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.

Comments

Sierra

[TheViciousOverWind]

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.

Re:Sierra

[CptChipJew]

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.

Re:Sierra

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

Re:Sierra

[samsmithnz]

There were other aspects to Sierras Death. While they made some fantastic Dos games (Kings Quest 1-4, LLS, Quest For Glory, Space Quest), their later titles didn't convert well to the point and click interface, Lucasarts and their SCUMM interface (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, Indiania Jones, etc) Blew Sierras method out of the water... I think that in this case Sierras 'inovation' just plain went in the wrong direction (what was up with KQ7?!?)

Re:Sierra

[dafoomie]

What happened with Sierra was very sad. Too bad Tsunami didn't work out, the company with the former Sierra employees (they made Blue Force, great game, Police Quest knockoff). Maybe someday we'll get a new Space Quest, King's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.

Re:Sierra

[mahdi13]

Anyone remember Dynamix?

I miss good games like that :(

Sierra is just stupid

[Stormwatch]

They had a completed version of Half-Life for the Dreamcast - and did not release it. And a reportedly almost completed version of Half-Life for MacOS - and did not release it. I mean, frankly, if you are not going to release, don't waste money developing!

Re:Sierra is just stupid

[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.

Re:Sierra is just stupid

[samsmithnz]

But remember that in Software Development, just because it is 95% complete, doesn't mean there is only 5% of the work left to complete...

Re:Sierra is just stupid

[trompete]

Valve canned the Mac port because they said it wouldn't interoperate with the PC version online.

Not to point out the obvious, but maybe they should reverse the byte order next time they share network data between PCs and Macs :)

Re:Sierra is just stupid

[PainKilleR-CE]

I didn't say they made any sense, just said that's what they said ;p

The only people that really know are Valve and the company that was porting it to the Mac. Either way, Sierra only knows what Valve told them, more than likely.

Re:Sierra is just stupid

[carou]

There was enormous amount of discussion about this in Mac forums and newsgroups at the time; as far as it's possible to make out, the Mac port was complete and it did network to the PC version.

However, at the time a lot of patches were being released for the PC version, many of which broke networking compatability with each other. Naturally that means they would also break compatability with the Mac version until a patch was released for that too, but neither Valve nor Sierra wanted to take on the responsibility of maintaining (or paying to maintain) the Mac version indefinitely. So rather than release a product which would become obsolete very quickly, they decided to save face and not release the game at all.

Vivendi (Blizzards parent co.) Merges With NBC

[LordYUK]

direct from yahoo... hopefully, NBC will leave Blizzard the heck alone, and they can continue to pump out quality games.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid= 56 4&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20030902/ts_nm/media_vivendi_ dc_21

Re:Vivendi (Blizzards parent co.) Merges With NBC

[Anonymous Coward]

From GFraizer, web designer over at Battle.net
"Blizzard is a part of Vivendi Universal Games which is a different group. Unless you see something that specifically mentions them, it doesn't really apply to Blizzard."

http://www.battle.net/forums/war3/thread.aspx?FN =w ar3x-general&T=247292&P=1&ReplyCount=18#post247292

Re:Vivendi (Blizzards parent co.) Merges With NBC

[mahdi13]

direct from yahoo... hopefully, NBC will leave Blizzard the heck alone, and they can continue to pump out quality games.

You said that like you mean it...when did Blizzard put out 'quality games'?

Re:What about Valve?

[PainKilleR-CE]

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.

Release Dates

[unc_samurai]

Release Dates are no longer that, they are more of wishful thinking on the part of the company (remember Daikatana? Falcon 4.0?).

The elasticity that release dates have gained is not what bugs me. What bugs me is that developers feel the need to release incomplete products to store shelves. I understand that sometimes a patch is necessary, but for the love of Baal, how many patches did Diablo 2 eventually see?

Re:Release Dates

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Release Dates

[PainKilleR-CE]

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).

Re:Release Dates

[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).

