"Gamers" might believe this but do the stakeholders actually believe that? The company is still printing money. [1]
[1] https://gamerant.com/diablo-immortal-made-300-million-dollar....
So many fun franchises are basically dead because they aren't nearly as profitable as a freemium game and selling digital garbage. Single player FPS is basically dead. RTSes are also effectively dead. The only place you'll find such things is from indy devs and they don't have anywhere near the budget to make something as good as what we used to get :(.
The problem occurs when the game has been out long enough that all the active players are leagues ahead of a new player; either they wait forever for a match or get steamrolled.
The main problem is that it's a 12 year-old game, that's been largely abandoned by the developer. The other main problem is that unlike a skill-based MOBA, you can't blame anyone else for your losses. The third main problem is that the game is incredibly stressful, demands 100% of your attention, and the smallest mistake can lose the game for you.
my brother in Christ, you got it backwards - being abandoned is the biggest blessing an old Blizzard game can receive.
They'd probably add commander level and equipable commander items which grant buffs to your units. You'd have a chance of getting one item each time you win a pvp fight and you can increase the quality/rarity of the drop by using cash shop items. Oh, and the rare items might require a higher commander level... Obviously you'd also be able to buy temporary buffs to your XP gain, so you can equip them sooner.
They could maybe even focus more on group pvp (i.e. 4vs4) so the whales can carry scrubs to wins. That would give them a chance of loot even if they're just there to be farmed and will make them properly fawn over the mighty whales that let them gain their pointless upgrades.
Perfect whale farm.
Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.
This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.
It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.
The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.
(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)
I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"
Plenty of people have fun turtling (:
This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.
I think a larger issue is that there's like 3-5 games to get ranked and then a bit more to get really ranked properly. And by SC2 design the early game is resource constrained so decisions are important and even with the right decisions execution is hard.
Watch a few games on Youtube.
It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches
My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.
It was pretty much the same as SC2, they just never told you in the UI. e.g. Dragoons do half damage to mutalisks. Yamato cannons don’t kill zealots.
Other competitive games like CS/Valorant gives you downtime in between rounds and when you die. Similarly with MOBAs, travel time in between your base and lane, when you die. Even fighting games, when you get a hit in, it's back to muscle memory for your bread and butter combo, and rounds are much shorter.
They're less niche and more fun to watch as e-sports for the casual player.
RTS streams are downright boring if you're not actively competing at ranked matches.
MOBAs seem super confusing if you dont play. Its 30 minutes of nothing happening, and then like 15 seconds of people getting really excited and then the game is over.
I disagree. A lot of Korean viewers never even touched the ranked online multiplayer when BW was mainstream esports. Heck even my dad watched it.
I realized I wrote a mistake: I did play a handful of MP matches of World in Conflict after finishing the (very enjoyable) single-player campaign. It was fun, but not as much as the single player portion; and I never invested enough time for it to be fun.
I could see something like SC2 being fun with 2-3 people playing 1 player's role at a time. 1 person on the econ, 2 people on the army. Or much better AI that you can override selectively, so if you want to handle the fighting you can, or if you want to handke the econ you can.
The fun of RTSes is the learning curve, but throw in a bunch of "you can buy a special unit for $10" and all the sudden the game balancing is destroyed. That leaves you with inconsequential things like avatar skins to sell and very few people would buy those.
Couple that with the fact that new players aren't likely to spend hours online playing the game (because they get destroyed) and you've got a major problem.
For me, the fun of RTSes was in single player games and lan parties.
I remember the transition. I kinda hated it, to be honest. Not because of the drops (they were introducing hats and loot well before this) but because the influx of players were...low quality
Big difference between the cosmetics for an FPS and RTS. There aren't a lot of cosmetic options you could come up in an RTS.
Elden Ring and the Souls games are difficult and even to a point intentionally alienating but have had massive success including in the mainstream.
I don't know what it is but I feel there's something else going on with the rapid decline of RTS besides the difficulty.
This also describes chess, yet that has a significant online presence.
New Wolfenstein and Doom games, yearly call of duty, halo infinite, Titanfall 2, half life alyx, super hot, metro exodus, black mesa, destiny 2, deep rock galactic, the list goes on.
I almost question whether having this deal blocked may ultimately be the best for Microsoft...the game industry seems to be collapsing in on itself. The one big thing I'd argue with myself on there would be a lot of the IP and its ability to be applied to non-gaming "metaverse" applications. Games aren't getting any better, and often, aren't as good as what we had 10 years ago, but I can't argue that the graphics are improving significantly, even if it doesn't matter to me in the slightest from a gaming standpoint.
