Activision Blizzard supplants Nintendo as world's largest gaming company

[Zontar]

After 9 years of mergers, acquisitions and buyouts, Activision Blizzard has become the largest gaming company in the world with the official absorption of King.

The company seems to be charging ahead with becoming an entertainment juggernaut with this new position within the industry coupled with the fact they've entered the movie and television series making business with the Warcraft movie and Skylanders series in development.

I'm mixed about this. On the one hand it's interesting to see the new big entity in entertainment to be a video game company instead of being a movie or electronic one a the others all seem to be, but on the other Activision Blizzard seems to be more interested in expansion then sound moves. Television and movies aren't a bad bet for them, but this is a company that got the title of biggest gaming company by buying a company for 5 billion that will requires 15 years of continuous profits at its current levels (which are unlikely to last for more then 2 or 3 before collapsing given its business model) to brake even. I don't know if this is a new permanent player entering the game of true multimedia entertainment or if this is a house that is about to collapse under its own weight.

Then again, with Nintendo entering the theme park and television game itself, this may also be a temporary thing anyway if only due to Nintendo playing catch up.

 

[Flammablezeus]

This won't last long. Nobody at Activision has understood video games for a long time. All they know is how to buy out other teams and run their IPs into the ground. Imagine if Nintendo decided to start buying out other IPs! They'd simply grow and we'd actually get some noteworthy games.

 

[CritialGaming]

Hate to say it, but Blizzards quality has gone to shit since the Activision merge. While they aren't exactly churning out the games. In the time since the merger they have nearly doubled their catalog. And not with exactly seller stuff.

Diablo 3 sucked at launch.
Starcraft 2 isthe biggest meh ever.
Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.
Heroes of the storm wishes it could matter to anyone.
Overwatch does not seem fun enough to keep and audience for very long. It will sell gang busters though.
I guess technically we got a couple of Wow expansions too. But who gives a shit anymore?

 

[Erttheking]

Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.

I love Hearthstone but I'm concerned about the direction it's going in. The Power Creep is getting downright insane.

 

[the_dramatica]

Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.

I love Hearthstone but I'm concerned about the direction it's going in. The Power Creep is getting downright insane.

That's kinda what you get for balancing a game before putting any interesting or complex mechanics into it.

And i'd take powercreep over nerf creep any day. FPS games are constantly ravaged by patches adding in more rng. Devs pretty much do it so that they can kill their game and get it over with, most recently dirty bomb is trying to finish itself off. The CS:GO community has forced the devs to undo one of their recent awful patches, and in a fit of rebellion the devs have stopped doing balance changes overall. I guess it's for the better.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.

I love Hearthstone but I'm concerned about the direction it's going in. The Power Creep is getting downright insane.

That's kinda what you get for balancing a game before putting any interesting or complex mechanics into it.

And i'd take powercreep over nerf creep any day. FPS games are constantly ravaged by patches adding in more rng. Devs pretty much do it so that they can kill their game and get it over with, most recently dirty bomb is trying to finish itself off. The CS:GO community has forced the devs to undo one of their recent awful patches, and in a fit of rebellion the devs have stopped doing balance changes overall. I guess it's for the better.

Where is the RNG in FPS games? I play Battlefield 4 quite a bit and I cant think of a single gameplay mechanic that involves it.

EDIT: I realize now you were talking about the cases in CSGO and the card packs in Dirty Bomb.

 

[Hawki]

It's hard to say how I feel about this. I mean...well, take EA. EA owns plenty of properties that I like (Mass Effect, Dead Space, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, etc.), and all of said properties were probably hindered on some level. Activision, on the other hand, I'm just apathetic to. It's popular to hate on CoD, but I have little interest in it, so I won't comment on its quality (or lack thereof). I'd much prefer Spyro to be separate from Skylanders and Crash to be freed as well, but even then, while I liked them back in the day, I don't know if them being 'freed' would mean that much to me now. Blizzard's still free to do its own thing, and Bungie...well, at some point I need to actually try Destiny and see what's what.

