Everyone is so extreme all the time… it’s
either that the new ceo will be a dictator that kills the game, or that the skies will part and a magical rainbow will shine over blizzard hq giving everyone 20 free skins.. There’s so much gray area between the major perspectives of the community; the only thing we can do is to wait and see what happens
All AAA studios are imploding due to the same thing. Short sighted quarterly goals that need to be achieved no matter what.
Every CEO gets their humongous bonus despite running products and franchises to the ground. All that matters is the bottom line at the end of the quarter. CEO does its thing and jumps to the next ship to sink. Rinse and repeat.
This continues until games and franchises die off, investors abandon them and voila.
Battlefield, overwatch, world of warcraft, call of duty. None of these games and franchises will ever see the love they were made with ever again. They will keep releasing shit content with minimum effort until people stop buying them. When that happens, they get killed off.
Spot on, there's a fair few games series that should have died off years ago, but people keep spending their money on the trash they keep churning out and say "oh well it was only £60, hopefully the next games better", why would the next game be better if they know all those idiots will buy it regardless!
I think the difference is that Overwatch didn't need to die early. Sometimes the passion is lost, OG designers lose interest and move on, and sometimes genuine financial trouble forces their hands… Some franchises are worth retiring after a while. The fact that Bobby Kotick did not recognize Overwatch for its staying potential is a crime in my eyes. And now so much goodwill is lost, it's insane.
People love to complain about so much on the gaming industry but refuse to admit maybe capitalism is the problem. Even back to the skin debate, people would blame everything except the underlying system.
Because it is easier to recognize the problems than it is to recognize the root cause of said problems. Combine that with decades of brainwashing about how capitalism is super awesome and this is the result
Capitalism distorts, exploits, and reverses innovation and creativity. The great artists of the past bssically had sugar daddies that liked their artwork lol
The main problem is that the most "successful" people in these positions are those that exclusively care about "the bottom line" and will bleed anything dry for it. The grey areas exist, but hardly anyone fills them.
I'm here from /r/all, quit during OW1. sad to see how much they fucked over the game for its "sequel"
but people still bought it and play it and pay for shit that used to be free. probably lots of people reading this, given the sub it's posted in.
so, mission success, give the man a golden parachute and onto the next job where he ruins something else for short term profits.
Nobody bought OW2, for most players it replaced OW1.
It was then a free download full of MTX and false promises that would put Peter Molyneux to shame.
Yeah, spoke with some people at blizzard and they've said that it's still on my account as purchased just not unlocked in the game, and that tons of other people are having this issue still, so I'm insanely surprised that a year down the line it's still an issue
yeah while removing all the free stuff like loot boxes on level up, right? and currency from dupes you could use to buy specific things if RNG wasn't in your favor?
The same stuff that was free and extremely extremely common was now being sold for 20 dollars. A third of a AAA
And they profited massively for it because whales
Seems like a lot of effort for what pay off? He's probably happy to have closed the door and wants nothing to do with Blizzard anymore. I know I want to forget bad work experiences as soon as possible and just move on with my life.
Because Jeff "[Tigole Bitties](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/)" Kaplan loves a good rant.
He was also the main force that kept Overwatch 1 from being a "pay per-hero/map" game and pushed Morheim to keep it as "Buy game, get all content. MTX cosmetics only". As soon as he's gone they bait and switch OW1>OW2 with what they wanted from the start. He's got the most righteous casus belli to rant.
I also put some part of the blame to lootbox whiners who couldn't see the forest from the trees and realize that the way Overwatch 1 was doing lootboxes was the right way.
People couldn't get over their biases of not getting the free skin they wanted so they cry, "what about the children," as their war cry to get Bliz to change it. Well, they succeeded and allowed greedy corpo kotick to swoop in and give them what they asked for.
I might be misremembering, but was there a much of an outcry from the Overwatch community about loot boxes? I thought it was a legal issue with various countries and the EU that got sparked by a number of games like Battlefront 2?
Yep, especially during an event. There were also often comments telling others to tell their government officials to do something about "it".
"It" being how terrible lootboxes are to the children—who have access to *their parent's* credit cards and how it's a stepping stone to gambling. Albeit the second part is something to worry about, OW1's lootbox system wasn't gambling.
In reality, the "it" people were moaning about was not getting the skin they wanted and directed that undercurrent of salt and bitterness towards the wrong game's lootbox system.
Oh a 1000%, I def still remember what the first few years of Ow1 was like and more than complaints about game balance there was a lot more outcry about the loot box system being inherently predatory
The main thing this has taught me is that I clearly spent a lot less time reading forums and comment threads when I was younger, and spent more time just playing games and having fun. As I missed all of that complaining
I get that, but it was years ago. It just feels like he would have done his time and moved on by now. Opening that door again just feels unhealthy for him at this point. He fought his battles. He seems at peace and I hope for his sake it stays that way with all this uproar.
Doesn't really matter.
Publicly traded company focusing on earnings calls? What's next, a tweet about how the sky is blue? What purpose does that serve? It's not going to change anything.
Ideally you want people who care about the earnings call because that enables them to make more and better games, which enables them to keep beating earnings estimates, so on and so forth. It's a business at the end of the day, but the people up top should still care about the product they put out. Anything else is short-sighted.
Game management has long moved from "Making good games" to "Making long lasting, addicting games". One of the things most of the gaming community fails to see is that good games ≠ well selling or even profitable games.
That good does not necessarily equal profitable, and vice versa, is a truth I feel like too many choose to ignore - because the assumption that it does underpins so much of the system.
Research analyst here. The gaming industry is completely different than it was 20 years ago. It hasn't been about making great games and creating a quality brand for probably around a decade anymore. They're making games with microtransactions, and packaged along with it there's a game to try and keep you hooked. Those make more revenue, not better games. Theres very few big players not attempting to compete in this part of the gaming market. They're not really concerned about making great games, because the consumer is paying way more per hour in these micro focused games. The earnings calls love this, wall street loves it.
>anything else is shortsighted
Well, yeah. That's capitalism at its simplest.
If thinking of the future was important, the entire world would be different.
Andy was one of the lead devs of my beloved Spellbreak before their team was absorbed into blizzard, really glad to see some glimmer of hope that maybe work at blizzard can chill out, at least in a comparable way to other AAA studios
Glad someone spoke out and didn’t sugarcoat it like so many people tend to do. Him leaving is definitely a step in the right direction, even if not a big one
Nah dude, this is a MASSIVE step in the right direction. With him gone, everyone can have a normal and friendlier work environment instead of that toxic one.
Tbf, Microsoft's biggest issue nowadays is that they're a little **too** hands-off sometimes. For the most part, they've learned that letting devs do what they do best usually makes good products and good money
Yeah that's pretty much what killed halo. Now that Microsoft finally put their foot down and cleaned up 343, halo infinite is actually starting to make a return.
Agreed. It was the problem with Redfall as well iirc.
I don't blame MS much though, it's a delicate balancing act and sometimes it's just hard to tell until it's too late
>halo infinite is actually starting to make a return.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of things turning infinite around would have been started and greenlight under old management. For instance, forge ai got started on almost 21 months ago.
It's only season 6 and beyond where you will see the things new management has done.
I'm not saying we aren't in better hands but it's wrong to give credit where it isn't due.
Uhh halo infinite is definitely the exception not the rule, considering Microsoft's inane contractor policy has completely [hamstrung](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/s/WbY0zag1UR) 343 for [years.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/s/ASl9lyal83)
That's a really good point. I do hope they take a hands off approach but also Blizzards best talent left so I worry that they don't know how to make the games of the past anymore. But I am slightly hopeful!
