Blizzard’s flagship World of Warcraft is in serious trouble. After years of being abused and ignored, WoW players have lost the faith and are leaving in droves for MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV. The shit is hitting the fan at Irvine and the chickens are coming home to roost. The Blizzard name is no longer golden. Then end is coming for woke Blizzard 2.0 hopefully sooner than later.
Every single warning I made about about the internal problems at Blizzard is now coming true.
Ex-Blizzard developer Mark Kern who played a big role in convincing Blizzard to release WoW Classic, has just posted a blisteringly honest Twitter response to an alleged leak from an alleged Blizzard employee.
Here it is in all it’s glory for posterity:
Supposedly this is Blizzard leak about the current state of WoW. It may not be legit, but the attitude described about monetization and how devs view gamers, and hate of streamers is true overall in AAA dev.
How did we get here? A couple things happened in AAA dev that lead up to this point.
The biggest thing is the money. Once AAA gaming got bigger than all media, you start to attract a lot of execs who are in it for the immense profit vs the love of making games. This change starts at the top, and is made worse by game companies going public.
This starts to flow down to middle management, who are starting to make serious cash. The “why” of a company changes. Instead of going for games they would love to play and identifying as gamers themselves, there is now a sense of “other.” “WE made the games, THEY pay for them.”
Old guard Blizzard culture used to be “We are gamers, right down to the receptionist, and we make game for ourselves because we are gamers.” That is gone now, and devs at many AAA studios are distinctly US vs THEM (the “whiny, entitled gamers”).
This was not helped by the increase in personal attacks on devs by gamers themselves. Gamers are passionate, and unfortunately this sometimes this move beyond criticizing the game, to personal attacks and some really unsavory and threatening behaviors.
Let’s get back to the money. Once games were obvious money makers, and EVERYONE started to play them, and a “cool” rep, you started to attract a different type of developer. The first wave did it for free, made very little money, very little success, just to make dreams happen.
But once games were viewed as a stable(myth) and more glamour “Career choice” with good pay, you started to attract the types of professional who are very good at their job, but are definitely what I call the Nine to Fivers. They treat it not as a passion, but as a routine job.
Again, this wasn’t helped by upper mgt, who by now is fully flooded with MBA and Marketing types, who treat devs poorly and binge hire and fire them from project to project, treating them as tools. Hard to have passion when both mgt and angry gamers don’t have your back.
Then, Zynga blew up big on Facebook, and metrics were becoming important along with predatory monetization. When mobile exploded and everything become “free but with pay2win” the sheer scale of gaming profits lept an order of magnitude or two forwards. Billions…not millions.
Suddenly, making games for games sake was not the goal. Now games needed to collect metrics, retain users, and the way success was judged was more about how much money per user you could make vs having a great game. The focus moved from gameplay to monetization metrics.
When you design for monetization metrics, you get a very different type of game than if you design for gameplay. The two are often at odds. You find yourself deliberately making your game worse so it can sell better convenience items and power items.
Steve Jobs was right. When you let this type of “why” drive your company, and you make monetization the only goal, you kill the innovation in your company and you drive out the innovators and makers.
While Jobs was talking about sales and marketing staff vs product makers, in games it’s worse. In games, designers are now the sales staff. The gamification of monetization makes or breaks a AAA game. So now, even your product people are contaminated with this mentality.
The devs who do it for the passion, who are tired of being blamed by gamers for corporate decisions above them, and who do it out of genuine passion…well they leave and go indie. What remains are those who are doing it as a job. One they often hate, and they are not innovators.
The arrogance is also real. Steve talks about how you get surprised, because you have a monopoly on the market. WoW had the at monopoly on MMOs. And they are no longer gamers but game salespeople. So of course they are prone to disruption.
In this case, it wasn’t Square and Final Fantasy BY ITSELF. That just happened to be a game that was competing on gameplay instead of monetization because they were NOT the monopoly. It’s also an old enough game where the old values of gameplay were more important.
What sparked the exodus from wow started with a player base that was tired of being treated as customers are often treated in a monopoly (taken for granted, poor service in terms of content, not being listened to, milked for cash and fees). Then came the streamers.