Re:Release Dates

[dhall]

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.

Re:Release Dates

[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.

Re:Release Dates

[moonbender]

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.

You are referring to the Public Battle.Net Stress Test. That was a public beta, sure enough, but it wasn't the only beta, of course. Rest assured, they beta-tested all other aspects of the game in-house. Now whether they tested it properly or as much as they should have is another matter, but I'm fairly certain they put as much effort and resources into it as other developers/publishers. Which is, of course, not saying much.

Re:Release Dates

[PainKilleR-CE]

in-house betas rarely find balance issues because they're too limited in scope and usually handled by people that have already played the game at some earlier point. In other words, the players already have certain expectations for the game. You need people with a fresh perspective to find balance problems in a game, and with the nature of a game like Diablo 2, it would really only take a week or so with a fairly limited public beta to find a lot of the issues they found after release.

Re:Release Dates

[The Evil Couch]

actually, D3D with certain mainstream graphics cards was broken with 1.0

Blizzard released a patch immediately as soon as they caught it and even people that bought it the first day actually have 1.03, NOT 1.0.

Obligitory Penny-Arcade link

[Rayonic]

"That would be awesome!" (art by Tycho)

Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[pecosdave]

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.

Re:Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[Etone]

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-

Re:Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[pecosdave]

First of all, I'm not necessarily mad at them for not porting to my OS of choice. That caused me to go from fan to near indifferent. Just like many other software companies have done from my perspective. I'm not mad at the other companies. If they don't port I wont pay them any attention. If enough people do the same they'll eaither port or suffer.

I'm not mad at them for defending their IP rights. It's theirs and they can defend them. What caused me to get mad at them was the fact they turned a blind eye to it and some of the employees gave unofficial words of encouragement in both cases THEN they fired up the smack down out of the blue. Sort of a bait and switch or waiving a carrot. A nice simple "please cut it out" early on would have been nice a simple. Even the RIAA and MPA give (or gave) a nice please cut it out before laying the smack down, and they advertise the fact they're going to lay the smack down otherwise.

I haven't bothered looking at Blizzard in quite some time. I know most of their games worked on Mac OS9 before OSX hit. I don't know if any of their games work on OSX or not. If it works on OSX it would be trivial to do the Linux and BSD porting. Only carelessness or a vendetta would stand in the way, resources to do a Linux or regular BSD port would be minimal. Think I'll cruise the site and see if there's any OSX support on their games now.

Write in portable code to begin with and porting becomes easy. I don't expect everyone to embrace SDL right away, but leaving the engine free of dependancies on OS specific libraries would be a start.

Re:Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[pecosdave]

Pirated games being able to use BnetD was just a side effect as far as I was concerned. My version was legal, I really wouldn't have minded serial tracking being built in. That would have required co-operation from Blizzard and a tie in to the Battle.net servers to be effective, which brings me to the next point. During that time frame (I don't know about now) Battle.net was extreamly frustrating. It was overloaded 95% of the time and was often unuseable. BnetD allowed the ISP I used to work for to put up their own Battle.net type server for their customers to use that was up even when Battle.net was frequently down. This allowed for unscheduled games between strangers, just like Battle.net did. That was usefull legal copies of the clients or not.

Fair? Maybe not. Helping out the competition, definately not. Smacking a fan around after leading him on with a carrot by "unofficial" words of support and indifference for quite a long time, definately wrong.

Shit list? I wouldn't call companies not support Linux on my "shit" list. There's lots of software made for Macs that isn't made for Windows. Are they on your shit list, or do you just not care about them? Same with Linux/Unix/Netware. Macs are expensive hardware. Intel (AMD in my case) hardware is cheap. If I could pony up all the money it took to get a Mac that cost nearly twice as much as it's PC hardware equivelant/supperior I would. As I said. I no longer want to run Blizzard games, they don't make games for my environment and they would be on my don't care list (or more like not on my "fan" list) instead they had to be jerks and wound up on my jerk list.

