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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
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]
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]
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]
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]
"That would be awesome!" (art by Tycho)
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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.
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]
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.