Though, I probably underestimate the never ending stream of children who are always making fun of each other for not having the latest shiniest skin or emote in whatever "Free" game they happen to be playing these days.
There could always be a sc3 or aoe18 (or whatever). There are infinite areas to explore.
People are largely still completely satisfied with what they have now.
That being said AoE2 is an awesome game :)
Different strokes for different folks.
* Disco Elysium
* Tyranny
* Shadowrun, all of them
* Pathfinder: Kingmaker
All within the last decade, and at least for Disco Elysium and Tyranny, every bit as good as Planescape Torment.
Western RPGs though.. I don't have high hopes for ES6.
Other games with those qualifications: Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
The obsidian games typically have plenty of utility spells, but not always.
Oblivion has some of that stuff too but it's definitely simplified.
Skyrim has no spell crafting at all, which means combat becomes "mash mouse button" or "sneaky arrow". Lycanthropy is pretty fun though, but also wears out. Mods definitely saved the game since they add all the crazy shit that is missing.
The trend is quite obvious though. Don't get me wrong, I'll still definitely play the shit out of ES6, I just don't feel it will reach the glory of Morrowind.
> Ultima underworld Arx fatalis Two worlds series Deus ex series
Sadly I've already played all of these. Never did finish Arx Fatalis though, might go back to it..
Especially with graphics million times faster than the devs could have imagined.
That has got to be a joke.
Tyranny has MMO-style ability cooldowns that make combat a boring spam-what-is-availale fest, pretty much no enemy or encounter variety, companions which barely any development compared to those in PS:T, as well as a story that is obviously cut short of what it should have been.
I also don't play CRPGs for the combat mostly. That's why the old Infinity Engine games were a lot of fun, it was about cheesing through the game in funny ways while enjoying an amazing story.
And I'm going to have to disagree about "not as good as we used to get". Is there any question that Zero-K/Spring (or BAR/Spring) aren't way better than Total Annihilation (ok, maybe not for the orchestral score), despite being entirely community-made ?
hm isn't there a ton of different single player FPS out that are fairly creative? Like Deathloop recently, MW2 single player campaign was pretty good.
It's the innovation in multiplayer FPS that's gone pretty much short of biannual efforts from AAA (Battlefield, CoD) and 1-2 niche attempts from indies (Hell Let Loose was good, Cycle Frontier) Otherwise it's just closing the gap with freemium and premium
HL3 just needed to merge the two storylines/timelines and give players both.
Imagine multiplayer with that!
Luckily, most of the time you just to have wait about a year to get them on PC, often for a cheaper price too.
Also single player FPS games still exist, just not standalone as they used to.
You can see this well in comparing Crysis 1 with 2 & 3.
But its certainly better than not having story games at all. Sony's story games are really really good, and they finally realized that releasing on PC is a win-win for everyone, more money for Sony, more games for PC, because most of the time no one wants to switch from PC to PlayStation
This is not just about gamepad console => m&k PC, by the way.
I also don't think RTS is dead but the category has been stale for some time. I grew up playing Age of Empires 2, and the game still has a healthy player base with regular new content being added. However compared to the turn of the century the pace of innovation has definitely slowed down.
It's nothing like "pure" RTS like starcraft where everything is actually real time. Their 4X games have: speed control, pause, turns (days and months, depending on a game and action). If you remove ability make turns simulatinusly and make a single turn into a day - not much will change in gameplay other than it will take longer.
> 4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) is a subgenre of strategy-based computer and board games, and include both turn-based and real-time strategy titles.
I am not interested in 4X games.
I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept. You are not the only opinion in this world, and the media and critics are incentivized to create drama.
Doom Eternal came out in 2020, and LoL is one of the most popular games of all time. SC2 just released a huge patch that revamped a lot of balance issues that had cropped up over the past decade...
Gaming has never been more diverse and well funded. It's wild to me that you see the huge selection you've got available to you and could possibly believe we're in anything but the best gaming era of all time right now.
Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?
I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).
Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.
> You are not the only opinion in this world
I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.
Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.
But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.
And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.
But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"
> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.
If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.
What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago [1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201311/us...
Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.
That said, I reject a definition of fun that involves how profitable something is because of the slot machine example.
If fun is anything, it's not getting a diaper rash while going broke.
i.e. if it were just electrical impulses going back and forth?
I feel like tossing in a patch from SC2 as an indicator that it's actively being supported is a little misleading. SC2 had the opportunity to compete with LoL and Dota2 for viewership but Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes with the first expansion that alienated players and sent them to LoL, Dota2, or CSGO.