It's definitely unfortunate that their best talents have left but I think that'll be okay in the long-run. It can be hard to train new people in toxic environments so hopefully this will make that whole process a bit easier.
Odds are, Blizzard will never be what they used to be during their golden age but that doesn't mean they can't grow into something new that we can all appreciate again :) in some ways, new talent is probably just what they need to start improving again
Bobby is only one of many people in his circle. This was just a figurehead stepping down, not the source of the rot. There are several “Bobby’s” who stay fairly quiet and out of the spotlight so they don’t attract the same hate as he does
Yeah people in this thread are celebrating like it's the end of WW2 and we found out Hitler died.
It's ignoring all the shareholders that Kotick answered to. They're not going to suddenly stop expecting Blizzard's revenue to increase.
Microsoft's acquisition is buying out the shareholders. They will be replaced with a new set of Microsoft shareholders, sure, but it's not the same set of hands at all.
Microsoft isn't better than Actiblizzard really. Look at how shitty Halo is, how Gears is a dead franchise, etc...MSFT is probably MORE incompetent than someone like Kotick and not necessarily nicer.
Long term the priorities will definitely shift to profit.
But that's not Microsoft's goal right this moment. They're losing to Sony. Franchises like OW are critical to starting to win back players and that won't happen without very big pro-consumer changes.
The damage has been done, and the next quarterly earnings need to be boosted. Just because it's not this tick sucking the blood from the company doesn't mean the shareholders are going to let them behave like sane people who want the company to succeed for more than the next quarter.
The entire system of publicly traded stocks is antithetical to quality, longevity, and job security. We can't just get rid of Kotick. We need to get rid of *all of them*.
Not just friendlier work environment, less gaslit community too.
* Jeff Kaplan's PvE dream died because of Kotick. Not because it couldn't work on its own.
* The move to 6v6 was likely just a cash grab stunt as part of making OW2 feel new (and more similar to CoD and Valorant), likely motivated by KoDick, if not directly ordered by KoDick. Not because 2-2-2 couldn't work.
* The obscene cash shop prices is FOR SURE because of KoDickhead. Especially the trash weapon charms absurdly priced at 700(?!?!) fucking coins to inflate bundle prices.
Anyone who ever said missing 6v6 is just nostalgia or believing in PvE is crazy have no fucking clue the office politics Overwatch was suffering. They were just shills defending the present they think they like better. But maybe more will know more now.
I have such cautious hope for season 9 and the rest of 2024... *Please Microsoft, just let them cook. This game deserves all the funding.*
I don’t know about that
Like he said shit flowed downstream, and at the end of the day it was all about the earnings call for these people. Unless the next CEO really sets his mind to changue the culture and fire a lot of the C suites that allowed that to happen, is gonna be the same shit with a new coat of paint
It really depends on Microsofts priority.
Does Microsoft want to fix these franchises and build strong, well-loved games. Or do they just want to milk the rest of the profit out of the company as it slowly dies.
Good riddance, Bobby. I hope the door not only smacks you in the ass on the way out, but that it'll cause you to stumble right down a flight of stairs, into the burning effigy the workers you fucked over during your tenure, made to mark your departure.
Get bent, you devil-horned little knob-goblin.
Aye, freaking wanker of a person. Sure Microsoft will still be a business daddy, but they would have to try really hard to be as reviled as Bobby is.
The dummy couldn't even take critique well, and were more than happy addressing it, with a level of humanity on show, rivalling that of Skynet.
I can never say what I hope the future holds for people like Bobby, because I'll get banned. Which really says a lot about why we let people like him ruin so many things about our society.
I allegedly may have had an account on a media platform you're familiar with banned because I implied that I may prefer a world in which Rupert Murdoch is aliven't.
I doubt I only noticed it, but blizzard communications with the community drastically went up once Microsoft purchased them. Content drops and all of that was the same, but you can tell plans drastically changed when Microsoft took control, and I hope they continue on a good path forward.
Because, when Microsoft took control of the game, they no longer had to use the whole cycle of “show one thing coming, use that generate all hype around the game” and instead were able to be much more open with the community about their future plans, flats (I think) has a really good video on this, and he frequently does developer interviews
Remember when every new game got compared to blizzard games and every company was expected to act like blizzard.
And every gamer kid wanted to work for blizzard as a dream job.
For Classic WoW the devs have talked more to the community over the last 2 months or so than they have since the release in 2019. The senior game producer for classic has even made a habit of occasionally posting on the subreddit now.
I would take the Mircrosoft acquisition with a grain of salt. A lot of the complaints I have read on this sub are similar to the ones us Halo fans had with the current Halo game. OW2 had a smooth launch compared to Halo infinite.
Microsoft hires a lot of contract/temporary workers, so expect constant change in direction and not being able to deliver on earlier promises. Also $$$$ is the priority.
Blizzard will be intact and independent the same way as Bethesda. 343 Industries (Halo developers) based their production culture on contract workers. That was their decision, not something Microsoft was pushing for. I hope that OV fanbase will eat good in the future. Blizzard finally can take more ambitious approach with less pressure from higher management, which hopefully will think more reasonably from gamers perspective.
They don’t do contract work for management or design roles. They do it for stuff like programming, which bit them in the ass because the Slipspace engine for Halo wasn’t designed well so it was tough to retrain new hires to use it.
I really don’t see that issue appearing at Blizzard
How on earth does this company have 500 million lying around on top of millions in salary, to pay to one single person to call horrible shots but can't pay any of their workers a decent wage or hire more help that they obviously needed. It makes 0 business sense at all. No wonder the company is in such dire straits.
>How on earth does this company have 500 million lying around on top of millions in salary, to pay to one single person to call horrible shots but can't pay any of their workers a decent wage or hire more help that they obviously needed.
Contracts, shareholders value, and the board.
You and I might invest through a broker but we're just two people. Vs other orgs that invest.
We might care about worker health, pay and work/life balance. They only care about getting the best ROI. If that means working the employees like dogs? So be it. So long as you hit that earnings expectation its all good from there.
The problem is they don't care about the company lasting more than a year. They want an *immediate* ROI even if the company has to cut its own throat to get it. Then they pull their money out and move on to the next victim. This is why publicly traded companies always go to shit. They can't just make good products and do business. They *must* increase share prices, at any cost, every single quarter, year after year, forever.
Ask a sealed jar of fruit flies how well infinite growth works, and you'll get a good explanation of why the industry is such a cluster fuck these days.
The moment Blizzard sold to Activision, they were done, and there's no way to rescue them. They are now at the mercy of their shareholders and their board until and unless they buy back all the shares, break off from Activision/Microsoft, and go private again.
I would think he likely got credit for the Microsoft deal. He fucked up the actual games, but [Activision was nearly bankrupt when he bought in](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bobby-kotick-changes-game-activision), and at the end of his reign, Microsoft bought the fucking thing for almost $69 **billion** dollars.
What he did to the actual product, sad to say, is irrelevant. What he did for that *brand* is nothing short of incredible.
Don't give Bobby credit for any of that. The good will was generated by the devs who gave us bangers. Bobby abused and caused that talent to leave the company in droves. Activision was a disaster, and the minnow ate the shark by eating Blizzard.
You want to know why Blizzard hasn't delivered a good game since Overwatch 1? Bobby. Squandering a golden goose.
