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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard is done for. Everyone important left. There's no one to work on StarCraft 3 / WarCraft 4 and their reputation is deservably not what what it used to be only a few years ago. Like almost until the "you all have phones, right" moment.

Activision ruined the company. Sure, the market changed but Blizzard was doing much better under Vivendi.

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What would, "Blizzard is done" look like? Are you suggesting that the IP (Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft) would be shut down, all employees laid off or incorporated into Activisions other departments?

I could not imagine any business abandoning billions of dollars of IP like that.

Warcraft alone I can't imagine shutting down. There is a certain community of people that more or less lives in that parallel universe and it would be pretty disruptive to abandon it. It's like buying access to a virtual bar for $15/mo where you reliably get together with your warcraft nerd birds of a feather.

They're pulling in ludicrous amounts of money, and it's pretty clear from the quality of content over the last 8 years or so that they're not investing more than a tiny fraction of it back into the game

They'll just continue to invest less and less in actual playable desktop games and more and more in toxic mobile dogshit as time goes on

They have the IP but they are struggling to hire talent to do something useful with it. So there's a chance that they will milk their IP with smartphone gambling until it dries out.

Some people believe that has already happened, which is why we have the Diablo mobile partnership and no new StarCraft 3.

We're almost guaranteed to see a shift to mobile games. HotS on mobile, Warcraft4 as a freemium mobile "strategy game" - ditto with SC3. They may occasionally sink cash into large PC primary titles but I think mobile is going to be the way they milk that cow from here on out.

But this is the sensible thing to do, talent leaving or not. A universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because of business reasons is indistinguishable from a universe where Blizzard shifts to mobile because "everyone left", so your hypothesis isn't falsifiable.

But I don't think the Blizzard of 2005 would make that shift just because there's a sensible business case for it. It'd be like Paradox shifting to mobile.

the parent company gave the Diablo 2 remake to another studio inside Activision (i.e. not the Blizzard studio)

so... more of that: fewer and fewer Blizzard IPs developed by "Blizzard"

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