No real lover, but right now, in retrospect, Activision seems far more mild compared to EA or Konami.

Also:

Hate to say it, but Blizzards quality has gone to shit since the Activision merge. While they aren't exactly churning out the games. In the time since the merger they have nearly doubled their catalog. And not with exactly seller stuff.

Diablo 3 sucked at launch.
Starcraft 2 isthe biggest meh ever.
Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.
Heroes of the storm wishes it could matter to anyone.
Overwatch does not seem fun enough to keep and audience for very long. It will sell gang busters though.
I guess technically we got a couple of Wow expansions too. But who gives a shit anymore?

This is kind of getting off topic, but, well...

-I never thought Diablo III sucked at launch (if anything, D3 is my favorite Diablo game, but D2 is my least favorite, so...) I'm not denying that a lot of people made that assertion, but the general consensus now is that it's certainly up to par post-RoS. It's had over 20 million units sold last I heard, and was so popular that it prompted Runic to create Hob rather than Torchlight 3 (at least according to one of Runic's developers, as they didn't want to compete).

-If you didn't like SC2, fine, but I'd hardly call it "meh." It's easily still the RTS king in terms of popularity/sales, still has an e-sports scene, and is still being supported. Personally I found it an excellent sequel in pretty much every aspect.

-Heroes of the Storm actually has quite a following. Not LoL or DotA level, but I'd say on the same level as Smite. It isn't uncommon for various sites (including this one) to reguarly report on new HotS characters, which is more than can be said for other MOBAs that have faded into obscurity (HoN, Smite), were canceled (Dawngate) or seem stuck in beta (Arena of Fate).

-Can't comment on Overwatch, but all indications are that in the here and now, it's very popular, and gets far more focus than its rivals (e.g. Battleborn and Paladins).

-Actually, over 5 million people "give a shit about WoW." It's not in its heyday, but it's still the most widely played MMO out there in terms of player count.

Subjective, but if anything, as someone who's played Blizzard games since The Lost Vikings, the 2000s/2010s period feels like their strongest to me personally. True, I loved SC1 back in the day, and I still enjoy Diablo I (and I suppose Warcraft II), but from this period we got WC3, SC2, D3 (which, as mentioned, I actually like), and HotS (only MOBA I've been able to get into). Plus, WoW itself. Heck, I don't even like WoW that much, but I can't deny the influence it's had.

 

[CritialGaming]

-I never thought Diablo III sucked at launch (if anything, D3 is my favorite Diablo game, but D2 is my least favorite, so...) I'm not denying that a lot of people made that assertion, but the general consensus now is that it's certainly up to par post-RoS. It's had over 20 million units sold last I heard, and was so popular that it prompted Runic to create Hob rather than Torchlight 3 (at least according to one of Runic's developers, as they didn't want to compete).

-If you didn't like SC2, fine, but I'd hardly call it "meh." It's easily still the RTS king in terms of popularity/sales, still has an e-sports scene, and is still being supported. Personally I found it an excellent sequel in pretty much every aspect.

-Heroes of the Storm actually has quite a following. Not LoL or DotA level, but I'd say on the same level as Smite. It isn't uncommon for various sites (including this one) to reguarly report on new HotS characters, which is more than can be said for other MOBAs that have faded into obscurity (HoN, Smite), were canceled (Dawngate) or seem stuck in beta (Arena of Fate).

-Can't comment on Overwatch, but all indications are that in the here and now, it's very popular, and gets far more focus than its rivals (e.g. Battleborn and Paladins).

-Actually, over 5 million people "give a shit about WoW." It's not in its heyday, but it's still the most widely played MMO out there in terms of player count.

Subjective, but if anything, as someone who's played Blizzard games since The Lost Vikings, the 2000s/2010s period feels like their strongest to me personally. True, I loved SC1 back in the day, and I still enjoy Diablo I (and I suppose Warcraft II), but from this period we got WC3, SC2, D3 (which, as mentioned, I actually like), and HotS (only MOBA I've been able to get into). Plus, WoW itself. Heck, I don't even like WoW that much, but I can't deny the influence it's had.