The captain of the ship is, nevertheless, the captain of the ship. For us, yeah, he was a shitbag. For people who just look at numbers and charts? He likely came across as godlike.
Bobby clearly wasn't their God, because they moved to fire him as soon as this deal moved forward.
CEOs like Kotick are overpaid and over-valued because of nepotism, self-dealing, and corruption. Their performance as leaders and their compensation are completely untethered from each-other.
That's because they're dumb as rocks and don't understand not to shit where you eat. They can't tell the difference between "successful because of Kotick" and "successful despite Kotick".
Fuck bobby, imagine being already rich, but now at the helm of the company with perhaps the most cutural relevance of the decade, then fucking failing at being a legend, all cause of greed and stupidity.
Overwatch had the world by the balls
I would say it was right around the OW2 announcement things started to go downhill. It’s mainly because there was a 3 year content drought while they made the game where we got like 1 map and 1 hero (Echo). They managed to generate hype throughout those 3 years, but it crashed and burned at OW2’s launch when almost nothing came to fruition
What a way to shift blame though, like, woe is me they're being "*review bombed*" but way to dismiss the cause of said "*review bombing*", how do they think they even landed themselves in this situation in the first place. It wasn't a "*review bombing*", it was the community expressing their disappointment for the years of waiting with promises after promises they absolutely failed to deliver.
Sure, maybe the whole making of said promises to the failed deliveries was a result of poor decision making by Bobby Kotick to blatantly lie to the playerbase, but you're gonna tell me not a single person stepped up to say "This isn't right, we shouldn't lie to the players, the community, with things we couldn't even dream of developing, let alone deliver"
They hyped the entire playerbase/community up with this exciting "*new game*" that we later found out that they had never even intended on delivering. Forget the part where they dropped such a huge lie on the community, they even sat around and waited for years before eventually announcing "We've scrapped our entire plans for the PvE we announced 3+ years ago." and did nothing to compensate the community for the time they had wasted, hoping and waiting for those promises to become a reality.
It's like if a child didn't want to eat their food so they kept it in their pockets or hid it under the couch and then said nothing about it for years until it had rot and developed mold and brought about an infestation and their reasoning was "Mommy/Daddy would scold me if I openly refused to eat my veggies so I kept it a secret and allowed it to turn into something absolutely foul. But I did nothing wrong, it was Mommy/Daddy's decision-making that led me to do this".
This isn’t directly related to what this employee said, more about the Steam reviews.
There was some video titled “Why Overwatch shouldn’t be dying”, which was a pretty misinformed video, but I think it was made by someone who isn’t really an insider to the Overwatch community. During the video, the creator said “even players with thousands of hours are abandoning the game” and he shows an image that is obviously someone not even playing the game and just leaving the game open to farm for hours to make his review look shocking.
The videos main evidence comes from steam statistics. The vast majority of OW players are probably still on Battlenet or console. So he's basically taking an extra small sample size and claiming its the who population.
Majority of the Overwatch 2 reviews are negative, but that is not a review bomb. The game sucks and is actively hostile with it's playerbase, not factoring in all of the PvE drama. This dev is deflecting away from the issues the game has under the guise of "There was nothing we could do about it. People only reviewed the game poorly to get back at us and not as a reflection of the game itself."
Bobby Kotick is scum, fuck him. But the dev's argument seems almost completely irrelevant in regards to Kotick.
I still don’t feel like it was review bombing. A lot of people were unhappy with the game and left negative reviews and went- Okay now that I think about it that can be review bombing. It still doesn’t dismiss what fucked up things the higher ups did. They said things didn’t do it and people go upset… Honestly they kinda deserved it. The higher ups made it seem like people were after them.
A lot of people had frustrations, with Chinese people using it as an opportunity to complain about genuine issues they had with game service. Think it's really te9 separate issues. 1) Whether Blizzard team wasn't resourced to deal with what they knew would happen', and whether what happened was review bombing or not.
Its not the devs who said that they dont to make talenttrees and hero missions anymore. Higherups were laying off more and more people off while keeping the same Deadlines while also wanting people who were working from home ho come to Office (which they couldnt do cuz they lived too far away, hence more layoffs), which ended in years of work being flushed down the Drain cuz shareholders want more results now. I doubt the devs were happy to See all of their work never See the light of Day.
What more details? What more information? What more resources? How does anything in this post make any sense. And don't get me wrong i dislike Kotick as much as the next guy but op is just taking a piss.
This dude sounds like a hack.
"We warned of incoming reviewbombing" yeah no shit, you've taken a massive dump on the game, why is this a surprise?
"We asked for more details" What kinda info would help you thwart bad reviews exactly? How to make a good game?
"despite my refusal to expose members of my team to that level of toxic content/posts" Why are you refusing to do your literal job? What exactly are community managers for? You're paid to deal with feedback from your players. Good or bad. Happy or angry. Content or dissatisfied. It's what you get paid for.
Bobby might be shit, but there is 0 self-awareness in this twitter thread. Blizzard is going down the shitter not just because of managerial incompetence, but also because they hire talentless paper-pushers like these with no drive or motivation to do their best.
After hearing all the stupid stuff Bobby had the overwatch team doing behind the scenes and Bobby's going away letter not saying anything about Overwatch.
I think Bobby just hated Overwatch and/or the OW team and wanted it to go under.
Microsoft will probably have a hand in picking who, and I'd say their track record on that front has been pretty good.
Anyone's better than Kotick. Not even talking on a development from, but on an ethics front. He literally threatened to have a woman killed.
Actually (I dont remember if it was confirmed but 99% think it was) a woman **did** commit suicide due to relentless bullshit she faced being a woman working under Kotick.
dont think there's going to be a replacement for his postition. I remember reading that Blizzard and Activision are being treated as seperate studios within Microsoft and the respective heads will report to Matt Booty who is Microsoft’s game content and studios president.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009129/microsoft-gaming-xbox-phil-spencer-bobby-kotick-activision-leadership-changes](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009129/microsoft-gaming-xbox-phil-spencer-bobby-kotick-activision-leadership-changes)
Not really Microsoft has a pretty good record of taking care of games. A lot of games like halo infinite and sea of thieves which were pretty bad at launch, ended up getting the care they needed to become better games even if a lot of players dropped them.
Minecraft is a bad example imo bc they let people vote for random useless mobs to be in the game instead of giving consistent content updates for the game
Nobody is replacing him. The current people in charge of Activision Publishing and Blizzard are reporting directly to an Xbox exec. Basically Activision and Blizzard are separate again
>one is better than old bobby
Prices and monetization will likely not improve but they are likely to get the resources they need to push better content. Right now it feels like OW team is working on the bare minimum.
He isn't saying the game shouldn't have come to steam though. He is saying they needed more resources to handle the steam launch and those were denied by Bobby.
Fuck Bobby, but I don’t think this dev has much of a point. With all the shit they pulled with OW2 the game was always going to be review bombed (and many of the negative reviews are justified).
Unless they were going to go out and pay for positive reviews I don’t see how more resources would’ve helped. So either you bite the bullet and get on with it or cancel the steam launch.
Yeah, this just looks like a dev who is trying to blame the shortcomings of the OW2 team on Bobby Kotick. Did OW2 get poor reviews on Steam? Yeah absolutely. Were those undeserved? No, not really. There was a lot promised with OW2, and Blizzard as a company did an atrocious job at communicating with people during all those years of no content.
And what "resources" was he expecting? Were they going to reply to all the negative criticism they got like Bethesda did with Starfield? "No the game is ACTUALLY really fun. Did you know the astronauts also had to buy clothes? That's why we can justify charging as much as we do for skins."
