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

[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: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.

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.

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.