Gonna say what the 14-year-old me would have said...

Maybe if they took some of the CEO pay and put it into game development and community building... they wouldn't be losing players.

> https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-17-activision...

As a long-time fan of Blizzard games... have to say... what others have said mostly in here.

WoW... peaked in like 2010. They know this, and that's why they re-release WoW Classic. They have been slowly ruining what made the game fun by taking away the community and need for communication. It was too hard to make friends and form groups... so they built automatic group finders. Cool, except they didn't keep the core values in place. The game was about making friends. If you take that away... what's the point of a social game? They dumbed down all the stat weight mechanics to just a gear score. They had that whole expansion where you had to spend all your time not raiding in solo-player mode in your Garrison... oof. Just feels like the people they have running the games aren't actually gamers, but people who sit back and say, "How can I increase hours spent playing... WITHOUT making it more fun?" I hated all the modern cut scenes and NPC's who talked to you, "You're the greatest hero Azeroth has ever seen!" Oof. Like I don't need some pixel playing a recorded affirmation message, if I wanted that shit I'd play a single-player game. I need fun shit to do with friends, I need just enough down time and waiting while we travel between dungeons to talk to people and get a sense for who I like and who I don't. I quit in Wrath, but tried to go back a few times and each time it's pretty painful. So like fair to say I don't have enough experience with the game to say, but it really has no community feel at all to me any more. WoW Classic - relaunch under way.

Diablo... D3 sucked. It got a lot better with later releases, but on the whole it's pretty meh and has been pretty meh it's whole existence. The scaling is off, I don't know. Like you get in, and you play for 30 minutes, and you're instantly able to do like nightmare level 15... there's no effort to get there. There's no struggle, so there's no sense of achievement. All that's left is an endless grind, doing the same boring thing, hoping the "Primal Ancient" version of the item you need drops so you can do 1.5% more damage. Again, no community to speak of. They never had a way to monetize Diablo 3, and the "real money auction house" was a disaster. The content was always so stale, they just didn't make enough of it. Or make it challenging enough. When I play... you either zoom at max speed, or you get one-shot and killed. Other than equipping the right gear (based on the instructions of a website), doesn't ever feel like you make any meaningful choices when playing. There's no, "Oh I would have lived if I used X instead of Y..." moments. Always just, "I would have lived if I ground out 400 more stamina by doing ultra-repetitive rifts. Diablo 2 Remastered - relaunch pending.

StarCraft... Great game, I thought SC2 was well done. And... inexplicably it has sat dormant. SC2 was never as good as SC. StarCraft 2 Remastered - relaunch happened a few years back.

Overwatch... never played it. Don't do FPS. Looked fine, but I hear it's not as fun as PUBG or others. And apparently one of the new heroes really unbalanced some things.

Heros of the Storm... never played it. Not a fan of the the gimmicky "hero-based" RTS.

Hearthstone... tried it, it's just Magic the Gathering. It's fine, but I didn't have all the cards other people had so I couldn't win. I don't know, I'll blame that. I just wasn't into it. For me, too many bells and noises. Animations were too detailed. Every time you played a card, it gave you some sort of drawn out "oh look at this, this is happening!" animation and it felt like the game was slower as a result.

Lost Vikings... GREAT game for SNES back in the 90s. Re-release pending. Ha.

Overall theme... they stopped trying to build new great stuff, and just focused on re-releasing old great stuff. The old stuff appeals to some of the old players, maybe some of the new players, but pretty clear example of how a company can "run out of good ideas" and every bit of news you hear about how the company is run... layoffs, more layoffs... old founders starting a new company to get back to "good game development"... CEOs getting huge pay days... it doesn't sound like it's healthy.