1. Diablo has made a lot of improvements, of that I cannot deny, and I still play the game for two weeks at the start of a new season. However Diablo 3 is nowhere near the game Diablo 2 was. I'm merely comparing the story and gameplay of Diablo 3 to what Diablo 2 was. D3 has a much more limited character building design, limiting not only ability uses, but also spec options further hindered by only a handful of the hundreds of items in the game. Weaker game design, even though the gameplay is smoother and tighter, extremely weak story, and limiting item hunting. Is D3 a bad game? In today's market, no. But it also doesn't compare to the game that came ten years before it.

2. As for SC2, functionally it is the same game as SC1 with a new coat of paint. Game tweaks and a sprinkling of new units has certainly shaken the meta for multiplayer. But again the story was drawn out and yet shallow. I personally was disappointed.

3. You may right on Heroes, but I just felt like the business model was greedy and it turned me off from the game.

4. I am in the Overwatch beta and I cannot find the fun in that game for me. Be warned though, people are alwaus hyped about a new Blizzard game, people were excited as fuck for D3 during the beta too. I wont deny that Overwatch can be fun for people, but I wonder how much lasting power a game like that can find in today's gaming market.

5. 5 million subs still? Yeah you are right. Judging by the numbers you can easily say WoW is still the most powerful MMO out there. But if you actually dig into those number you will find that the last expansion was almost universally hated. I mean during this last cycle Wow LOST 5 million subs. Half the player base said "fuck it, I'm out." That means something for the state of the game. I wonder how many subs are just sitting inactive and hoping the next expac renews life into the game for them, or how many people are sticking with it because raiding with friends is still fun. The problem I had was that all my friends quit the game and I couldn't justify sinking time into something that nobody I knew cared about.

WoW's issues may just be the collapse of MMORPG's in general. Now that everything is becoming online multiplayer, people have more options. Before the best way to play a game with 20 friends was a MMO raid or something. But now people can play any number of games and have that same experience.

It is kind of funny, people always cried that the next big MMO (Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, etc) would be the game to "Kill" WoW. But instead WoW is dying, not because of one big new shinny MMO, but rather hundreds of smaller faster MMO experiences all taking bites out of WoW's playerbase. WoW is bleeding to death basically. But WoW is also GIANTIC, so it will take many years to take down the beast, but you cannot argue that the monster is hurting.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Diablo has made a lot of improvements, of that I cannot deny, and I still play the game for two weeks at the start of a new season. However Diablo 3 is nowhere near the game Diablo 2 was. I'm merely comparing the story and gameplay of Diablo 3 to what Diablo 2 was. D3 has a much more limited character building design, limiting not only ability uses, but also spec options further hindered by only a handful of the hundreds of items in the game. Weaker game design, even though the gameplay is smoother and tighter, extremely weak story, and limiting item hunting. Is D3 a bad game? In today's market, no. But it also doesn't compare to the game that came ten years before it.

I'm getting in on this!

Diablo 3 survived its launch month hysteria to become one of the best selling games of all time. It's EXTREMELY popular. It's also gradually evolved into a significantly better title than it was at launch. I've never been overly enamored with Diablo, but we cannot pretend that it's anything other than a mega-hit.

As to design...I preferred 3 to 2. There will always be debates about LAS and their impact on game design, and I think you can reach a point where games can be too clean/lose too much complexity. But Diablo 2 had a lot of bloat, and wasn't nearly as complex as its many skills and tiers would imply.

As for SC2, functionally it is the same game as SC1 with a new coat of paint. Game tweaks and a sprinkling of new units has certainly shaken the meta for multiplayer. But again the story was drawn out and yet shallow. I personally was disappointed.

