Is Activision Blizzard Losing Its Magic? | Hacker News Reader

Is Activision Blizzard Losing Its Magic?

bloomberg.com

16 pointstosh24 comments

Open articleView on HN

Activision Blizzard never had fucking magic.

Blizzard had magic. But Blizzard died a long time ago (IMO - it didn't survive the WC3 to WOW transition).

Activision just pulls the string to make the dead body move every now and then.

> Blizzard died a long time ago (IMO - it didn't survive the WC3 to WOW transition).

that's where I'd place it, too

I remember playing great Blizzard games. Activision Blizzard games less so. I guess SC2 and Overwatch were pretty ok.

Activision Blizzard never had any magic in my mind.

Even before the merge, I can't think of any Activision game that I genuinely loved and immersed myself in. Hard to do that with shallow movie tie-in games and I never cared for Call of Duty.

I loved Blizzard's games though.

As they're mostly a publisher, you probably don't associate them with any, but they did publish well-received things like old Mechwarrior games, Tony Hawk series and even Quake 2 and 3 for example.

I enjoyed the old PS2 Call of Duty games as a kid, and sometimes go back for the sake of nostalgia.

Overwatch is decent enough to play with friends once a week or two. Otherwise, Activision has been quite far from my taste of games.

1990s don't seem so bad. Quake II, Zork, MechWarrior, Battlezone, Heavy Gear...

Yeah im trying to think of ANYTHING Activision Blizzard has put out sense merger that has captured the popular imagination. All their big ips were pre merger. Overwatch maybe?

Lest we forget, Call of Duty still tops charts in sales every time due to the popularity among middle and high school students.

Even though older people may not enjoy or desire to play the 'innovative' games, the rehash games are still enjoyed by the masses.

Destiny?

Does Destiny count? Wasn't Activision just the publisher, but Bungie did the ideation and development?

Not only that, but I think it went out before Activation merged with Blizzard, same deal with CoD. I was referring to post merger IPs and products

SC2 was amazing. I think the expansions killed it for multiplayer. They should have made them single player only, maybe with some exclusive cosmetic items for multiplayer.

The game itself was decent.

The framework around it was a tremendous step backwards in every way.

I'd take the version of BattleNet from WC3 in a heartbeat over the current iteration - the current version is a soulless money grab.

It has less hackers, I'd give it that. But yeah, in every other conceivable way the old BNET was miles ahead.

Warzone was really good for a minute. But they failed to address the hackers and the pay2win got really obvious after a while.

Not sure what else can be said about AB at this point. Activision has successfully leeched what made Blizzard one of the most revered gaming companies, and what remains is a distressing husk of a company that most likely will not recover. I saw a rumor about Activision potentially rebranding Blizzard and shifting their priorities. That's probably the best possible fate for them.

And everybody saw it coming from day one.

Blizzard was but another special spark that was extinguished by the dark forces of Financialization[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

WW2, the future, today, the 80s, WW2, Vietnam, the future, today, … it just gets stale after a while.

Battlefield had a slightly fresh take on WW1, and addition of new gamemodes, which made it more entertaining for longer. But seeing the cycle of Battlefield following Call of Duty, makes me worry about the future of the lifecycle for said games.

Thats not activation blizzard, thats activision.

But, I read that New World lost tonnes of users after just a month, 500k, to be exact. Wonder where this will end.

All the original Blizzard employees left, AB is a heartless shell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com