What's going on at Blizzard?

Honestly having ridden this for as long as he has I can see retiring. He has made a ton of bank over the years so he and his family should be well set financially may as well go off and enjoy it and his family and then maybe if he gets the itch again putter around with some small indy stuff in the future. God knows if he ever wants to hop back into the industry it likely won't be that hard down the road.

I agree that Overwatch is shit. Either that or I just suck, prolly a bit of both. And yah, when it comes to "corrupted" as your last way out of something winning, you've fucked up.

Overwatch is pretty much TF2 with the blizzard treatment. They polished the hell out of it gave it some good quality of life improvements and pay attention to the small details so many companies forget and it shows. Overwatch has been a pretty huge success for blizzard so far especially for something that was basically them trying to salvage something from titan falling apart and managed to make it something pretty solid and popular.

Blizzard, you have 14 days...

You have to understand Blizzard's compensation structure: they have a salary that is ok for the game industry (not even remotely comparable to the base salaries in the tech industry) and then with profit sharing bonuses they can make 3x easily, maybe more. A medium level engineer can make $500k/year easily, presumably Metzen was making several millions a year for the past 12 years.

Blizzard is no longer the cash cow that it used to be, that coupled with the current disappointments (Titan, the Minecraft-clone) probably some of them reached a point where some lost 75% of their yearly income, no significant game in the pipeline, maybe Activision curbing bonuses. Makes sense to move on.

Edit: And the "retiring" part is probably mostly because he has a garden leave period in his contract

Sincerely doubt this has anything to do with compensation at this point... They are likely just as nostalgic as many of us are. Think about how awesome it must of been to be part of Blizzard in the early days of WoW. A close knit team making the most successful MMORPG in history and still holding the title over a decade later. Now it's a huge corporation with international offices, and likely much more bureaucracy. I know when I look back on my days just playing WoW I primarily think about the time I spent with the core of my guild, and all the fun we had. Not the drama and bullshit that came with running a 40 man raiding guild where 25 of them were filler who you hoped could follow orders.

tyen said:

wat?

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Don't worry Tyen, in 5 more years Blizzard can contract out your bot army to keep their "active user" count alive.

tyen said:

wat?

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ok maybe "easily" was a bit of a stretch. An engineer can make $120k-180k and with profit sharing on expansion releases (one every 18 months or so) you could make 2x or 3x in bonuses. It's a powerful way to retain top talent.

Edit: top salaries for engineering talent as comparison This Is How Much Engineers Make at Airbnb, Uber and Snapchat

Edit 2: this was the case for vanilla and BC, since then bonuses have gone down

that's pretty crazy, my buddy that does software engineering for google started at like 120k or some shit. People making 300+ at Uber is nuts

Woolygimp said:

Overwatch is a mediocre game at best. If it didn't have Blizzard's name and marketing, it would have disappeared into irrelevance. Legion isn't as good as you think it is either. I don't think Blizzard has produced anything of quality in a very, very long time, with Diablo 3 being the first of a long list of poorly constructed games.

If Blizzard implodes I think the gaming community would be better off for it.

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Damn dude tell us how you really feel.

Personally, I thought Overwatch was good, I loved Diablo 3, and I really liked the Warcraft movie.

I think overwatch did what it was attempting to do very well. It is basically TF2 with a bit more modern engine and a whole lot of blizzard injected into it. Say what you want but blizzard apparently knows their market pretty well and they also advertised the living hell out of the game and it seems to be paying off pretty big for them. Given a lot of it was pulling stuff out of a defunct product it is really a case of taking lemons and making some pretty decent lemonade.

James Waugh also left Blizzard

Kuro said:

Re: Diablo at Blizzcon; I like the conspiracy theories around the fucked up "diablo-themed" 4-sided-Die that came in the goody bag.

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What is a 4 sided die? How is that even possible? I mean, a triangle would leave 3 sides equally up in the air. You can't even make all of the sides face different directions because most of the time, your "bottom side" would be the same direction as one other side.

It's true. The leveling experience has always been the best part of WoW.

Khane said:

It's true. The leveling experience has always been the best part of WoW.

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Yes this is why I expect them to expand the level scaling to all the content, so you can play all the content and still get better loot etc. there is a ton of unused unseen and unplayed content that could be repurposed. that and the fact that they are finally adding more and more procedural quests and timed events. I think raid will continue but the bulk of the new time spent in game will be quasi-solo content. Personally no longer have 12 hours per week (minimum!) to raid.