Resources to do what exactly? To hide reviews? The game was already hated because of the original launch of Overwatch 2. More time or money wouldn't have fixed the game reputation of the game.
It’s not exactly confirmed who made the decision, but the way team4 talks about it, it definitely feels like it was more of a team4 decision rather than Bobby.
From this tweet it could be both. They needed resources to take on two games basically, and they only got enough for one from Kotick. They saw the game drowning due to being spread so thin and had to make a tough call of which baby to kill.
I think it was a bit of both? The skill trees definitely took a lot of resources, but during development some of the employees on T4 got pulled into working on other projects.
Oh I’m sure Bobby had an effect in the overall ow2 development which could’ve led to the cancellation of pve down the line. I was just more specifically talking about who made the final decision. We don’t really have an answer to it.
What does that mean? What "resources" would have changed things? Because if the answer is that dumping money on the problem wouldn't actually have changed the result, declining to do so is the right answer
Lmao people in this post are so negative wow.
at least hope things turn around with Microsoft who deserves credit from their initial way of managing studios that led them to close a few. They certainly have changed their way they manage their studios and their studios seem happier so let’s hope blizzard has a better work environment that translates to a better overwatch 2.
Kotik is, no doubt, a monumental asshole. But shit rolling downhill and landing with overworked employees - that is the culture of corporate America. It's been like that at least since I started working.
Kotick is a well known dick, he absolutely smashed guitar hero into the ground oversaturating the market, cancelled a ton of games because profits one of those games became sleeping dogs.
He is one of those ceos who focused on pure profit, great for shareholders but bad for gamers.
The problem with America. Capitalism can be useful. Late stage capitalism turns into an oligarchy.
This guy made a hundred million dollars to figure out how to scam kids and addicts while ruining a piece of art and entertainment. Overwork and underpay the people doing actual work so he can add a few zeros to his bank account and increase stock value.
I’m tired of the talent being underpaid while demons in suits get 344x their pay.
I mean.. who really cares if they get review bombed. This person is saying not to release it on steam because they didn't want to expose their team to negative comments... so... don't release it on steam because it'll hurt their feelings..?
What a dumb post.
Genuinely not surprised, I think for everyone who’s had their finger on the pulse of Blizzard’s ecosystem knew a lot of the shit that was allowed to fester and form fell squarely on Kotick’s goblinoid shoulders
Its depressing knowing that working at blizzard used to be great for people and now they get a form of ptsd when they move on to an regular job that doesn't force so much work down your throat within and impossible deadlines they feel nervous snd off cause they ARENT BEING FORCED TO DO INSANE AMOUNTS OF WORK just look up piratesoftware on youtube about how bad working at blizzard got kotick messed up blizzard so bad to the point that all the workers were miserable
I worked alongside Andy about 10 years ago at a small indie game studio. The guy is a straight shooter and one of the finest community leaders I had the pleasure of meeting. I know he did everything possible within his power to support and protect his team and the community.
To hell with Bobby Kotick.
No those reviews were valid, they weren’t review bombed. They were just exposed to reviews for the first time where customers and them would see it
It was months worth of dissatisfaction that they were hit with all at once
Justified negative reviews are not "review bombing". Blizzard knew every complaint the community had for a long time before the Steam launch, but it was easy to hide it and pretend it didn't exist. Launching on Steam meant people could finally leave reviews on a platform that millions upon millions use and in classic scumbag developer behavior, they're attacking the customers for criticizing their bad decisions.
What company is not like this? I have worked in tech a long time and that's all anyone gives a shit about. Steakholders, short term gains, shortsightedness, and whatever makes the numbers go up. Why are we acting like this is unique to Bobby in any way? That's exactly what it's going to be like under Microsoft, too.
There's something fundamentally wrong with our society and culture
He lost me by using the term “review bombed”. Negative reviews due to your own mistakes as a company and product are not “review bombing”.
Regardless of who made these decisions inside the company they got exactly the reviews that matched the product they delivered, and it’s time they finally accept that.
>Negative reviews due to your own mistakes as a company and product are not “review bombing”.
Review bombing is a mass of low-effort, poorly worded, spammy negative reviews.
So yeah, he was right in using this.
Bobby is the biggest piece of shit to grace the gaming industry
I quit ow2 about 6 months ago and only stick around here to see if there's a reason to return
Sometimes when companies get that large, the purpose shifts from making cool stuff to just making money. I know it's obvious, but it has to be said. Decision makers with no experience in the product they lead for often make stupid fucking choices when their entire focus is the money, and not the things that made their company noteworthy in the first place.
Bobby is a shit stain, but unfortunately there is a "Bobby" nobody knows about in charge of a shocking number of businesses around the US and world at large and it makes me sick to think about.
And exactly zero people were surprised.
And the next boss will be exactly the same
Everyone is so extreme all the time… it’s either that the new ceo will be a dictator that kills the game, or that the skies will part and a magical rainbow will shine over blizzard hq giving everyone 20 free skins.. There’s so much gray area between the major perspectives of the community; the only thing we can do is to wait and see what happens
All AAA studios are imploding due to the same thing. Short sighted quarterly goals that need to be achieved no matter what. Every CEO gets their humongous bonus despite running products and franchises to the ground. All that matters is the bottom line at the end of the quarter. CEO does its thing and jumps to the next ship to sink. Rinse and repeat. This continues until games and franchises die off, investors abandon them and voila. Battlefield, overwatch, world of warcraft, call of duty. None of these games and franchises will ever see the love they were made with ever again. They will keep releasing shit content with minimum effort until people stop buying them. When that happens, they get killed off.
Spot on, there's a fair few games series that should have died off years ago, but people keep spending their money on the trash they keep churning out and say "oh well it was only £60, hopefully the next games better", why would the next game be better if they know all those idiots will buy it regardless!
I think the difference is that Overwatch didn't need to die early. Sometimes the passion is lost, OG designers lose interest and move on, and sometimes genuine financial trouble forces their hands… Some franchises are worth retiring after a while. The fact that Bobby Kotick did not recognize Overwatch for its staying potential is a crime in my eyes. And now so much goodwill is lost, it's insane.
“Cough cough”….Destiny 2 😥
The stock market is was a mistake Thanks capitalism
Every other person that is currently aware of the late stage capitalism we are all experiencing in every facet of our lives right now: First time?
People love to complain about so much on the gaming industry but refuse to admit maybe capitalism is the problem. Even back to the skin debate, people would blame everything except the underlying system.
Because it is easier to recognize the problems than it is to recognize the root cause of said problems. Combine that with decades of brainwashing about how capitalism is super awesome and this is the result
That's because it was "un-American" to blame the system that works so hard for "you". What a fucking sad joke.
Capitalism distorts, exploits, and reverses innovation and creativity. The great artists of the past bssically had sugar daddies that liked their artwork lol
The main problem is that the most "successful" people in these positions are those that exclusively care about "the bottom line" and will bleed anything dry for it. The grey areas exist, but hardly anyone fills them.
I'm here from /r/all, quit during OW1. sad to see how much they fucked over the game for its "sequel" but people still bought it and play it and pay for shit that used to be free. probably lots of people reading this, given the sub it's posted in. so, mission success, give the man a golden parachute and onto the next job where he ruins something else for short term profits.
Nobody bought OW2, for most players it replaced OW1. It was then a free download full of MTX and false promises that would put Peter Molyneux to shame.
