Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, Activision Blizzard was always chasing revenue at the expense of everything else. They got away with riding the coattails of Blizzard for a while, but eventually everyone figured out what was going on.

My "favorite" part was watching them kill Overwatch with Overwatch League. Overwatch was popular because people played it casually. Activision thought it would be great to make it a professional sport. Eventually every balance change was aimed at preventing some pro team from complaining and they made the game completely unfun for casual players. So they all stopped playing. Meanwhile, Overwatch League was massively unprofitable and the privately-owned teams all pulled out after losing everything. Probably the worst business decision in gaming history, or maybe even in Fortune 500 history.

At this point, I'm just waiting for someone else to make games with the quality and "spark" of old Blizzard. It will happen. Probably not at Microsoft, though.

If the bad decisions there were driven from the top, then the acquisition could cause a large change in behavior. No guarantees, of course.

Microsoft hasn't made any remarkable games in a long time, either. They just play it safe and release filler msterial, like most of Gamepass.

Blizzard has been stuck in a failure state for years now, so there's little downside for them to shaking things up. At worst, Microsoft sells its parts off to vulture companies to turn things into gatcha games.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of hope for Microsoft acquired companies tbh. Just look at what happened to Rare after they were acquired. All the games in their pipeline were published on Xbox, but then the Studio's production nose dived. Rare as an independent studio was producing banger after banger for 20 years. Under ~15 years of Microsoft they have only produced Viva Pinata, B&K:N&B, then nothing for a decade but some Kinect sports trash nobody wanted(sorry). then Sea of Thieves.

Like mcdonnell douglas made Boeing a great aircraft company..

Are you suggesting Blizzard is going to take over the C suite at Microsoft?

At the end of the day, the C suite at microsoft is just another group of humans, waiting to be hacked with lootboxes and stimuli, nothing makes you more capable & prone to apply parasitic technices then beeing in a company who develops such

That's what I (and the rest of the community) was hoping for, but given that they gutted things like the art teams today... I don't think they're planning on improving anything. If anything, they're making it worse.

Larian, FromSoftware, Gunfire, Grinding Gear... the smaller studios are putting out great games still, with much of that 90s magic. There's that new game Palworld too apparently making a stir (haven't tried it yet), from another small studio.

It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist. I mostly just ignore them and haven't felt like I've missed much. So many good indie titles coming out every day.

Palworld is basically Ark: Survival Evolved with Pokemon plus some elements from Breath of the Wild. That said, it's less buggy (and better performing) at launch than Ark is 9 years after release, and unlike Ark it isn't designed to require you to quit your job and have a full guild with set work schedules just to get some cool pets.

> and unlike Ark it isn't designed to require you to quit your job and have a full guild with set work schedules just to get some cool pets.

This is a very important point, Palworld is much more respectful of you the player's time. Gone is the tedious tending of Ark's taming and breeding, or Conan's arduous process of dragging a captured thrall back to your base to throw on the wheel of pain.

On top of that it has a number of handy QoL upgrades over most survival crafters I've played, like all chests in your base sharing their inventory with all crafting stations at the base. No more hunting through all the storage in your base schlepping things into your own inventory just to craft junk.

>It's the big ones that have jumped the shark and gone full-in capitalist.

Nonsense for most single player games which there are still many of.

Yeah? That's probably not a segment of the market I play much, then. What are some good ones from the AAAs that aren't just Call of Duty sequels or Ubi games?

Death Stranding, Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring.

Also I hope no one bothers to argue these are AAAA, AAAAAAAA. It really doesn't matter.

I guess technically Larian and GGG are "smaller" than even Activision-Blizzard before the buyout, but they aren't "small" either any more. (And GGG has been mostly owned by Tencent for a few years now.)

Path of Exile 1 is a glorious mess that anyone remotely interested in the genre should try (don't give up in the first act like most players, it gets way better), but currently at least with quite ridiculously bad performance, which is particularly aggravated by it being an online-only game of which you cannot play the old DX9 32-bit version any more, which had at least an order of magnitude smaller hardware requirements.

(And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !) like Palworld. (Or if you rely on a subscription-based platform like Unity, like [insert "indie" X].))

> but they aren't "small" either any more

OK, that's fair

> And you aren't indie if you release on Steam (especially only !)

Why not? It's the best marketplace for indie games... IMO it jump-started the PC indie gaming revolution! Before that, we only had shareware of limited reach, maybe distributed through PC Gamer floppies/CDs. And maybe Tucows. It was hard to find new indie games, much less buy them. Steam changed that whole paradigm.

> [PoE performance issues]

For what it's worth, it runs like shite on my M2 Max, but flawlessly on GeForce Now. Terrific performance with everything on max.

Because Steam has taken over some of the most important features of publishers : dealing with distributors and (built-in) advertising. (See also Epic Store which even gives funding !)

I would expect almost all of the studios that release on Steam to quickly go bankrupt if prevented to use it. So, ironically, Activision-Blizzard would be more indie than them, but I guess that "indie" also requires a limitation of size.

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GeForce Now, well duh, have you seen the kind of hardware it provides - that you're paying for ? (For reference, at release PoE1's minimum requirements were : 32-bit single core 1.4 GHz CPU, 2 Go RAM, 0.25 Go VRAM, 5 Go storage.)

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