Their game design philosophy and slow patch rhythm sabotaged the momentum that the pro scene had been building (warp gate tech, infinite value units like Brood Lords and Swarm Hosts, frontloading all Terran power into Stim units, etc). They also catered the ladder experience solely for competitive players, they didn't introduce many (if any) casual-friendly modes until far too late.
Wings of Liberty was a great time, though.
But also, just not being able to play cooperatively with friends was the final death knell. SC was designed for an era where you played alone and then you played against others who played alone because there weren’t a lot of anyone playing SC or anything really.
LoL unlocked an entire demographic of kids who wanted to play with friends. A great explosion in online VC tech helped foster this and the rest is history. Gaming is now a social activity and all the top sellers right now effectively leverage this.
The gaming industry is experiencing the same hyper-commercialization that the movie industry has experienced.
You can argue that the super hero movies of today and the remakes are "better" than older movies on the best objective metric we have (how much revenue they generate), and that we're in "the best era of film of all time" right now, but... I don't know who truly believes that, subjectively. :p It feels wild to believe that. I certainly don't, and I don't for gaming either.
Funny story: I got Doom Eternal about a year after it came out. I needed to make an account, even though I only play singleplayer. When first opening it, I got bombarded by pop-ups from a dozen DLC and update cycles, like a little history of its updates thus far. I cringed at the social media-like network integration stuff in the main menu. I play for a few days. On like the fourth day, when opening the game, this pop-up appears in-game, but it's empty. It's like some network notice, but it's broken. The pop-up is blank. There's no way to get past it. Nothing helps. The game essentially bricked itself via its own botnet bloatware (a thing an older game would never do). Apparently, it happens to console and PC users alike, and there was no solution around it. It's as if it accidentally ripped you, the user, off, in that a digital product just stopped working. (Let's not even mention the plight of future gamers trying to simulate the always-online DRM so they can play it in an emulator. Hey--at least Bethesda removed the kernel-level anticheat following backlash, allowing the game to run on Linux again!) Luckily, even though I was past the usual playtime limit, Steam gave me a full refund. :D
Also, Diablo Immortal is probably more profitable than all the previous Diablo games put together, and I'll leave it to you to decide if that's a case where profitability or even popularity maps with whatever we truly mean by "quality".
I agree, a lot of parallels can be drawn between modern AAA games and superhero movies. the quest to reach the largest market has resulted in products without much in the way of nuance or new ideas. this is kinda what you have to do if you're going to spend $250mm on a game or movie. even achieving wide appeal within a single large country isn't enough to reliably make that back; you have to make something appealing (or at least inoffensive) to most of the world.
at the same time, I think you are missing just how much the gaming market has expanded since 10-20 years ago. while very successful for their time, games like halflife are very niche by today's standards. there's no like-for-like comparison between cod:mw2 and a game from the early/mid 2000s.
if you expect AAA games in 2023 to scratch the same itch as they did back then, you will surely be disappointed. they aren't designed for the same audience. but by and large, more money is available to fund development for all sorts of games today. concepts that would have been a janky mod for some other games ~20 years ago are full-fledged titles of their own now. ymmv of course, but I find that when I lose the expectation for modern AAA-level graphics, there are tons of great new games available in recent years.
GOG still exists to avoid most single player DRM issues (some games have limited single player content that requires an internet connection) and with a better refund policy, although unfortunately they don't have good Linux support. I have an entirely offline game system and rarely have any kind of issue due to that (Zachtronics games are some of the worst since you can't see how well you did on a level without an internet connection, unless they changed that since I last tried one a few years ago). GOG has about 4500 games at this point (catalog shows a few hundred more with "hide DLC and extras" but some are miscategorized DLC), not nearly as many as Steam but still quite a few (unfortunately, some developers don't keep the GOG version up to date).
To put things into perspective - in its heyday - WoW was half as profitable as Tesla is now...
It's hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice.
They made WoW. It was insanely profitable. Their valuation soared. They sold. They declined.
It's hard to say if its reversion to the mean or the Activision acquisition - but it's hard to argue Blizzard hasn't declined by every metric.
The paid stuff was a monetization tactic after the decline.
Considering the cost to create and amount of reputation damage it caused, YES. Diablo immortal was a massive failure.
That’s the calculation you need to look at, not earnings as if expenses prior to release was 0$.
According to the article they generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as the previous record breaking game did in an entire year. I wish I had that kind of reputation damage.
