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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

I was a huge Overwatch fan. Seeing them stop development on it and announcing Overwatch 2 as a whole new game was what made me leave the game. The promise of Overwatch 2 was a story mode, a skills system, more maps and more heroes. Now after years of development and selling the game with future promises to millions of fans, all they have is cancelling PvE and skills system, and one or two heroes and maps.

This is not a game dev problem. This is a company that has excellent game dev talent but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers problem.

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> Harvard MBA Types

Steve Jobs:

"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

That last line is what a true marketeer should want, and by extension, good marketeers are good product people because they understand what the market needs and wants.

nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric.

since there is no metric for good product, only sales or funnel size - product will be shaped in a way to increase sales/TAM/funnel size - from here you get messaging as vague as it gets (like nonsense from WeWork: "create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living" - to increase audience size/TAM to maximum)

> nowadays marketing evolved into SEO-hacker type performance marketer who looks at metrics and can optimize product&marketing mix to optimize metric.

Like "Engineering", "Marketing" encompasses a bunch of roles — growth marketing is generally handled by one person or team, messaging by another person or team, etc., all hopefully working in concert toward common goals under the CMO.

(Good) Product Marketing folks have extremely close relationships with the teams who are architecting and building the product, and care very much about the kind of craftsmanship Steve was talking about.

Product Marketing continues to exist, especially in the B2B space.

That said, the function has increasingly merged with Product Management because GTM is critical to Product Strategy.

In the B2C space, it's hard to drive product lead growth simply because the economics are much more difficult (eg. Selling a product vision to an enterprise who will sign a multi-year contract is easier than changing the mind of millions of consumers).

As such, it's much more cost efficient to concentrate on Growth Marketing because product input and stakeholdership is simply too diffused.

Story of our time. Contrary to popular belief, market capitalism isn’t inherently good. It needs competition for the magic to work, ideally a lot of it. Otherwise you get Comcast.

But ActiBlizz doesn't have any monopolies ? (Unlike, say, Steam, or Microsoft.) If their games are bad, quickly enough nobody will buy them any more (regardless of how much they invested in marketing).

IP goes such a long way, though. To overtake ActiBlizz on MMO's, for example, you would have to build something 10x better than WoW. And any Diablo game is going to sell a shit ton, even if it isn't good.

There's no need to overtake, for instance Eve Online can exist in parallel with WoW.

* Announce Overwatch 2

* Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates

* Announce this is necessary for PvE rewrite

* Release Overwatch 2 without PvE with f2p Battlepass monetization model - change to 5v5 instead of 6v6

* Shut down all Overwatch 1 servers with the release of OW2

* Announce PvE is cancelled

What even is the point of balance updates?

Keeps the game fresh. If the game changes it gives people a reason to want to play again to figure out new combinations. Otherwise the meta gets set and it never changes and that gets old quickly.

Not necessarily. For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017. If the base is solid the players can spend their time mastering what they are given and over time it grows on you. Imagine chess buffing up the pawn and nerfing the bishop.

Fair enough, though I'd suggest that rocket league has many fewer gauges to fiddle with than Overwatch. It's always symmetrical fields and 5 different car types, right?

There is steering sensitivity, car speed, ball speed, car mass, car power, boost strength, shooting power, jump height. All those variables have been finalized. What I'm saying is that balance patches are a band aid over the core problem.

What’s Rocket League like nowadays? I only played when it first came out. The impression I got though was that it was more like Counterstrike or something: mechanically simple with lots of depth, designed to be more like a sport than a game.

Overwatch is pretty casual. It is tuned for spectacle, and the abilities work out such that most reasonably non-bad players get a steady trickle of moments where they get to be the “star” for a scene.

It isn’t really a core problem, just a different type of game.

> For instance rocket league was released in 2015 and hasn't gotten any such update since 2017.

StarCraft 1 has had no balance updates in over 20 years, and the game is doing great.

StarCraft 2 has had no balance updates for like a year or two, and it was slowly killing the joy of the game for everyone who bothered to suffer through it.

StarCraft 2 was designed to be a game where the meta has to be shaken up occasionally; StarCraft 1 ended up more like chess: if you tweak a rule once in a century (or the Internet-equivalent of a century), it's big news.

Different games, different needs.

Nah, Starcraft 1 just ended up pushing balancing to the tournaments and map designers. If you tried playing it on the last Blizzard maps from the original run of Brood War, it's a questionably balanced game.

You are correct. Map design has a dramatic impact on the balance of BW - and as the game develops, and certain matchups become more or less one-sided, tournaments adjust their map pools.

True, but then BW's map pool rotation is also way slower / more conservative than SC2's. We're used to 7 new 1v1 maps every other season by now (personally I preferred the old system where the 2-3 oldest and/or most problematic maps would get phased out every season).

Meanwhile: Fighting Spirit

I think the comparison doesn't work because the composition of the teams doesn't change based on character choice. The interplay of the characters, and inherent strengths and weaknesses of each one create a dynamic metagame that games like MOBAs and Overwatch change to keep things fresh.

For games like Rocket League, CSGO, Overwatch, Apex, etc. The teams are even no matter what (skill aside). Meta still exists however, as anyone who has played multiple years of any of these games sees. Expected attacks, combos, and preferred approaches change over time as people discover weaknesses to the existing metagame and exploit them.