It's the king of a dying genre. It's a very well made game. Is it more of the same? Yes. That was intentional, as it was primarily intended to appeal to South Koreans and continue holding down that segment of the esports market. It's not remotely a "story" title. SC2 having a mediocre story is about as meaningful as DOTA having a mediocre story.

You may right on Heroes, but I just felt like the business model was greedy and it turned me off from the game.

I've never liked HOTS. It's one case where I feel like Blizzard's formula of glossy polish and accessibility is actually counter to the primary merits of the genre. Overwatch is shaping up to be the game HOTS probably should have been.

I am in the Overwatch beta and I cannot find the fun in that game for me. Be warned though, people are alwaus hyped about a new Blizzard game, people were excited as fuck for D3 during the beta too. I wont deny that Overwatch can be fun for people, but I wonder how much lasting power a game like that can find in today's gaming market.

Your personal disenfranchisement with the beta notwithstanding, Overwatch has been getting extremely strong buzz, and stands poised to be yet another roaring success. People were "excited as fuck" for D3, and it bore out in the form of record setting sales. This might be a case where you're confusing the 'quality' of Blizzard's products with your personal predilections as far as entertainment goes.

5 million subs still? Yeah you are right. Judging by the numbers you can easily say WoW is still the most powerful MMO out there. But if you actually dig into those number you will find that the last expansion was almost universally hated. I mean during this last cycle Wow LOST 5 million subs. Half the player base said "fuck it, I'm out." That means something for the state of the game.

The game is ELEVEN YEARS OLD. That peak/die-off cycle is actually something every active MMO suffers. Every single one of them. Retention past the first 3 months tends to hover between 10-20% of peak concurrency. And that's for the best sellers, the games with real legs. And they tend to slump down to 100-200K people. Not 5 million. A game "failing" its way to a player base of 5 million people ELEVEN YEARS after launch isn't just a success story, it's an accomplishment you're not likely to ever see repeated. WoW's lifetime earnings are in the double figure billions. That takes it out of "hit game" territory and into "evergreen franchise" territory. It's comparable to something like freaking Star Wars.

 

[CritialGaming]

It's comparable to something like freaking Star Wars.

Just imagine what will happen if the movie turns out to be fucking awesome!

To all your other points. I get it. There is a sense of bias from me. I've been a Blizzard fanboy for a long time. Hell, I am STILL Subbed to WoW ten years running now.

But Diablo 3 sold on hype, as does most of Blizzard's games. And listen, the game as it stands now is FUCKING GREAT! But that doesn't excuse (the current state or overall sales) the colossal disappointment in gameplay, story, and always online functionality that the game had at launch. Not to mention when people bitched about having to always be online, and Blizzard said that it was IMPOSSIBLE to code the game to play offline.......except they released on consoles with offline available.

Hacking is all well and good of an excuse, but surely with today's tech they could have created a server cache that would store your online characters on a server rather than the player's system. Offline characters could be stored locally and if desired people could be allowed to hack the shit out of the single player side all they wanted because they only affect themselves there. Hell even turn off achievements unless you're online.

The thing was a mess, plain and simple. Luckily Blizzard listened to people when they were told that D3 was shit, and they have done a major 180 to fix it. Now the game is in a great state and they are to be applauded.

My argument here is that it just seems like things have been shaky since they were bought by Activision. Diablo 3's launch, a few hit or miss expansions in WoW.

Again that may just be the impressions that I have been getting and have nothing to do with reality. But I can't help but feel like Blizzard hasn't felt like the same game company ever since.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Again that may just be the impressions that I have been getting and have nothing to do with reality. But I can't help but feel like Blizzard hasn't felt like the same game company ever since.

Things have changed, certainly. Look at the top 10 gaming companies 20 years ago and it would be full of a lot of foreign names. Blizzard has actually experienced a very unusually long stay at the top. When I was a big gaming fan in the 90's the giants were names like Origin, and Microprose, and Bullfrog, and Westwood. Were this a normal company, they'd have been purchased by Activision, and become to the old Blizzard what modern Bioware was to pre-EA Bioware. They'd be a Department of Activision, and probably working on DLC for Call of Duty. It's a testament to how ridiculously successful the company was that Activision actually SHARED THEIR BRAND upon acquiring them. Blizzard sales actually form the lion's share of profit for the mega-company.

