46
Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?
« on: February 21, 2020, 09:46:45 pm »
The only good thing about the reforged (character models), was done by a Malaysian company Lemon Sky Studios, which apparently did cinematics for previous Blizzard games:
https://www.lemonskystudios.com/
Should have outsourced the whole remaster I guess.
I think the main mismanagement is that Activision tried to enforce single corporate culture onto all its sub-parts and just throwing people between departments at random, which naturally led to a disaster, with key professionals, like Metzen, being fired or leaving on their own. That problem seems to be here since the Mythical Man Month book, about the disaster at IBM, when they tried to speedup project development by throwing at it irrelevant people from different departments or just hired newbies, without any training and team building. It sometimes works with football teams, where they play a game with well defined rules, but fails bad for software and art projects.
The right solution would have been diversifying like Google, which created Alphabet super company to avoid mixing one brand with another, and to limit PR disaster to just one brand, in case some "google car" crashes into a wall. And to also have separate well trained teams on each project. Blizzard was known for PC strategies and RPGs with very good multiplayer, and their whole fan following was mostly PC gamers, so using the same brand to diversify into smartphone and console market was just retarded since the beginning. But then they used that brand to address their original fan base with irrelevant smartphone games. Even to non-business people it would have been obvious what could have happened. That means modern Blizzard management is either detached from reality, having some mass psychosis, or that is some sabotage from competitors, who bribed management into destroying the company (it is rumored that say Amiga was destroyed by Microsoft by bribing one manger).
https://www.lemonskystudios.com/
Should have outsourced the whole remaster I guess.
I think the main mismanagement is that Activision tried to enforce single corporate culture onto all its sub-parts and just throwing people between departments at random, which naturally led to a disaster, with key professionals, like Metzen, being fired or leaving on their own. That problem seems to be here since the Mythical Man Month book, about the disaster at IBM, when they tried to speedup project development by throwing at it irrelevant people from different departments or just hired newbies, without any training and team building. It sometimes works with football teams, where they play a game with well defined rules, but fails bad for software and art projects.
The right solution would have been diversifying like Google, which created Alphabet super company to avoid mixing one brand with another, and to limit PR disaster to just one brand, in case some "google car" crashes into a wall. And to also have separate well trained teams on each project. Blizzard was known for PC strategies and RPGs with very good multiplayer, and their whole fan following was mostly PC gamers, so using the same brand to diversify into smartphone and console market was just retarded since the beginning. But then they used that brand to address their original fan base with irrelevant smartphone games. Even to non-business people it would have been obvious what could have happened. That means modern Blizzard management is either detached from reality, having some mass psychosis, or that is some sabotage from competitors, who bribed management into destroying the company (it is rumored that say Amiga was destroyed by Microsoft by bribing one manger).