Not to say Rocket League has vastly changed in the last 8 years (I've played for 5 of them), but it's definitely different and a little updated.

Edit: Not to mention Rocket League rotates special game modes regularly for this purpose as well.

For balance updates the problem is that if balance swings too wildly out of whack, it effectively removes content from the game as it gets too underpowered. Especially in a team game like Overwatch, where peer pressure and sometimes outright harrassment will be deployed by your team mates if you pick an underpowered, or perceived to be underpowered, option

> Stop all updates for 3 years - including balance updates

Cries in StarCraft 2

Kotick didn't go to Harvard, doesn't have an MBA, and in fact dropped out of university.

It's not about MBA vs not. He's just shit.

True, but this is just nitpicking over something that's not really the point being made. The argument behind the OP still stands... the decisions being made by the company aren't ultimately being made by gamers or gamedevs (the workers who make the product / customers who use the product). So everything just turns to shit from a product standpoint...

Lots of 'real gamers' developers make horrible products all the time. For example, star citizen, the game in development for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget and no game to show for it.

Mighty No. 9 Biomutant

The list goes on

Gamers/game devs making the business decisions isn't a panacea. Look what happened to Ion Storm with Daikatana.

Never said it was a panacea. Just that without product focused people having say in decisions, the product will inevitably turn to shit. That is not the same as saying: having them make decisions guarantees you a good product.

I said “Harvard MBA types” not “Harvard MBAs” since you’re nitpicking

The "harvard mba types" brings a certain kind of distaste to my mouth. Using it to describe someone who is in fact nothing of the sort feels a little too sloppy.

Sloppy enough to be “Harvard MBA type”? /jk

I believe in business when it's defined as a large group of people coordinating incentives to achieve huge things that can't be achieved by small groups, I understand that aligning these incentives, and fund raising, and leadership are real and important jobs. I'm in awe that we can pull off the global shipping infrastructure, and that we can build power plants, and offshore oil wells, and these AAA games with so much art and technical innovation that the mind spins. But it is inarguable that there is a ubiquitous layer of parasitical filth lying and manipulating and strategizing how to capture value out of this system while systematically destroying the health of many of these organizations and pretending they are actually making them better.

The director came out and said it wasn't an MBA-types problem, but their attachment to their original vision of Overwatch.

Remember that Overwatch came from Project Titan, the megaproject designed to be the MMO successor to World of Warcraft. When their design goals failed, they shipped a modified PVP portion as Overwatch, and they intended to ship the MMO in pieces, with the story mode and skills system as massive components.

Overwatch 2 was them trying Titan again, and failing.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/overwatch/23952480/director-...

> This is a company that has excellent game dev talent

I'm inclined to believe that the incredible talent that used to be at Blizzard is long gone by now. Most of the original devs have their own studios or work at other companies by now.

This is what I was thinking too (more or less since 2004, I was effectively blaming it on Activision and Kotick !), but Diablo 4 seems to prove the opposite ! (I'll be only sure of it only once my honeymoon phase with it is over I guess.)

What I don't understand then is this.

If the Harvard MBA types are so detrimental to a gaming company, why don't we see any or many widely successful gaming companies who are run by dev types rather than MBA types?

MBA types make the company more money quarter over quarter, dev types make the company more money decade after decade.

Publicly traded companies tend to use greedy algorithms when making decisions.

There are plenty of dev (or really, artist driven) type companies, some may argue with my choices, but I would say Bethesda, Epic Games, id Software, and Double Fine. Bethesda and id are now owned by Microsoft, so there is a possibility that market forces will seep in over time.

The successful companies get bought out by the giants after the make something popular eg. Mojang and Minecraft.

I feel you could write a book about what that games dev process must have been, it's beyond parody what they did.

> but is run by Harvard MBA types who aren’t gamers

This is going to piss people off, but that's because people who sink huge portions of their spare time and energy into video games do not become CEOs. "Getting high on your own supply" doesn't set you up for professional exceptionalism.

I’ll be charitable and grant that you’re likely talking about a very specific type of CEO who ends up at a very specific type of game studio; usually one that stopped caring about the quality of the games that it produces and instead envisions the studio as a financial engineering play.

Elsewhere, there are plenty of game studios that have product-focused CEOs who are gamers and care deeply about creating memorable experiences, with the playtime to prove it.

thats a very complicated way to say "i dont like young people"

I like young people a lot!

Which is why I think we should massively restrict the amount of digital poison corporations are allowed to pump into their veins.

I'm pretty sure the Gullemot brothers still play their own games, heard that Yves played some rainbow 6 siege or something, and while I hate Ubisoft games quality and only ever bought one, he seems way more professional than whoever the Blizzard CEO is.

Yves covered for Maxime Béland's and Serge Hascoët's sexual abuses for decades.

Rayman Legends is amazing. Such a shame that their stores / launchers / DRM have been among the worst for years...

Gabe Newell

Sales and marketing CEOs pretend they work 24x7, but they spend much of their weekends on leisure activities such as golfing, travel, playing with their children, having expensive dinners with board members and politicians and so on. If you're committed it's really not hard to replace that leisure time with gaming.

They spend much of the working day on those leisure activities as well.

I've seen execs tell the rest of the company that a four day work week isn't reasonable while working four days themselves.

Did you see Elon Musk's Elden Ring build?

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