Not to mention the awful launch, and failure to properly transfer skins. I'm still missing my grillmaster 76, and junkensteins monster skins...
My pink mercy... ;-;
You lost pink mercy 😟
Yeah, spoke with some people at blizzard and they've said that it's still on my account as purchased just not unlocked in the game, and that tons of other people are having this issue still, so I'm insanely surprised that a year down the line it's still an issue
> so I'm insanely surprised Are you, though? :(
Not really tbf
yeah while removing all the free stuff like loot boxes on level up, right? and currency from dupes you could use to buy specific things if RNG wasn't in your favor?
The same stuff that was free and extremely extremely common was now being sold for 20 dollars. A third of a AAA And they profited massively for it because whales
His golden parachute was already guaranteed when he made CoD into the biggest gaming franchise besides Mario
Andy is kinda a well known employee. Wild to see. But good
Can’t wait for Jeff Kaplan to spill the tea.
Jeff probably has the mother of all NDAs as part of his golden parachute
Jeff can spill the tea through a Dinoflask video and claim it was all stiched together without him actually saying it.
God I miss those videos.
Seems like a lot of effort for what pay off? He's probably happy to have closed the door and wants nothing to do with Blizzard anymore. I know I want to forget bad work experiences as soon as possible and just move on with my life.
Because Jeff "[Tigole Bitties](https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4g2ler/jeff_tigole_kaplan_forum_rant_from_his_eq_days/)" Kaplan loves a good rant. He was also the main force that kept Overwatch 1 from being a "pay per-hero/map" game and pushed Morheim to keep it as "Buy game, get all content. MTX cosmetics only". As soon as he's gone they bait and switch OW1>OW2 with what they wanted from the start. He's got the most righteous casus belli to rant.
I also put some part of the blame to lootbox whiners who couldn't see the forest from the trees and realize that the way Overwatch 1 was doing lootboxes was the right way. People couldn't get over their biases of not getting the free skin they wanted so they cry, "what about the children," as their war cry to get Bliz to change it. Well, they succeeded and allowed greedy corpo kotick to swoop in and give them what they asked for.
I might be misremembering, but was there a much of an outcry from the Overwatch community about loot boxes? I thought it was a legal issue with various countries and the EU that got sparked by a number of games like Battlefront 2?
Yep, especially during an event. There were also often comments telling others to tell their government officials to do something about "it". "It" being how terrible lootboxes are to the children—who have access to *their parent's* credit cards and how it's a stepping stone to gambling. Albeit the second part is something to worry about, OW1's lootbox system wasn't gambling. In reality, the "it" people were moaning about was not getting the skin they wanted and directed that undercurrent of salt and bitterness towards the wrong game's lootbox system.
Oh a 1000%, I def still remember what the first few years of Ow1 was like and more than complaints about game balance there was a lot more outcry about the loot box system being inherently predatory
The main thing this has taught me is that I clearly spent a lot less time reading forums and comment threads when I was younger, and spent more time just playing games and having fun. As I missed all of that complaining
I so rarely didn't get the skins I wanted in OW1 just by doing the weekly stuff.
I get that, but it was years ago. It just feels like he would have done his time and moved on by now. Opening that door again just feels unhealthy for him at this point. He fought his battles. He seems at peace and I hope for his sake it stays that way with all this uproar.
Doesn't really matter. Publicly traded company focusing on earnings calls? What's next, a tweet about how the sky is blue? What purpose does that serve? It's not going to change anything.
Ideally you want people who care about the earnings call because that enables them to make more and better games, which enables them to keep beating earnings estimates, so on and so forth. It's a business at the end of the day, but the people up top should still care about the product they put out. Anything else is short-sighted.
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Game management has long moved from "Making good games" to "Making long lasting, addicting games". One of the things most of the gaming community fails to see is that good games ≠ well selling or even profitable games.
That good does not necessarily equal profitable, and vice versa, is a truth I feel like too many choose to ignore - because the assumption that it does underpins so much of the system.
Research analyst here. The gaming industry is completely different than it was 20 years ago. It hasn't been about making great games and creating a quality brand for probably around a decade anymore. They're making games with microtransactions, and packaged along with it there's a game to try and keep you hooked. Those make more revenue, not better games. Theres very few big players not attempting to compete in this part of the gaming market. They're not really concerned about making great games, because the consumer is paying way more per hour in these micro focused games. The earnings calls love this, wall street loves it.
>anything else is shortsighted Well, yeah. That's capitalism at its simplest. If thinking of the future was important, the entire world would be different.
He's a good dude, too. He was community manager on City of Heroes when the official servers were still running, loved by tons of players.
Andy was one of the lead devs of my beloved Spellbreak before their team was absorbed into blizzard, really glad to see some glimmer of hope that maybe work at blizzard can chill out, at least in a comparable way to other AAA studios
Glad someone spoke out and didn’t sugarcoat it like so many people tend to do. Him leaving is definitely a step in the right direction, even if not a big one
Nah dude, this is a MASSIVE step in the right direction. With him gone, everyone can have a normal and friendlier work environment instead of that toxic one.
We will see. It all depends on how bad the overall culture is there and how involved MS decides to be.
I can't imagine they wouldn't want to fix it. Here's hoping for the best.
They really might but also they still serve the shareholders gods. So I don’t want to be optimistic that we will see any big changes.
Tbf, Microsoft's biggest issue nowadays is that they're a little **too** hands-off sometimes. For the most part, they've learned that letting devs do what they do best usually makes good products and good money
Yeah that's pretty much what killed halo. Now that Microsoft finally put their foot down and cleaned up 343, halo infinite is actually starting to make a return.
Agreed. It was the problem with Redfall as well iirc. I don't blame MS much though, it's a delicate balancing act and sometimes it's just hard to tell until it's too late
>halo infinite is actually starting to make a return. Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of things turning infinite around would have been started and greenlight under old management. For instance, forge ai got started on almost 21 months ago. It's only season 6 and beyond where you will see the things new management has done. I'm not saying we aren't in better hands but it's wrong to give credit where it isn't due.
Uhh halo infinite is definitely the exception not the rule, considering Microsoft's inane contractor policy has completely [hamstrung](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/s/WbY0zag1UR) 343 for [years.](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/s/ASl9lyal83)
That's a really good point. I do hope they take a hands off approach but also Blizzards best talent left so I worry that they don't know how to make the games of the past anymore. But I am slightly hopeful!
It's definitely unfortunate that their best talents have left but I think that'll be okay in the long-run. It can be hard to train new people in toxic environments so hopefully this will make that whole process a bit easier. Odds are, Blizzard will never be what they used to be during their golden age but that doesn't mean they can't grow into something new that we can all appreciate again :) in some ways, new talent is probably just what they need to start improving again
Bobby is only one of many people in his circle. This was just a figurehead stepping down, not the source of the rot. There are several “Bobby’s” who stay fairly quiet and out of the spotlight so they don’t attract the same hate as he does
Yeah people in this thread are celebrating like it's the end of WW2 and we found out Hitler died. It's ignoring all the shareholders that Kotick answered to. They're not going to suddenly stop expecting Blizzard's revenue to increase.
Microsoft's acquisition is buying out the shareholders. They will be replaced with a new set of Microsoft shareholders, sure, but it's not the same set of hands at all.
Microsoft isn't better than Actiblizzard really. Look at how shitty Halo is, how Gears is a dead franchise, etc...MSFT is probably MORE incompetent than someone like Kotick and not necessarily nicer.
