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Blizzard's Uncertain Future Probed
Thanks to the Seattle Times for their story discussing the 'cloud of uncertainty' over Blizzard's future, following the stalled sale of Vivendi Universal's games division. Blizzard's president Mike Morhaime says that "...we don't even know if we're part of the assets being sold. We're used to having more control over our destiny, and now we're just waiting", echoing the sentiments of four key Blizzard staff who took things further by quitting the famed developer a couple of months back. But since Blizzard's "...three franchises - 96 percent of whose fans are male - have sold more than 34 million copies worldwide", there's a great deal to be gained if the right buyer can be lined up swiftly enough.
Let's hope they don't wind up the way Sierra did (Once a company with quality releases, now a crappy-publisher-house).
What happened to them AFAIK was pretty much the same. - Key developers (Al Lowe, Roberta Williams, etc.) from Sierra left the company (or put on crappy games).
The death of Sierra as a game-developer pretty much meant the end of adventure games as a mainstream-genre... It's hard to think of the same happening to the RTS (Real Time Strategy) genre, but then again if someone told me X years ago, that the adventuregames genre would be dead now, I would have laughed.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
direct from yahoo... hopefully, NBC will leave Blizzard the heck alone, and they can continue to pump out quality games.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Actually many of the Diablo 2 patches addressed the Direct3D support, which was barely usable when the game shipped, even on the best video cards available at the time (the glide support for 3dfx cards was significantly better).
The 'balancing' changes are, in themselves, a sign of the poor testing done on the game, though, for the most part, I'd say the game shipped mostly good (except for the Direct3D support).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Regardless of how omniscient you would like game developers to be, they are often underestimating the ability of several thousand rabid gamers, and to what extents a player will go to in order to gain an advantage of edge. No amount of testing can simulate the hundreds of man hours of play that goes into each game week of an online game.
You're right, except for one thing: Blizzard did an extremely limited beta test for Diablo 2 which was only meant to test battle.net. They ignored gameplay and hardware issues and even ignored many of the network problems they had with the test (which was several orders of magnitude smaller than the launch, though held on far fewer servers to simulate the loads). Their first nerf was in the first patch, which came out very shortly after the game was released. It wouldn't have taken much testing for something like that to show up, though they may underestimate the level of a problem in testing. Their major gameplay problems (as is the case in many of these games) was not so much that certain things were over-powered as that certain things were underpowered, to the point of uselessness. When people ignored those things, they found ways to make them useful in limited situations, but that doesn't really fix the problem. The things that seemed overpowered were nerfed, and overall the game stagnates at certain levels. I still enjoy it occasionally, but they didn't make the best choices with it.
This article discusses Blizzard, and yet the biggest names they cite to leave Blizzard were part of Blizzard North (Diablo fame). There's several games and companies under the VU standard, including 2 or 3 MMO's. There doesn't seem to be an issue with someone buying Blizzard, there seems to be an issue with VU using them as a carrot to sell off the rest of their gaming unit.
Well, the main issue is that Blizzard doesn't even know if they're being sold off with the unit. The fact that Blizzard can make up 25% of the profits of the unit when they only shipped an expansion should make them a huge carrot for anyone looking to buy, but then most would probably just try to get Blizzard and leave the rest in the dust (or maybe one or two other pieces to get some of Sierra's publishing deals and titles, for instance). The bulk of what VU is selling is crap, but there is some incentive for a company that's willing to fire a lot of people and dissolve a couple of companies for their assets, as much as we all hate to see that sort of thing happen. As for Blizzard, anyone that's willing to break them up or sell them off has some issues, but then it's understandable when a company like VU that's focused in completely different areas doesn't understand how games can fit into their overall company.
-PainKilleR-[CE]