Yes Blizzard has millions of fans. I'm no longer one of them because I'm one of those .01%. As far as I was concerned they were, I had Blizzard, Rare, and Atari/Infogrames at the top of my list. Unfortunately Rare went to a platform I don't have (except for their few GBA titles) and Blizzard attacked the open source community. They're now in the SCO/Microsoft catagory as enemies of open source. Indifference earns indifference, support earns support, attacking earns shit list.

Re:Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[mahdi13]

That was really just the icing on the cake...Blizzard has always been at the bottom of my list. Warcraft was fun, I never bought it playing it a friends, Warcraft 2 was more of the same...just looked better.
Starcraft, more of the same with a different story and look (Not to mention the story sucked more then a Mark Hamilton movie in the last 15 years).

Once Blizzard started pushing their obese, bloated weight around and suing movie studios for naming a movie about a Mexican drug lord "Diablo" things started to get more then ugly with Blizzard.
I agree with the poster, Blizzard will not be missed and maybe if they were to go away things might get innovative again as other companies try to fill the vacuum they will leave behind.

Re:Doesn't hurt my feelings if they disappear.

[vegetablespork]

Who the hell modded that insightful? Inciteful is more like it. Hope I see this in M2.

Blizzard is not so "right" as you suggest

[Cecil]

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.

Re:What about Valve?

[Attaturk]

A Vivendi subsidiary would never have been allowed to delay their first title for nearly 2 years.

I used to work for VU on the games side before and during the 'merger'. People went over two years alright. I can't say for sure that it happened on a first title but it definitely happened. When we visited one particular developer's office (nameless naturally) all they'd really achieved in two years was a 12 page promotional booklet and a pathetic amount of research. Although the reverse of the wallchart behind the pool table showed a pretty hectic tournament history... ;-)

What happened to the Havas involvement in Middle Earth? What happened to Bablyon 5? What happened to WON.net? Dig around a little and you'll soon see that the list of tragedies within VU is considerable and apparently ever-growing. My sympathies are with Blizzard. I know exactly what the 'VU uncertainty factor' feels like. At least whatever happens they no longer have to put up with Jean Marie Messier. And I hope for their sake that they'll be sold to a group under better management.

Re:What about Valve?

[PainKilleR-CE]

I used to work for VU on the games side before and during the 'merger'. People went over two years alright. I can't say for sure that it happened on a first title but it definitely happened.

I'm sure it does happen quite a bit, but first titles would normally be removed from that particular developer or the developer would be reshuffled (ie the name stay the same but the people change), assuming the title isn't just canned.

When we visited one particular developer's office (nameless naturally) all they'd really achieved in two years was a 12 page promotional booklet and a pathetic amount of research. Although the reverse of the wallchart behind the pool table showed a pretty hectic tournament history... ;-)

Fortunately, Valve actually had a working game, they just scrapped it and started over to rework the engine and give it more capabilities to help tell the story.

What happened to the Havas involvement in Middle Earth? What happened to Bablyon 5? What happened to WON.net? Dig around a little and you'll soon see that the list of tragedies within VU is considerable and apparently ever-growing.

I definitely know that, I was keeping pretty close tabs on a lot of things that were going on in the various development houses Sierra was publishing back in the same time frame shortly after Half-Life was released. Another big one would be the crap pulled on Dynamix (the developer of Tribes and Tribes 2).

My sympathies are with Blizzard. I know exactly what the 'VU uncertainty factor' feels like. At least whatever happens they no longer have to put up with Jean Marie Messier [expatica.com]. And I hope for their sake that they'll be sold to a group under better management.

Blizzard certainly has enough name recognition in the industry to survive something like this, it's just a question of whether or not the company that gets ahold of them will let them continue, or will buy them just for the name(s).

Seriously!

[JVert]

Can someone make a corporation and sell the shares on ebay with the exception that the transaction is only complete when there is enough money to buy Vivendi?

Dont look at me my ebay rating isn't THAT good to be trusted with 800 mil...