Dreamhaven Games

Update us in 5 years when they are close to having something.

Based on their little announcement it will be a TCG and/or RTS game, given who they boasted about having.

Hearing rumors that a bunch of current people are jumping ship after some stock bonuses finish vesting on Oct 1st.

I guess after the Bungie splinter Activision suits came down hard on the Bliz creatives and the COVID attitude has made things untenable.

Will they release a game before Pantheon comes out? It'll be quite the race.

I wish then the best. You can have merit or you can have diversity. Blizzard chose the latter.

Posting this in MMORPG is very, very wishful thinking.

Expect more small scale PVP games.

also they hired a lot of Hearthstone "brain", so might as well move this to the mobile game section

sadris said:

I wish then the best. You can have merit or you can have diversity. Blizzard chose the latter.

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I'm not sure if you mean merit/diversity as in merit within game choices or hiring practices, but I thought it was widely known that Activision was filled with assholes that are trying to turn games into heroin/gambling (sort of like EA). Look at the BFA clusterfuck, and soon to be the Shadowlands clusterfuck.

rhinohelix said:

There was a time when it seemed like the best way to make money was to give people what they wanted, i.e. capitalism. These were people who loved games and gave something back, Now these companies are run by people who love money above all else and don't care about the product, and are now looking at the bottom line above all else. It's the Critical Race Theory of Gaming. You could re-do the intro that Cate Blanchett gives at the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring but rather than Sauron, have a giant Bobby Kotick come out of Barad-Dur wearing gold chains swinging a slot-machine arm. "The power of the loot box could not be undone."

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Sounds like capitalism went to capitalism.

shabushabu said:

Sounds like capitalism went to capitalism.

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I would add to your analysis that there was a time when MMOs were not seen as cash cows so devs were given a bit more free reign over design choices. I think now you have boards and executives just strong-arming devs into making the game as addictive as possible through mechanics rather than quality. so perhaps, early/mid stage capitalism to a later stage. I'm at a loss as to how critical race theory is equivalent to pure capitalism. y'all getting radicalized here or something?

It's not a capitalist thing, just the bigger an organization is, the more people you have who don't give a shit about the stated goals of that organization. It's not like a state owned game studio where everyone is paid the same amount is going to do any better on that front.

This isn't even necessarily a bad thing - that guy you hired to make sure people get paid doesn't care about how fun your game is, the woman who you hired to stop you from getting sued doesn't care about your historical accuracy. It does mean that decisions tend to get spread out among lots of people which inevitably tends to bland things down toward a common low-risk denominator.

Capitalism is fine. What the US and the UK have is miles away from capitalism. What was capitalism has bought our politicians, our banks, our media and spend billions on pressing our buttons to hate each other and not pay attention to them.

Having seen pictures of Blizzard employees, I cast doubt on the skipping meals bit.

The QA types I met looked like Jack Skellington, so I can believe the lacking meals bit.

I want an MMORPG from them, but knowing what they know about MMORPGs I'm not sure they have the balls.