So they feel different because they ARE different, but not nearly as different as they could have been, or how the normal cyclical nature of the industry suggests they SHOULD have been. That they still exist at all, in relatively familiar form, nursing relatively familiar IPs, is a minor miracle.

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

So the biggest gaming company is also the biggest "fuck you, gamers" company that isn't named Konami. Coincidence?

Activision absolutely refuses to allow their games into the backwards compatibility program on the Xbone. What are they doing instead? Re-releasing their games with absolutely NO graphical enhancements, no FPS increases, no resolution increases, nothing. They're literally the same games that they sold on 360, and now they want you to buy them again if you want to play them on the One. In other words, "fuck you" to people who bought their products and made them the biggest company in gaming.

For the record, the most recent example of this is Deadpool. They released the game on the One without making a single improvement on the 360 version. Want to know how much they're charging? $50! Fifty fucking dollars for the identical game that came out almost three years ago. They could have allowed backwards compatibility, but their greed conquers all.

 

[Hawki]

Damn it, I knew this would happen. Wasn't this meant to be about Activision?

Oh well, responding by game:

Diablo

Actually, I'd put gameplay and story ahead of D2 in regards to D3. I love the flexibility D3 offers via the skill rune system, whereas in D2 it felt like I was being locked into a playstyle, at least if I wanted to actually progress. Oh sure, D2 has 'builds,' but those builds are usually locked to a specific character. In D3, I can change my ability layout as I want to depending on the situation.

As for story, well, again, I'd put D3 ahead of D2's. D3 has received a lot of flak for its story, and people have given reasons why, but...well, D1 barely had a story, I found D2's story to be very lacklustre, D3 felt like the first game in the series that actually had a story.

StarCraft

SC2 has far more in common with SC1 then D3 has with D2. Still, as someone who did enjoy SC1 gameplay, that's a personal boon. The unit combinations I find are more interesting, the pathings improved a lot, and there's numerous other little tidbits. And again, loved the story. SC1's story wasn't bad - in fact, I'd call it good (more than I can say about D2), but for me, SC2 surpasses it on practically every level. By the end of LotV, it had managed to even surpass Warcraft III on the story front. I can recall the 2010s period how it gave me disappointments like Halo 4 and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. StarCraft II is one of the few sequels I've waited that long for that delivered as much as it did for me.

As for the RTS genre dying...SC2 is king, but I'm left to wonder if that's the case, in regard to the whole "dying" thing. We had Company of Heroes 2 not too long ago, Grey Goo came out recently, there's Ashes of the Singularity and Etherium to consider. None of these have been big hits, but dying? I wouldn't say so. Simpy not as popular as it once was, which can be said for a lot of genres (platformers, MMOs, etc.)

Speaking of which:

Warcraft

Don't play WoW, so this is harder to comment on, but I don't think anyone's arguing that WoW isn't the giant it once was, nor am I ignorant of the issues that people reported in WoD. But people have saying WoW is "dying" since Cataclysm. I'd say the more appropriate analogy is that it's entering middle age. Yeah, you're not as good at 40 as you were at 20, but you're probably a few decades off from entering a stage of life where you're "dying," so to speak. And MMOs much older than WoW are still going (Ultima Online, EverQuest, etc.), so if they can survive on playerbases as small as that, WoW probably could.

As for the movie, well, I'm in the camp of "please don't suck, please don't suck..." If it succeeds, how much credit Blizzard should get is up for debate, but while creator involvement with a game movie can help (e.g. Prince of Persia), that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good (e.g. The Spirits Within).

