Ultimate Team is very much pay to win, and Western audiences lap it up.
Er, what’s Ultimate Team? Oh yea, FIFA.
It is a bit funny that everyone thinks FIFA is the most corrupt sport(ing league) yet is also the most monetized game.
FIFA, and Madden, and NHL. I think NBA 2K works much the same way too. It’s absolutely massive.
EA financials:
This is the problem when you have a massive cash cow with recurring revenue, classically a MMO. There’s a constant need for updates, every year or two like clockwork, to retain those subscribers, and it takes over the company, with everybody desperate to work on anything else.
Blizzard tried to fight that with its other properties and found some success with Hearthstone and Overwatch, but they simply weren’t sticky like a MMO; they performed well for a couple years then dropped off.
At the same time their famously long dev times led to no banner games being released for, like 7 years. Overwatch was 2016 and Diablo 4 will be 2022-- maybe. Probably not.
The article pretty much spells out that they have a house of ideas area in the company and that those ideas all went nowhere.
Again, I don’t think you can blame Activision. Between that and the current guy saying Activision isn’t coming in there messing with creative people, I think you simply have the (quite normal) case where the people who built the thing aren’t there anymore and those people were the brains that really knew how to make great stuff.
You all have favorite musical acts… and know how they can change and evolve in great or poorer ways dependent on who is involved. Gaming IMO is no different. Yes, it takes teams of people to make games in 2021, but the main vision is usually driven by one or two people at the top. You lose those people, or they retire, or move on because it’s just time for them to do something new, and you end up with a lot of their fans running the company. If those people didn’t bring something new and exciting with them, or weren’t groomed properly to take up the reins, you’re not going to have the same success.
That said, since Blizzard is still apparently working on things like Overwatch 2 and Diablo projects, there is a chance there are people there who can get it right, but again, with nothing being sold that’s new, how can you expect to be successful? They need new games.
Well, their strength in the past was taking a burgeoning genre and making a super-polished version of it that’s then super-successful. It didn’t work with their MOBA, but what other genre can they try that with now? Battle Royale? Auto-Chess? Minecraft? Tower Defense? Candy Crush?
I’m honestly expecting Overwatch part Deux to be an online looter-shooter like Anthem, with a battle royale mode like Warzone.
The question is if Activision would be happy with Blizzard making a competitor in a genre they’re already in. They cover FPS and Battle Royale with Call of Duty, and King I would imagine makes every sort of mobile game.
So it’s possible Blizzard is a bit constrained as to what types of games they can create.
I don’t think they’d have any problems with controlling multiple properties in the same market. Activision is huge, they have their own games of every type (other than MMOs, because it isn’t 2009).
If that’s the case then a BR game would be an obvious opportunity for the Blizzard “magic.” Same with a Destiny-style looter shooter.
Yes, that’s why I posited OW2 to combine the two.
Well unless someone in Blizzard’s creative team is really against RTS games then I’m not sure I would fully believe either side of the story. Warcraft 4 seems like it would have the potential to print money in the RTS genre, just not as much money as other types of games might make due to RTS being niche. Starcraft 2 is often argued about in discussions about Starcraft versus Starcraft 2, yet I don’t think you can say SC2 didn’t make money for Activision-Blizzard just that it won’t make them CoD-sized stacks of money.
Has Blizzard changed? Have they fallen? Who the hell knows. They are a game developer that doesn’t release games.
Hearth: 2014
Heroes: 2015
Overwatch: 2016
Current year: 2021
Maybe they are just fine. Doing as well as a bakery that is only open on weekends.
Their problem seems to be that they keep paying people to come In everyday when they only sell doughnuts on Saturday.
Yes, WC4 is the obvious thing they should be making right now.
I’d like to see a single-player character-driven open-world third-person warcraft game in the lines of Zelda BOTW. They should have been working on that for the past 5 years.
This is part of the issue with being a part of a public company. You may be right that WC4 could be profitable, but the real question is if it’d be profitable enough. The Activision/Blizzard board could reasonably determine that the same 100 devs could make a game that’d be twice as profitable as WC4.
That’s insane. Ultimate Team is just selling trading cards of players right? Total pay to win, and they don’t even need to make the content. Just license the player’s likeness and stats.
I think this is the root of the problem!
I agree, this is a huge missed opportunity for them. You could have a game that tells a story from both the side of the Alliance and the Horde or split it into two games. It’d also let them make an insanely beautiful version of Azeroth, which could then pull people into WoW.
A BOTW-like set in Azeroth would definitely put me in full Gandalf “DO NOT TEMPT ME!” mode.
It could be insanely huge, but the longer-term monetization possibilities are limited in a single-player game, and making a Blizzard-quality current-gen open-world game these days would cost what, like $400M? Conservatively! So my guess is Activision wouldn’t be happy with it.
That would be amazing, and it really would put to bed the idea that they’re driven by the suits. No suit would agree to a single player adventure with no potential for ongoing revenue.