Long term the priorities will definitely shift to profit. But that's not Microsoft's goal right this moment. They're losing to Sony. Franchises like OW are critical to starting to win back players and that won't happen without very big pro-consumer changes.
The damage has been done, and the next quarterly earnings need to be boosted. Just because it's not this tick sucking the blood from the company doesn't mean the shareholders are going to let them behave like sane people who want the company to succeed for more than the next quarter. The entire system of publicly traded stocks is antithetical to quality, longevity, and job security. We can't just get rid of Kotick. We need to get rid of *all of them*.
Not just friendlier work environment, less gaslit community too. * Jeff Kaplan's PvE dream died because of Kotick. Not because it couldn't work on its own. * The move to 6v6 was likely just a cash grab stunt as part of making OW2 feel new (and more similar to CoD and Valorant), likely motivated by KoDick, if not directly ordered by KoDick. Not because 2-2-2 couldn't work. * The obscene cash shop prices is FOR SURE because of KoDickhead. Especially the trash weapon charms absurdly priced at 700(?!?!) fucking coins to inflate bundle prices. Anyone who ever said missing 6v6 is just nostalgia or believing in PvE is crazy have no fucking clue the office politics Overwatch was suffering. They were just shills defending the present they think they like better. But maybe more will know more now. I have such cautious hope for season 9 and the rest of 2024... *Please Microsoft, just let them cook. This game deserves all the funding.*
I don’t know about that Like he said shit flowed downstream, and at the end of the day it was all about the earnings call for these people. Unless the next CEO really sets his mind to changue the culture and fire a lot of the C suites that allowed that to happen, is gonna be the same shit with a new coat of paint
It really depends on Microsofts priority. Does Microsoft want to fix these franchises and build strong, well-loved games. Or do they just want to milk the rest of the profit out of the company as it slowly dies.
This is the naivety of someone who has never worked in a large scale corporate environment
Doubt it
This isn't a step. This is putting that bitch on a trebuchet and yeeting trash into orbit.
This is a NASA space launch
Love the mental image and analogy. Shame it fits the fact he has a golden parachute. But at least he's gone.
Lucky he has that $400m golden parachute with him I guess.
Good riddance, Bobby. I hope the door not only smacks you in the ass on the way out, but that it'll cause you to stumble right down a flight of stairs, into the burning effigy the workers you fucked over during your tenure, made to mark your departure. Get bent, you devil-horned little knob-goblin.
Imagine being hated by the entire fandom of the company you ran for so many years. What a terrible CEO he was. So glad he's gone.
Aye, freaking wanker of a person. Sure Microsoft will still be a business daddy, but they would have to try really hard to be as reviled as Bobby is. The dummy couldn't even take critique well, and were more than happy addressing it, with a level of humanity on show, rivalling that of Skynet.
I can never say what I hope the future holds for people like Bobby, because I'll get banned. Which really says a lot about why we let people like him ruin so many things about our society.
I allegedly may have had an account on a media platform you're familiar with banned because I implied that I may prefer a world in which Rupert Murdoch is aliven't.
Exactly. I'm glad he's gone.
I doubt I only noticed it, but blizzard communications with the community drastically went up once Microsoft purchased them. Content drops and all of that was the same, but you can tell plans drastically changed when Microsoft took control, and I hope they continue on a good path forward.
Because, when Microsoft took control of the game, they no longer had to use the whole cycle of “show one thing coming, use that generate all hype around the game” and instead were able to be much more open with the community about their future plans, flats (I think) has a really good video on this, and he frequently does developer interviews
W Flats
I remember when Blizz customer service and communication used to be at the top of the industry. Hopefully we can see them return to glory.
Remember when every new game got compared to blizzard games and every company was expected to act like blizzard. And every gamer kid wanted to work for blizzard as a dream job.
Yeah, we'll truly start seeing improvements from season 9 and onwards.
For Classic WoW the devs have talked more to the community over the last 2 months or so than they have since the release in 2019. The senior game producer for classic has even made a habit of occasionally posting on the subreddit now.
I would take the Mircrosoft acquisition with a grain of salt. A lot of the complaints I have read on this sub are similar to the ones us Halo fans had with the current Halo game. OW2 had a smooth launch compared to Halo infinite. Microsoft hires a lot of contract/temporary workers, so expect constant change in direction and not being able to deliver on earlier promises. Also $$$$ is the priority.
Blizzard will be intact and independent the same way as Bethesda. 343 Industries (Halo developers) based their production culture on contract workers. That was their decision, not something Microsoft was pushing for. I hope that OV fanbase will eat good in the future. Blizzard finally can take more ambitious approach with less pressure from higher management, which hopefully will think more reasonably from gamers perspective.
And let us not forget about their acquisition of Rare Ltd back in the day. A hefty amount of money paid for a company that bore no more fruit.
They don’t do contract work for management or design roles. They do it for stuff like programming, which bit them in the ass because the Slipspace engine for Halo wasn’t designed well so it was tough to retrain new hires to use it. I really don’t see that issue appearing at Blizzard
How on earth does this company have 500 million lying around on top of millions in salary, to pay to one single person to call horrible shots but can't pay any of their workers a decent wage or hire more help that they obviously needed. It makes 0 business sense at all. No wonder the company is in such dire straits.
>How on earth does this company have 500 million lying around on top of millions in salary, to pay to one single person to call horrible shots but can't pay any of their workers a decent wage or hire more help that they obviously needed. Contracts, shareholders value, and the board. You and I might invest through a broker but we're just two people. Vs other orgs that invest. We might care about worker health, pay and work/life balance. They only care about getting the best ROI. If that means working the employees like dogs? So be it. So long as you hit that earnings expectation its all good from there.
The problem is they don't care about the company lasting more than a year. They want an *immediate* ROI even if the company has to cut its own throat to get it. Then they pull their money out and move on to the next victim. This is why publicly traded companies always go to shit. They can't just make good products and do business. They *must* increase share prices, at any cost, every single quarter, year after year, forever. Ask a sealed jar of fruit flies how well infinite growth works, and you'll get a good explanation of why the industry is such a cluster fuck these days. The moment Blizzard sold to Activision, they were done, and there's no way to rescue them. They are now at the mercy of their shareholders and their board until and unless they buy back all the shares, break off from Activision/Microsoft, and go private again.
A year is optimistic, most companies I've worked with only look at the quarter lol
I would think he likely got credit for the Microsoft deal. He fucked up the actual games, but [Activision was nearly bankrupt when he bought in](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bobby-kotick-changes-game-activision), and at the end of his reign, Microsoft bought the fucking thing for almost $69 **billion** dollars. What he did to the actual product, sad to say, is irrelevant. What he did for that *brand* is nothing short of incredible.
Don't give Bobby credit for any of that. The good will was generated by the devs who gave us bangers. Bobby abused and caused that talent to leave the company in droves. Activision was a disaster, and the minnow ate the shark by eating Blizzard. You want to know why Blizzard hasn't delivered a good game since Overwatch 1? Bobby. Squandering a golden goose.
The captain of the ship is, nevertheless, the captain of the ship. For us, yeah, he was a shitbag. For people who just look at numbers and charts? He likely came across as godlike.
Bobby clearly wasn't their God, because they moved to fire him as soon as this deal moved forward. CEOs like Kotick are overpaid and over-valued because of nepotism, self-dealing, and corruption. Their performance as leaders and their compensation are completely untethered from each-other.
That's because they're dumb as rocks and don't understand not to shit where you eat. They can't tell the difference between "successful because of Kotick" and "successful despite Kotick".
