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Comment by Majromax | Hacker News Reader

I hate to just drop a book recommendation, but Jason Schreier's Play Nice covers the history of Blizzard in comprehensive detail.

The overall situation was multifacted, but my takeaway is that Blizzard's recent failures come down to two main themes:

* World of Warcraft's success gave the company unrealistic expectations of what a successful "normal" game looked like, and

* "When it's ready" covers up the sins of a company that never quite figured out project management.

My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.

Activision's influence didn't help, and it imposed a tighter focus on prompt monetary return after Titan's cancellation. That clashed with the long development cycles of even the successful projects.

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So interestingly you see this sort of thing play out in online media.

- Youtuber X has a runaway successful video/s.

- Seeing the cashflow from that video, they think "Hey, I could probably duplicate this!"

- When that duplication fails, they decide "You know what, maybe I just need to make a lot of videos"

- When that doesn't bring in the expected income and/or leads to burnout they think "You know what, I think I need some outside help to make me see my blindspots".

And, of course, invariably when that outside help comes in, so does the slop. The outside help does not care about quality, they care about getting money in through the door. That often involves hack and slashing all efforts at quality, shilling out endlessly, and some real questionable decisions when it comes to employment.

Now, of course, the creator is still responsible for what their company becomes. But, money is money and a creator/owner is just more likely to like easymode income (for themselves) vs duplicating the efforts of a prior period.

But for some reason the angry video game nerd keeps making videos.

- Money from sponsored segments.

- Other people writing scripts, recording gameplay and other stuff.

It's a different series today.

I used to really like James and Mike Mondays. Then Mike posted a dick pic on the subreddit and for whatever reason that wasn’t a fireable offense. Kind of killed the vibes for me. That was even before everything started really changing. Now it’s like the avgn is reanimated from the grave for each episode. I haven’t really watched in years.

As someone who’s seen the inside of a game company, this thesis reads true. Success really warps expectations, and warped expectations create perverse incentives that are different than make this particular game good.

There was also imo a big cultural hubris among the Blizzard developers that if it wasn't done their way (i.e. they couldn't just take an existing IP like Dota and slap Blizzard logo on it, no no, had to start from scratch).

My synthesis is that the combination meant that Blizzard projects needed to promise the moon to be greenlit, but then they immediately blew the initial time and money-budgets with the extensive scope.

Going over budget and going over scope can only happen depending on who is measuring. I can spend 6 months developing a part of a game and not consider it a waste of time or out of scope. I’m of the mind that this was the natural state of Blizzard prior to Activision.

I mean, they are fundamentally making things that roughly sound like this - we are all going to sit around on a server and pretend to have a giant adventure

Ridiculous, the very concept is out of scope lol. You simply can’t have the wrong minded people involved in this process, certainly not the wrong project managers. You can’t even have the wrong parent company for a pursuit like this.

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