That is a good point, the amount of raid shadow legends adverts on the internet have become a meme at this point. I haven't seen any ads for Immortals here in the US and the financial report doesn't break down marketing spend by property.
According to the article I linked Immortal generated roughly the same amount of revenue in 4 months as Raid Shadow Legends (the previous record holder) did in their best year. That is a domination of that gaming niche.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
Also fyi, WoW was originally released in 2004, not 1994.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-does-World-of-Warcraf...
Anecdotally, I played the game briefly at launch and it died in terms of player numbers very very quickly.
I wonder if that's why the "Real Money Auction House" from Diablo 3 existed.
Sometimes it's not that they lost the touch or that they sold themselves. It's just that we're not teenagers anymore, in an old internet cafe playing on LAN with our friends. Even if a similar game is coming back, the entire moment with all its context is not.
Still, I'm happy to see they're still alive and faithful to their roots.
Even revenue for the developer, or in enjoyment for the user? Because Torchlight (ex-Diablo-II ICs) was a humdinger of a D-II sequel in terms of gameplay, but sales? Not so much.
This makes me think that the biggest value that the studio brings to the table for revenue is brand recognition.
IOW, it doesn't matter how good the game is, brand recognition gets you over the line sometimes.
Obsidian has been arguably less so, but grounded and the outer worlds have both been unique feeling and creative titles in my eyes.
Troika? Obsidian?
That game exists, and it's called Path of Exile. It is also the poster child for why most of D2 aged really, really, really poorly.
Another take on that same concept is called Last Epoch.
Double the price for minimal fixes? They didn't even bother including fixes for known issues which known workarounds available on the vault like e.g. HotU companions sometimes not using most of their abilites because the AI selects the mount ability as the best available one.
Really, these old games should just be released to the community to maintain them like iD used to do. And if someone like Beamdog wants to profit off such maintenance then they better be able to do so without taking the original down from sale because they know they can't actually compete with vanilla + community patches.
That said, even if it's activision, and even if you can can somehow separate them, the talent that made blizzard blizzard (whatever era of it you enjoyed) is likely long gone.
What for? Blizzard's a shell of its former glory and hadn't done much of note recently (even if it's still making money). The way things are, within Activision, Microsoft or on its own, I don't really see Blizzard making anything on the level of their best games in the future.
Overwatch was the first Blizzard game that I liked less and less the more they patched it.
I tried out Overwatch 2, despite all the negative press it is fun and sweaty. I had plenty of fun despite not playing as Kiriko and I'm sure I could easily derive 10s if not 100s of hours before feeling a need to unlock Kiriko.
If a game is taking so much of your time and you have a job, why isn't it ok to just pay a bit to unlock a hero?
I'd take these kinds of monetisation over destiny 2 which didn't even have p2w or clash royale (before season pass)
It's just odd to think that a certain part of the meta is paywalled. It really messes with the sense of competitive integrity.
Normally I'd be fine with a battlepass, but I refuse to pay activision any money out of principle.
Overwatch is all about swapping heroes during the game
Blizzard even incentivised swapping heroes more in Overwatch 2 (30% ult charge retained, vs. 0 in Overwatch 1)
Another way to put it is that for me it worked while Samwise contributed but was in check.
Edit: Now I'm not blaming them, from a business perspective they had to follow the shifting zeitgeist and it obviously worked, old school D&D/Warhammer/Heavy Metal/... were totally uncool at the time especially for teenage millennials.
Haven't been following recently. What have made the things to look brighter? It's really hard to see these things as a non-player these days because of all the negativity surrounding the company. Can't say I don't see why it is that way, though.
It's oligopolistic, you have a virtually integrated behemoth across multiple sectors that is too big to fail, which is not good for competition and thus for consumers.
> If anything, this just makes Microsoft into more of a conglomerate: something we should be encouraging and is good for a society!
Is this sarcasm I'm missing? There's nothing wrong with conglomerates, but enormous vertically integrated with exclusivity ones aren't good for society.
Doesn’t sound too-big-to-fail to me. Big on it’s own isn’t necessarily bad.
The fact that they repolished D2 into a game absolutely worth playing today on modern hardware, gorgeously really shows how good he was. And tbf, how good the graphics team is. D2R is a wonderful game, and the fact that the same old (but great) engine is actually still running is kinda incredible.
I wish OW2 was a gem like that. A friend and I have over 1k hours each into OW1.
Sincerely hope the deal falls through and the company goes bankrupt.
I actually only (re-)learned of the game recently (I recall its original announcement), but not enough to know anything more about it and I have been meaning to go back to it and check it out. Do you have a short version of what lends you that opinion?