Heroes of the Storm

I don't know if I can call the pricing system unfair? Overpriced? Absolutely (sorry Blizz, I'm not paying $25 for a unicorn mount). But every hero is purchasable through gold, so if we're operating under the assumption that the game is balanced (don't go there, I'm not into balance debates), then I'd say the pricing model is fair in of itself. But, speaking personally, HotS is the only MOBA I've been able to get into (alright, it's a grand total of 3 that I've tried), but I love the game systems myself (map mechanics, shared XP, talent upgrades, etc.)

Overwatch

Again, can't really comment. It's certainly popular right now, but it is a fair point to say it could whizzle away in the future. Personally, doubt it though. If TF2 is to DotA/LoL, then I suppose Overwatch could be akin to HotS/Smite on the relative popularity scale. I'd say that's enough to make it viable.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Diablo has made a lot of improvements, of that I cannot deny, and I still play the game for two weeks at the start of a new season. However Diablo 3 is nowhere near the game Diablo 2 was. I'm merely comparing the story and gameplay of Diablo 3 to what Diablo 2 was. D3 has a much more limited character building design, limiting not only ability uses, but also spec options further hindered by only a handful of the hundreds of items in the game. Weaker game design, even though the gameplay is smoother and tighter, extremely weak story, and limiting item hunting. Is D3 a bad game? In today's market, no. But it also doesn't compare to the game that came ten years before it.

I'm getting in on this!

Diablo 3 survived its launch month hysteria to become one of the best selling games of all time. It's EXTREMELY popular. It's also gradually evolved into a significantly better title than it was at launch. I've never been overly enamored with Diablo, but we cannot pretend that it's anything other than a mega-hit.

As to design...I preferred 3 to 2. There will always be debates about LAS and their impact on game design, and I think you can reach a point where games can be too clean/lose too much complexity. But Diablo 2 had a lot of bloat, and wasn't nearly as complex as its many skills and tiers would imply.

hopping on this train myself, to add a point about D3/D2 comparisons.

D2 was, in my view, the classic mistake people make that complexity=depth. The skills/abilities in D3 being shallow still have a depth to them. While you can min/max a character, there are still ways and balances enough that almost any playstyle is viable in the endgame. Hell I've winged most of my L70 monk's specs, never once looking at cookie-cutter builds and rarely do I get my rear handed to me by the game on the harder difficulties. I've not cracked the highest tiers, but I can survive solo on middle-hard difficulties and to me thats a better feat.
D2's endgame was tacitly boring as hell, whereas the Adventure option in D3 makes backtracking to old areas a little more fun, added in with the updates and new areas added, there's a real chance of having a sustainable endgame.
I don't hate Diablo 2 but I'm not going to say I can at all agree it was the penultimate ARPG of all time. It was great but I think Diablo 3 took things that were great from it and refined a hell of a lot of the complexity into a more shallow surface experience with a deeper endgame than D2 could ever have put out.

 

[Longview]

Thats nice....how about a real Warcraft game like they used to make?

 

[Dragonbums]

The thing is is that Nintendo actually has the skill, brand power, and quality to back them up. Its a wonder they didn't shove that weight around much sooner to make themselves a lot more prominent.
Activision doesn't cultivate anything like that. They just buy shit that makes a lot of money at the time, but is easily forgettable two years after they are gone. The only IP they own that has that power is WoW.

 

[Politrukk]

Hearthstone....well that was pretty cool.

I love Hearthstone but I'm concerned about the direction it's going in. The Power Creep is getting downright insane.

It's Blizzards refusal to increase the gold income that is the biggest problem with that same powercreep.

Sure the game is made for money to be shilled out but after several expansions the basic money making system in terms of gold doesn't work with the current meta.

A lot of people (like me) would like to be able to grind and then additionally be persuaded to buy packs to ease up on that grinding, Hearthstone is currently impossible to properly grind especially because you level wether you win or lose so you'll always end up playing against players who bought everything and have that deck stacked against you.

Aside from that fact ofcourse even whilst buying the random number generator might screw you over like it did with me, buying 80 packs and only getting 1 legendary whilst legendaries are so core to being able to play the game properly these days.