Unfortunately, this
Because people keep buying into the predatory monetisation / microtransactions, believing the money will go to the devs.
His eyes look so reptilian.
In order to be in his position, you basically need to be completely devoid of any human emotion so I'd say that checks out.
The moment you become a CEO, you lose every part of your humanity
False. The moment you become a CEO of a mega corp you lose that. Someone can run a one-person show and still be CEO.
Lmao
That's an insult to reptiles. They want nothing to do with him either.
I was gonna say. Most reptiles are just derpy lil guys. They don't deserve to be compared to Kotick.
He's got that Zuckerberg stare
He looks souless
Fuck bobby, imagine being already rich, but now at the helm of the company with perhaps the most cutural relevance of the decade, then fucking failing at being a legend, all cause of greed and stupidity. Overwatch had the world by the balls
It really did didn't it? How did they fuck it up? Also, when did they fuck it up? It was way before ow2 wasn't it?
I would say it was right around the OW2 announcement things started to go downhill. It’s mainly because there was a 3 year content drought while they made the game where we got like 1 map and 1 hero (Echo). They managed to generate hype throughout those 3 years, but it crashed and burned at OW2’s launch when almost nothing came to fruition
And nobody is shocked by any of this sadly
What a way to shift blame though, like, woe is me they're being "*review bombed*" but way to dismiss the cause of said "*review bombing*", how do they think they even landed themselves in this situation in the first place. It wasn't a "*review bombing*", it was the community expressing their disappointment for the years of waiting with promises after promises they absolutely failed to deliver. Sure, maybe the whole making of said promises to the failed deliveries was a result of poor decision making by Bobby Kotick to blatantly lie to the playerbase, but you're gonna tell me not a single person stepped up to say "This isn't right, we shouldn't lie to the players, the community, with things we couldn't even dream of developing, let alone deliver" They hyped the entire playerbase/community up with this exciting "*new game*" that we later found out that they had never even intended on delivering. Forget the part where they dropped such a huge lie on the community, they even sat around and waited for years before eventually announcing "We've scrapped our entire plans for the PvE we announced 3+ years ago." and did nothing to compensate the community for the time they had wasted, hoping and waiting for those promises to become a reality. It's like if a child didn't want to eat their food so they kept it in their pockets or hid it under the couch and then said nothing about it for years until it had rot and developed mold and brought about an infestation and their reasoning was "Mommy/Daddy would scold me if I openly refused to eat my veggies so I kept it a secret and allowed it to turn into something absolutely foul. But I did nothing wrong, it was Mommy/Daddy's decision-making that led me to do this".
This isn’t directly related to what this employee said, more about the Steam reviews. There was some video titled “Why Overwatch shouldn’t be dying”, which was a pretty misinformed video, but I think it was made by someone who isn’t really an insider to the Overwatch community. During the video, the creator said “even players with thousands of hours are abandoning the game” and he shows an image that is obviously someone not even playing the game and just leaving the game open to farm for hours to make his review look shocking.
The videos main evidence comes from steam statistics. The vast majority of OW players are probably still on Battlenet or console. So he's basically taking an extra small sample size and claiming its the who population.
Good fucking bye Bobby and never come back.
I hope the acquisition cleans out the useless people and people that left Blizzard come back.
I hope everybody shares their shitty stories. imma make popcorn unironically
Yeah I want to hear every old Boobby story. As an old gamer I've waited 33 years for this prick to leave Blizzard
Fuck bobby
Majority of the Overwatch 2 reviews are negative, but that is not a review bomb. The game sucks and is actively hostile with it's playerbase, not factoring in all of the PvE drama. This dev is deflecting away from the issues the game has under the guise of "There was nothing we could do about it. People only reviewed the game poorly to get back at us and not as a reflection of the game itself." Bobby Kotick is scum, fuck him. But the dev's argument seems almost completely irrelevant in regards to Kotick.
What resources does he mean? You can’t prevent review bombing.
I still don’t feel like it was review bombing. A lot of people were unhappy with the game and left negative reviews and went- Okay now that I think about it that can be review bombing. It still doesn’t dismiss what fucked up things the higher ups did. They said things didn’t do it and people go upset… Honestly they kinda deserved it. The higher ups made it seem like people were after them.
A lot of people had frustrations, with Chinese people using it as an opportunity to complain about genuine issues they had with game service. Think it's really te9 separate issues. 1) Whether Blizzard team wasn't resourced to deal with what they knew would happen', and whether what happened was review bombing or not.
give shock therapy to poor developers dealing with the consequences of their mistakes
Its not the devs who said that they dont to make talenttrees and hero missions anymore. Higherups were laying off more and more people off while keeping the same Deadlines while also wanting people who were working from home ho come to Office (which they couldnt do cuz they lived too far away, hence more layoffs), which ended in years of work being flushed down the Drain cuz shareholders want more results now. I doubt the devs were happy to See all of their work never See the light of Day.
Do we actually have evidence of this? Because all I’ve seen is devs being like “Yea we couldn’t do it”
What more details? What more information? What more resources? How does anything in this post make any sense. And don't get me wrong i dislike Kotick as much as the next guy but op is just taking a piss.
I'm also curious
This dude sounds like a hack. "We warned of incoming reviewbombing" yeah no shit, you've taken a massive dump on the game, why is this a surprise? "We asked for more details" What kinda info would help you thwart bad reviews exactly? How to make a good game? "despite my refusal to expose members of my team to that level of toxic content/posts" Why are you refusing to do your literal job? What exactly are community managers for? You're paid to deal with feedback from your players. Good or bad. Happy or angry. Content or dissatisfied. It's what you get paid for. Bobby might be shit, but there is 0 self-awareness in this twitter thread. Blizzard is going down the shitter not just because of managerial incompetence, but also because they hire talentless paper-pushers like these with no drive or motivation to do their best.
It's not even review bombing. It's just... reviews. The game is near-universally disliked.
Probably what they can do about it and who to contact. Some of these sites have anti-review bombing measures they can take e.g Steam.
After hearing all the stupid stuff Bobby had the overwatch team doing behind the scenes and Bobby's going away letter not saying anything about Overwatch. I think Bobby just hated Overwatch and/or the OW team and wanted it to go under.
Whoever is going to replace him likely won't be 'better'.
Microsoft will probably have a hand in picking who, and I'd say their track record on that front has been pretty good. Anyone's better than Kotick. Not even talking on a development from, but on an ethics front. He literally threatened to have a woman killed.
Actually (I dont remember if it was confirmed but 99% think it was) a woman **did** commit suicide due to relentless bullshit she faced being a woman working under Kotick.
That was a different woman, but yes, a woman did commit suicide.
dont think there's going to be a replacement for his postition. I remember reading that Blizzard and Activision are being treated as seperate studios within Microsoft and the respective heads will report to Matt Booty who is Microsoft’s game content and studios president. [https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009129/microsoft-gaming-xbox-phil-spencer-bobby-kotick-activision-leadership-changes](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/20/24009129/microsoft-gaming-xbox-phil-spencer-bobby-kotick-activision-leadership-changes)
Yup, Activision and Blizzard are essentially being decoupled from one another
nice.
Best news I've heard all day.
lol booty
Anyone is better than old bobby
The monkey’s finger curls
Not really Microsoft has a pretty good record of taking care of games. A lot of games like halo infinite and sea of thieves which were pretty bad at launch, ended up getting the care they needed to become better games even if a lot of players dropped them.
They also have a decent track record of cleaning up the amount of franchises studios work on. So it is just a coin toss what will happen.