Streamers are the world’s BIGGEST force in game marketing. They can make you a success overnight with ZERO trad marketing (APEX Legends), or they can absolutely tear your game down.
Many in traditional AAA game marketing never understood this, and many still don’t get it today. When streamers were just getting started, I was told by my EA and AAA staffed marketing team what a WASTE it was to do YouTube and Twitch (even though it cost a fraction of ad spend).
Of course, they were wrong, and they now curry favor and spend money on twitch and YouTube. But they don’t really UNDERSTAND it. They spend money on it, but they don’t actually watch the streams to understand when things are going wrong. Or they don’t believe it will affect them.
So when Asmongold started dipping his toes into alternatives to WoW, interviewing Final Fantasy content creators and then, finally, playing it himself on stream, Blizzard was unaware or unbelieving of what was happening. THEY were the monopoly.
Even Asmongold was taken by shock at the sheer number of viewers his Final Fantasy stream attracted. Even he had underestimated the number of dissatisfied and curious for alternative WoW gamers.
Well what happens in streaming? Once ONE content creator hits a gold vein of views, OTHERS quickly hop on. Suddenly you have many WoW streamers talking about Final Fantasy and starting to stream it. What’s a WoW gamer to think?
The rest is history. The King is dethroned, an expression of shock on his face. Sometimes you don’t need the best product. You just need to be good enough to take advantage of a company that has rested too long on their brand and monopoly to actually change, innovate and improve.
This won’t stop. WoW gamers are leaving for good. But if the monopoly can wake up, and pull an expansion out as a turnaround as drastic as Square itself did with A Realm Reborn, it can flip it around again. The problem is Blizzard, you chased all your innovators away. Oh well.
Bounding into Comics has a good write up on this story and the comments are worth reading as well:
https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/07/14/former-world-of-warcraft-dev-mark-kern-responds-to-rumors-of-blizzard-turmoil-the-attitude-described-about-monetization-how-devs-view-gamers-and-hate-of-streamers-is-true-overall-in-aaa-de/
Oh well… where to start!
Also great link you posted in comments. A lot what I wanted to say has been said there already.
“Suddenly, making games for games sake was not the goal,” but instead “now games needed to collect metrics, retain users, and the way success was judged was more about how much money per user you could make vs having a great game.”
Blizzard was a company created by gamers, to make the games they wanted to make. They had success. Not once, twice, thrice… and worked passionately on ever bigger projects, till one stellar failure. Titan. At this point it did not work out anymore. The company did not believe they could fail anymore. They cancelled the Lord of the Clans WoW adventure game before, but at this point this even underlined their commitment to quality.
Once a lot of money is involved, things change indeed to metrics. Particularly creative industries are naturally at odds with that.
No King lives forever is true for gaming companies. Bioware got part of EA, see where they are now. Blizzard is now Blizzard-Activision, it took them a while longer, but their reputation is no longer what it once was anymore either.
They are not the same Blizzard anymore. It’s a new studio with some old guys still being around, but ever less. It’s a new culture and company. Their chances to reach the levels of Blizzard of old? Very unlikely.
I must say I can sympathize with devs and execs not understanding Twitch/Streamer culture. I am a gamer, but this suddenly exploded without me noticing. Many others noticed earlier, even if they might not understand the appeal.
I for sure don’t. There are some streamers that now and then have something to say. Early on they played a game because it was popular, now games are popular because streamers play them (Rust e.g. got a massive boost through streamers recently).
Twitter statements/postings, streamers on Twitch and Youtube… that’s a new world. I quite shiver when I think about many games being made explicitly or at least partially with streamers in mind. Amazon’s New World MMO has (or will have, it’s still in development) a scheduled pvp/raid feature so that streamers can play with their followers and so on.
I don’t like streamers in particular either. Some are interesting and offer me something, but for the hell I can’t figure out why people not rather play themselves or do something else than watching them. Twitch is even degenerate so far to have shown that the most popular female streamer is streaming softporn, regularly getting banned and unbanned after a short time. Twitch is degenerate enough to let it slide, because apparently it generates money, metrics.
