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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Diablo 2 came out over 21 years ago; if it were a person, it would be old enough to go to the bar in the US and get wasted.

I don't think it needs mentioning. It is impossibly hard to keep the same culture at a game company two decades later, especially when the company grows so much. It's not like Valve is the same Valve that released Half-Life, or Bungie is the same Bungie that released Oni. None of these companies today could possibly have a similar culture to what their company culture was when those games came out.

Changing company culture, it turns out, is easy. Stupidly easy. I say it's "stupidly" easy because all you need to do is hire new people, and most companies already do that. The hard thing is changing company culture in the right direction.

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> I say it's "stupidly" easy because all you need to do is hire new people

Don't forget turnover rates, too! The games industry especially has turnover rates that would be astounding in some other industries. Crunch culture and youth culture (both direct co-factors in the issues Activision are being accused of) leads to a games industry that is perpetually stuck "young". The median age of a developer in games has pretty much always been close to 25. (We're getting very close to the point where the median age of developer at a videogame company is younger than Diablo 2.)

It's easy to believe that videogame companies especially have short memories and cultures that lack maturity when they are perpetually stuck in an elongated sort of adolescence by mostly only retaining developers that can put up with crunch and lack of work/life balance in the name of "passion" (who by nature of those challenges are almost always going to be younger and more naive).

Even if you kept the culture perfectly intact, gaming itself has changed. Players expectations have changed dramatically. You'd need the same culture perfectly adapted to the changing gaming landscape which never happens.

Games have changed vastly more than gamers. Nobody actually wants micro transactions or paid DLC.

My 8 year old nephew spends vastly more time on very old and Indy games not because their “popular” but simply because their more fun.

Which is why there's the biannual Diablo 2 clone that flops, and the "horrible", "failed", Diablo III is on its 24th season and sold like gangbusters on consoles.

I don't really think that the culture at the company to be equal to the culture of gaming overall to be honest.

In fact Blizzard and especially Activision aren't really well loved company by gamers. Didn't EA got the title of worst company multiple times? They probably have a decent competitor now.

Just here to say that I loved Oni very much when I was a kid. So ahead of its time. It lives on as the Office of Naval Intelligence in Halo.

Blizzard North more or less dissolved 18, and officially defuncted 16 years ago.

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