfortunately no one seems to be able to execute even that part half as well as Blizzard did.
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.
Its probably not that hard to make an inspirational 5 minute animation though, is it.
I mean they likely have some great talent doing it, but its not the product, its not what we are paying for.
At least they started putting more cut scenes in game rather than the single intro video to hype you on the game.