For MMOs, apparently, it’s FF XIV’s time now. Quite interesting, it was floundering and had to be rebooted, after all. The Elder Scrolls Online is also going strong.
I am quite out of the loop. Interestingly, the last WoW expansions that I liked were Legion and Warlords of Draenor. Where they basically retold the WoW story again, it was like a TBC re-imagining. It also wrapped up the Legion storyline.
The raid design in Legion was great, but maybe it’s true, the overall direction of the game is lacking. The new story… doesn’t entice people. Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands… they lost it.
They can add, reintroduce, change mechanics. They can probably even balance classes better than ever and have smoother mechanics. Thinking about Warlocks, the first incarnations of soul shards were frankly terrible inventory and gameplay mechanics nightmares.
They lost the WORLD of Warcraft. Which made people dream. All new expansions are smaller scale, with more densely designed quest clusters and activities. But that’s even more theme park design than WoW already was. The world is gone, replaced by smaller new maps for every expansion.
Even without Activision having a say, they don’t have a group of people working together anymore who dream and have visionary qualities. EverQuest didn’t live because of the raids. Kaplan and co perfected raid design. But nobody started playing EQ because of the raids, the endgame.
Nowadays people rush towards it. That’s a fundamental design difference and a major problem for a virtual world.
I am not a fan of the new trends in gaming. Maybe I am just getting old. What rubs me the wrong way is the countless re-imagining of ages old movies and the general lower quality of Hollywood productions. TV series have taken the crown by now, among a lot of trash there is still gold to be found. I am looking at the cinematic releases of this year, and they are not just poor due to the pandemic.
When I was young, games were very individual, not so streamlined into this or that profitable genre with similar systems and mechanics. The word “Indie” didn’t exist, games were somewhere in between, not small scale 1-2 people indie or big company, that middle ground seems to have been lost.
I have grown up in a good time for video games, saw the rise of the MMORPG genre, but by now I rather read books as the current offerings are all too much Asian for my liking. Good times for Koreans and other Asians, they seem to dig their style of their games. But it isn’t my cup of tea.
Blizzard is unlikely to return to glory. Yes, FFXIV did that with Realm Reborn. I just don’t see anyone at Blizzard who has the power to decide that or the ability and vision necessary for that. It would take more than one person, I don’t see a team capable of great things at Blizzard design anymore. They still have talented people and skilled coders, but apparently the only option left for them is to leave Blizzard and hope for a new beginning elsewhere.
Epic post! Lots to digest when I have the time 🙂
Also, I wanted to add that if you visit Blizzard’s LinkedIn page, all you see are new women being hired as VPs of diversity and inclusion. I’m not making this up. Every week there’s another new announcement. These are 6 figure salary jobs we are talking about. Most of the new hires have no idea what a MMO is and the most gaming experience they have is playing Angry Birds. These diversity “experts” could work anywhere in woke corporate America.
It’s all such a shame, but it’s fun experiencing the schadenfreude and watching Blizzard go down in flames.
When Rob Pardo left Blizzard, that was the first domino to fall. I have an article in the can about how and why that happened. Someday I’ll get around to finishing it.
Have you played classic wow? If you have, I would love to get your thoughts on how classic wow compares to the vanilla wow of 2004-2006.
Hello there! Yes, I’ve played WoW Classic. I enjoyed it for the months when I played. It was pretty much faithful to WoW circa 2004-2005.
Those side bar ads….
Can’t trust a game site that supports any number of false GoP claims and furthers the spread of misinformation despite claiming they are “anti-communist”.
Fun fact, by the way. Stocks are a form of Socialism. When a company goes public, “Answering to their stockholders,” rather then staying capitalistic and owned/run by a single person or team.
Food for thought.
Hello, for some reason Akismet my spam plugin censored your comments.
Please tell me what “misinformation” am I spreading? Be specific.
By the way, misinformation is the latest buzzword used by all of the mainstream media outlets to categorize anyone who dares to question the narrative.
But stocks can be bought and sold, ya dunce