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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.
Well, I do believe Sierra publishes Half Life, and that is quite the best seller.
But I agree, not having amazing releases like Liesure Suit Larry really is a shame.
Vonal Declosion
but note that he said Sierra as a developer.
Valve is the developer of Half-Life, and they have very much been working on methods for self-publishing their titles (ie Steam).
Furthermore, whenever Sierra has had full control over a development house, they've had a nasty tendency to run it into the ground shortly after a major release, or even push it into that release before it was ready and then run the studio into the ground. Luckily, Sierra has no control over Valve except to delay release of retail packages and patches when they fail QA.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Sierra had no choice in either of those releases. Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.
Why they canned the DreamCast version I don't know, but the storyline was released as Blue Shift, iirc.
Sierra's never had any control over Valve except in the QA process for titles Sierra is contracted to publish. In other words, Sierra can force Valve to fix bugs before releasing a title to retail or releasing a patch, but they can't force them to ship a title. Otherwise, we would've had Half-Life at least a year earlier and TF2 a long time ago.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Hardly a fair thing to say about D2. It shipped working, you can have lots of fun with it with 1.0, there's no huge problems. All the patches have been obscure bug fixes and balancing/fun changes to the game. Complaining about continued support is kinda silly...
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.
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.
In other words, you're mad at Blizzard for not devoting tons of resources to porting their games to your OS of choice, and also for defending their intellectual property rights. When they throw away their common sense, then maybe you'll consider buying games from them again?
I hope you're not holding your breath.
-etone-