At the beginning of this year, I wrote an article where I stated I would be boycotting Blizzard Entertainment. After years of writing about World of Warcraft from a design perspective, I had finally had enough of Blizzard and their descent into identity politics. After the Diablogate debacle this week at BlizzCon 2018 in Anaheim, I have decided to rescind my boycott and from today onwards I’m going to start writing about Blizzard and their games.
The Diablo Immortal catastrophe is a massive and unprecedented failure on so many levels that it has outraged, electrified and unified many PC gamers. This fiasco has unearthed many troubling things about what is going on at Blizzard that affect all of us who love PC games and MMORPGs.
For years Blizzard was the crown jewel of the PC video game world. They produced some of the most beloved video games of all time such a Diablo, Diablo 2, the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games and of course World of Warcraft. What Blizzard achieved over the years was no accident. Their video games and MMOs were masterpieces of design, art, and production that stood miles above their competition. Those days are gone.
I believe that Blizzard is the canary in the coal mine for the entire PC video game industry.
In the olden days, canaries were brought into mines by miners because of their sensitivity to noxious chemicals in the air. If a canary died the miners knew that the air was poisonous, so they would watch them closely to prevent themselves from being poisoned. Today, the canary in the coal mine is often used as a metaphor for impending danger.
If Blizzard goes down, the entire realm of PC gaming will go down as well or perhaps it will die a slow death of neglect. I love PC games too much to sit idly by to watch that happening without speaking out.
It’s not that Blizzard is going out of business, rather it is the fact that Blizzard is fundamentally transforming itself into something unrecognizable. Blizzard has decided that their fans are expendable and with that their design and production ethos that made them famous is collateral damage as they foolishly move toward their new goal of pleasing Activision shareholders.
Blizzard is all about the benjamins now as their new business model is all about chasing the financially lucrative genre of mobile games. Recently returned Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham who left Blizzard in 2004, proudly revealed in a BlizzCon 2018 press conference that most of Blizzard’s top talent is now working on upcoming mobile games.
If this keeps up, PC games will be relegated to the sidelines at Blizzard and eventually phased out. WoW’s yearly declining subscription numbers and the fans unhappiness with the most recent WoW expansion Battle for Azeroth is evidence that A-list talent at Blizzard is not focusing on PC games. True WoW fans have known this for years as the infamous B team was assigned to WoW giving us some of the worst expansions in WoW history.
Transferring your top talent to mobile is madness. If you really care about making amazing PC video games, then this makes about as much sense as removing the top scientists from the Manhattan Project and putting them to work making a better toaster.
The undeniable truth is staring everyone in the face: Blizzard is now making games for shareholders, not their fans.
In many ways, what happened at BlizzCon 2018 was a blessing in disguise because it awakened a sleeping giant: the Diablo fanbase. Instead of being boiled slowly in a pot of water, the fans were scorched by the preposterous announcement of Diablo Immortals. The passion and tenacity of the Diablo fans on forums like Reddit (where threads are free to exist without being deleted by overzealous Blizzard moderators) has exposed much of the truth about what is really going on in Irvine. Diablo fans are doing real reporting and analysis, unlike some alleged video game journalists who are white knighting for Blizzard and accusing Diablo fans of being entitled.
In a world where entertainment creators are increasingly more concerned about virtue signaling and promoting identity politics than they are pleasing their fans, the revolt of the Diablo fans will go down as one of the most important moments in video game history. If Blizzard is smart, they will have learned an important lesson this week:
Live by the fans, die by the fans.
Fans are not the problem; fans are the solution. Given Blizzard’s tone-deaf leadership and legendary arrogance, it is very doubtful that they will learn any lessons and instead double down on this fool’s errand. It’s a real shame because what can take a lifetime to build can be destroyed overnight. It didn’t have to be this way. In the future, I hope to do my part and share what I believe are the reasons why the Blizzard ship has gotten so off course. While it may be too late to save Blizzard, perhaps what happened will be a cautionary tale so that others may avoid a similar fate.
-Wolfshead
I can only agree, but want to add: Why don’t they even try something new? Did they lose all creative persons or is their corporation now too big to spawn any new ideas? They are going for remasters of their games from the times when Blizzard dominated a lot lately. For a mobile games company they seem terribly bloated. Currently PC gaming sees a surge of Fortnite and PUBG style Battle Royale games. Maybe Blizzard focusing on mobile will give rise to new champions of PC gaming. While mobile gaming is for sure popular and growing, I still believe there can be money made among PC Gamers. It seems also a healthier business system for me than going for Free 2 Play mobile games aiming for the so called whales to make money.
Blizzard isn’t very good at coming up with original ideas. Instead, Blizzard takes good video games, does some innovating, changes them up and polishes them for the mass market. I’ve been talking about this for years on this blog.
