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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.
Valve is an independent developer, as mentioned above. They were started by Gabe Newell (an ex-MS employee) and have been mostly self-funded from the start.
A Vivendi subsidiary would never have been allowed to delay their first title for nearly 2 years. The only reason Blizzard gets away with that kind of crap is because they have a track record of horrible predictions for release dates, but solid releases.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I understand that sometimes a patch is necessary, but for the love of Baal, how many patches did Diablo 2 eventually see?
9 or 10 patches in a couple years isn't too bad. They did have some major problems that had to be fixed, but they used a lot more of those patches for gameplay and hack fixes than anything else (the D3D support had a couple of minor fixes and then a major fix around the time of the expansion release, which also included a major overhaul of the gameplay in terms of skill trees and difficulty). They could've easily stopped much earlier, but the expansion probably would've required some kind of patch in any case to allow them to co-exist as well as they currently do.
At least that game works. I've got a handful of other games that never worked completely right, no matter how many patches came for them (or even worse, that never received patches that were definitely needed).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I used to be a big Blizzard fan. I could play StarCraft and Diablo all day with the rest of them. Then one of my buddies told me about a nifty program he ran on his server called BNETd, developed by someone right here in Houston. Blizzard made no comments on the program officially, they just let it go for a couple of years. It was really cool because it was a server daemon that ran on Linux that emulated a Battle.net server. We liked it and it was good.
Then Blizzard gets their panties bunched in a knot because someone starts making a pretty cool UT mod with StarCraft characters. They put the smack down on them, and oh while we're at it we'll put the smack down on BNETd to.
To top it off, I had by that time pretty much stopped playing Blizzard games. You see, during the time period I migrated slowly over to Linux until finally I no longer wasted drive space on a Windows partition. I could make Blizzard games run with Wine, but it was never quite like it should be. Heck, all my other favorite games like UT, Descent, Quake 3, later on UT2K3 and quite a few others I just wont bother ratteling off ran great and NATIVELY on Linux. Blizzard was the only game publisher I gave a shit about that fully shunned Linux in all ways. I simply placed them on the not give a shit about list. They'll stay there until they start supporting Linux and offer an apology to the maker of BNETd. Giving him a job or something would make a great apology in my eyes, but just admiting they should have said something earlier or not laid the smack down so hard out of the blue would be enough for me.
When Blizzards gone I'll miss them about as much as I'll as miss Britney Spears when she runs out of steam, which will be about the same amount as I've missed N'Sync. None.
Die Blizzard. You haven't done what you need as a game company to keep an audiance. Sometimes kickass games isn't enough. Lay down your 2x4, your OS blinders, and your attitude and you'll be right next to Atari/Infogrames in my book again.
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For defending their intellectual property rights? A *protocol* is their intellectual property (bnetd)? The Craft suffix is their intellectual property too (FreeCraft)?
In neither of those cases did they really have a leg to stand on. But the small developer communities had no income from their product and therefore couldn't justify spending much money to defend it, much less the amount that would be required to take on Blizzard/Vivendi Universal. So they folded, and Blizzard wins.
Blizzard may have been defending their intellectual property as they saw it, but really they were just stomping on innocent fans.
Not every developer treats their most talented fans that way, and I'm sure that they'll be welcome in the communities fostered by friendlier developers such as Ambrosia Software, Bioware, etc.
Random and weird software I've written.