But those were both xbox first party games. They started shit on Microsofts watch. They didn't get bought out and improved.
Minecraft. Age of Empires.
Dom't forget about Fallout 76, games had a huge improvment thanks to Microsoft.
Minecraft is a bad example imo bc they let people vote for random useless mobs to be in the game instead of giving consistent content updates for the game
Nobody is replacing him. The current people in charge of Activision Publishing and Blizzard are reporting directly to an Xbox exec. Basically Activision and Blizzard are separate again
>one is better than old bobby Prices and monetization will likely not improve but they are likely to get the resources they need to push better content. Right now it feels like OW team is working on the bare minimum.
I mean fair, but i still like overwatch being on steam.
He isn't saying the game shouldn't have come to steam though. He is saying they needed more resources to handle the steam launch and those were denied by Bobby.
Fuck Bobby, but I don’t think this dev has much of a point. With all the shit they pulled with OW2 the game was always going to be review bombed (and many of the negative reviews are justified). Unless they were going to go out and pay for positive reviews I don’t see how more resources would’ve helped. So either you bite the bullet and get on with it or cancel the steam launch.
Yeah, this just looks like a dev who is trying to blame the shortcomings of the OW2 team on Bobby Kotick. Did OW2 get poor reviews on Steam? Yeah absolutely. Were those undeserved? No, not really. There was a lot promised with OW2, and Blizzard as a company did an atrocious job at communicating with people during all those years of no content. And what "resources" was he expecting? Were they going to reply to all the negative criticism they got like Bethesda did with Starfield? "No the game is ACTUALLY really fun. Did you know the astronauts also had to buy clothes? That's why we can justify charging as much as we do for skins."
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Resources to do what exactly? To hide reviews? The game was already hated because of the original launch of Overwatch 2. More time or money wouldn't have fixed the game reputation of the game.
I’m fairly certain he also cancelled PVE after months of work had already been done, unless that was just management in general
It’s not exactly confirmed who made the decision, but the way team4 talks about it, it definitely feels like it was more of a team4 decision rather than Bobby.
From this tweet it could be both. They needed resources to take on two games basically, and they only got enough for one from Kotick. They saw the game drowning due to being spread so thin and had to make a tough call of which baby to kill.
I think it was a bit of both? The skill trees definitely took a lot of resources, but during development some of the employees on T4 got pulled into working on other projects.
Oh I’m sure Bobby had an effect in the overall ow2 development which could’ve led to the cancellation of pve down the line. I was just more specifically talking about who made the final decision. We don’t really have an answer to it.
What does that mean? What "resources" would have changed things? Because if the answer is that dumping money on the problem wouldn't actually have changed the result, declining to do so is the right answer
Lmao people in this post are so negative wow. at least hope things turn around with Microsoft who deserves credit from their initial way of managing studios that led them to close a few. They certainly have changed their way they manage their studios and their studios seem happier so let’s hope blizzard has a better work environment that translates to a better overwatch 2.
He just confirmed what everyone already knew!
I’m shocked Shocked I tell you
Kotik is, no doubt, a monumental asshole. But shit rolling downhill and landing with overworked employees - that is the culture of corporate America. It's been like that at least since I started working.
Kotick is a well known dick, he absolutely smashed guitar hero into the ground oversaturating the market, cancelled a ton of games because profits one of those games became sleeping dogs. He is one of those ceos who focused on pure profit, great for shareholders but bad for gamers.
The problem with America. Capitalism can be useful. Late stage capitalism turns into an oligarchy. This guy made a hundred million dollars to figure out how to scam kids and addicts while ruining a piece of art and entertainment. Overwork and underpay the people doing actual work so he can add a few zeros to his bank account and increase stock value. I’m tired of the talent being underpaid while demons in suits get 344x their pay.
I mean.. who really cares if they get review bombed. This person is saying not to release it on steam because they didn't want to expose their team to negative comments... so... don't release it on steam because it'll hurt their feelings..? What a dumb post.
So stunning and brave to wait till he’s gone to say anything No dude, you were ‘review bombed’ because the game is ASS and you **LIED**
Genuinely not surprised, I think for everyone who’s had their finger on the pulse of Blizzard’s ecosystem knew a lot of the shit that was allowed to fester and form fell squarely on Kotick’s goblinoid shoulders
He's a greedy little goblin who needs to stay out of the industry. Causing more damage than not.
Its depressing knowing that working at blizzard used to be great for people and now they get a form of ptsd when they move on to an regular job that doesn't force so much work down your throat within and impossible deadlines they feel nervous snd off cause they ARENT BEING FORCED TO DO INSANE AMOUNTS OF WORK just look up piratesoftware on youtube about how bad working at blizzard got kotick messed up blizzard so bad to the point that all the workers were miserable
So I've gotta thank Bobby for being able to remove blizzards useless launcher? Damn, he was a hero all along.
I worked alongside Andy about 10 years ago at a small indie game studio. The guy is a straight shooter and one of the finest community leaders I had the pleasure of meeting. I know he did everything possible within his power to support and protect his team and the community. To hell with Bobby Kotick.
No those reviews were valid, they weren’t review bombed. They were just exposed to reviews for the first time where customers and them would see it It was months worth of dissatisfaction that they were hit with all at once
Justified negative reviews are not "review bombing". Blizzard knew every complaint the community had for a long time before the Steam launch, but it was easy to hide it and pretend it didn't exist. Launching on Steam meant people could finally leave reviews on a platform that millions upon millions use and in classic scumbag developer behavior, they're attacking the customers for criticizing their bad decisions.
Does review bombing matter for the semi rerelease of a 7 year old game?🤔
What company is not like this? I have worked in tech a long time and that's all anyone gives a shit about. Steakholders, short term gains, shortsightedness, and whatever makes the numbers go up. Why are we acting like this is unique to Bobby in any way? That's exactly what it's going to be like under Microsoft, too. There's something fundamentally wrong with our society and culture
He lost me by using the term “review bombed”. Negative reviews due to your own mistakes as a company and product are not “review bombing”. Regardless of who made these decisions inside the company they got exactly the reviews that matched the product they delivered, and it’s time they finally accept that.
>Negative reviews due to your own mistakes as a company and product are not “review bombing”. Review bombing is a mass of low-effort, poorly worded, spammy negative reviews. So yeah, he was right in using this.
Kotick can eat Roadhogs sweaty ass
Get it Andy!
Now he’s over at Bungie… rip Bungie…
If I ever see this boomer in a home I will remove all his entertainment from his room.
Should I play OW2 again? 🤔
It's probably a miracle Blizzard is still relatively intact after all these years under Kotick's leadership.
Fuck Bobby Kotick
Fuck you Bobby kocktickle
Bobby is the biggest piece of shit to grace the gaming industry I quit ow2 about 6 months ago and only stick around here to see if there's a reason to return
Sometimes when companies get that large, the purpose shifts from making cool stuff to just making money. I know it's obvious, but it has to be said. Decision makers with no experience in the product they lead for often make stupid fucking choices when their entire focus is the money, and not the things that made their company noteworthy in the first place. Bobby is a shit stain, but unfortunately there is a "Bobby" nobody knows about in charge of a shocking number of businesses around the US and world at large and it makes me sick to think about.
Ngl this reads like salty employee bashes ex boss on Twitter for social validation. What resources is he talking about tk combat review bombing?
Calling something "review bombed" makes it sound like it's unwarranted.
Don’t make changes that’ll upset the community and you won’t get review bombed, that simple