Surprisingly Ben Kuchera at Polygon talks about this in a recent Diablo Immortals article:
https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/5/18064290/blizzard-diablo-immortal-reaction-explainer-blizzcon
The fallout from the Diablogate debacle has yet to fully manifest but I think the end result will be positive much like how the WoW legacy server movement forced Blizzard’s hand and embarassed them into making WoW Classic. Stay tuned. This ain’t over.
No comment on WoW Classic? The panel about it is up on YouTube. Between that and playing the demo, Blizz does seem more serious than anyone aside from Jagex about making a vanilla server as authentic as they can manage.
Actually, I’m very bullish on WoW classic and I’ve got a lot to say about it in a future article.
Dude, its not Blizzard.
The mobile market absolutely dwarfs the PC and console markets combined. They have to align to survive.
Even WoW at its peak was not earning what the top mobile games (even ones you’ve never heard of) are earning now… these are hundreds of millions of players, rather than a “peak” of 12 million.
It will be hard pressed for anyone to commit to make big PC games anymore because it just doesn’t make financial sense.
The only chance we as MMO players have is the democratization of technology and the balls of the indie developers.
They won’t have the budgets, but they will have the ideas and now the tools… that’s where the PC evolution will come from, because it can’t really support the mainstream publishers anymore.
It’s why Geffen won’t pay to make any more Whitesnake records.
The decline of WoW over the years was largely due to Blizzard’s incompetence. Handheld games (that I used to develop) and mobile games are more lucrative but it’s a completely different market.
Blizzard should create a new division called Blizzard Mobile and be done with it. There is no reason that both PC games and mobiles games can’t exist simultaneously.
I agree the future for PC games is the democratization of technology via indie video game companies.
I don’t think the problem the fans have is that they’re making mobile games. It’s that they’re ONLY going to make mobile games when the bulk of their fan base are PC gamers.
I wanted to share some excellent analysis by YouTuber The Quartering regarding the Diablogate fiasco:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmqCovWVBTg
Making games for shareholders? Well I think that’s what they TRIED to do, but they obviously failed since their stock plummeted as a result of this.
Oops.
Long time read here. Always loved your articles.
I’ve been saying for years that Blizzard (ever since D3) has turned into something unrecognizable. Honestly, it feel like liberalism has taken over their company and they’re just a shill of NPCs clamoring about to exist only to appease their bottom line—to hell with quality and loyal fanbase.
Similar to what we’re seeing from Netflix, more and more of these California-based companies are being overrun with politics bleeding into their products, shows, games, movies, etc. It’s a disease that can only be cured by a massive reset. I’m glad there are still companies like CD Project Red that give me hope. Sadly, the days of the MMORPG in the West seem to be over. All we’re left with are the cash cow flashy games coming out of Korea and JP.
Good to see you back in the saddle Wolfshead.
I’m surprised that it took this long for the retarded Blizzard fanboys to get smacked upside the head to wake the fuck up that they no longer have your interests at heart much less financially.
I was never into WOW I was more into FPS games and so I purchased Overwatch and saw how well it was made until their SJW agenda reared it’s ugly head by censoring their customers, rigging the matchmaking and moving valuable company resources to silencing players and I was silenced for two years for calling my team retarded.
Now you can just get censored for saying nothing, I have written an article exposing Overwatch rigged matchmaking and how they profit from it.
https://tacticalknight.com/how-overwatch-punishes-skilled-players-for-profit/
I made an affiliate link for your site and would appreciate if you could do the same and see from a redpilled WOW player calling out Blizzard for their bullshit because the Blizzard forums even banned me for calling out Blizzard on their censorship.
Hi there! Thanks for this post. I appreciate the link on your site to my site and have added your site to my blogroll. It’s good to know that there are other gaming blogs that are sounding the alarm about the infiltration of cultural Marxist/Social Justice Warrior ideology into the realm of video games. Keep up the good fight!
On a recent podcast, Mark Kern was asked his opinion on when Blizzard began to change from being a company made up of passionate developers pouring their hearts and souls into their projects to the sort of profit-driven corporation that we know, today.
According to Kern, just after WoW was shipped, he was directed to layoff a large number of people who Blizzard had hired to help with WoW’s development. Apparently, he attempted to stop these layoffs from happening. Without giving any names, Kern said that a meeting was called on this matter. He argued that Blizzard was a family and that they didn’t treat their employees this way. One of executives responded to him by saying “well, we’re a real company now”.
According to Kern, that’s when it hit him.
Six months later, he left the company.
Hi Josh, thanks for the post mentioning Mark Kern’s observations about how Blizzard changed after the popularity of WoW. Here’s the link for the video interview from The Quartering and Mark Kern.
https://youtu.be/rT3zMvTdTrs?t=312