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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like Satya is going to be making a replacement soon.

Or not, because DEI was never actually more important than money.

Will be interesting to see

Blizzard as a company sucks though. As in, even if you’re a brutal capitalist and don’t care at all about people stealing and drinking their coworkers breast milk, they just keep failing spectacularly at actually shipping games and getting people to play them. If you’re Microsoft, I’m not sure why you’d keep most of their exec team _even if you don’t care about the culture_

Diablo IV is shaping up to be very successful, though.

It'll probably be successful but not still-played-in-25-years successful.

Well all of their game are being played 15+ years later on, there is no reason why it won't be the case with d4.

Online-only requirement. Such a shame and wasted long-term potential for D2R, D3 and likely especially D4. Compare with Diablo 2 legacy where mods like Median XL are still going strong !

(I guess that they are stuck in a bad place with their games being so popular that they attract a lot of unwelcome attention, but IMHO still not worth it for a game that is much more cooperative than competitive.)

All Blizzard game have online features, they never shutdown an online game, never, Diablo 1 is still running since 1996.

I don't see issues with online only tbh.

No, the Lost Vikings for instance don't.

And last I checked they seem to have given up on supporting Diablo 1, and let GoG deal with it instead ? (Its online MP has security flaws.)

And Blizzard cannot run a game if Blizzard doesn't exist.

But even before that happens, you can already see the wasted potential : D3 (and D4) has no modding whatsoever, compare with D2R (though mods there are still heavily restricted and they have also removed normal MP from it) and especially D2LoD legacy !

https://median-xl.com/

lost vikings is not a blizzard game, and they still run diablo 1 matchmaking it's not gog.

Broodwar, SC:R, and D2R seems to be telling a different story. Hell, WoW is close to 20 years old at this point.

So their old games. What of OW(2), D3/D4, whatever mobile abomination they made for Diablo, Hearthstone or HoTS will be played for that long? Any? I would wager D2 is played more than D3 by a mile. OW1 was already killed. OW2 is dying. I'm not even sure the OW franchise will be around in four years, letalone 15.

Huh? This thread is about their old games that are still being played.

Yes, and someone pointed out that their new games aren’t of the same caliber as their old games, as in, their new games won’t be played in 15 years. My comment is that you didn’t list any new game as having the same staying power.

Well, we'll find out any day now where D4 sits, right? I know where I'd put my money if I were a betting man.

Since it is a partially offline game, there doesn’t seem to be any way to calculate the Diablo 2 population. But I’d be shocked if there were more D2 players than D3.

It took them 11 years and 2-3 tries at making the game before they could ship it, though.

I wonder why.

I don't really care about the scandals, but man, Blizzard games have been shit for a long, long time. Gone are the days of Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3.

I mean, their track record is fine.

Starcraft 2: The age of Blizzard RTS is over now, but it was the best RTS ever made and the devs left a final patch with a massively expanded community tooling.

Overwatch: Was absurdly successful and then decided to shoot themselves in the foot canning development, but the weakness there was hardly the game itself.

Hearthstone: I do not respect the design choices the game makes, but I admit it's practically defined Digital Card Games as a genre ever since it's come out.

World of Warcraft: Questionable storytelling aside, I've only heard good things about this from my MMO playing friends. I have never had the time to play an MMO myself, but I'll defer to them on this.

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