I’m sorry but one of my close friends works at Blizzard, has worked there for almost 2 decades now, and has multiple teams he over sees.

He and his people are hard workers, usually working over 40 hours a week. Many, himself included, are also on call to be ready to assist or direct sudden issues that may come up. Whenever there is an expansion to WoW or other bug updates to a game, my friend and his teams will easily out in 80 hours a week. Sometimes over several months.

Having known him’ met several co-workers of his, and know what he goes through to hire on new people, I entiely disagree with your assessment of who works at Blizzard.

From what I heard, what had happened was that Blizzard said they had a big Diablo announcement they were going to make (either at Blizzcon or during the coverage of the Overwatch tournament, I forget) and a lot of people assumed/believed it was going to be Diablo IV. Then the announcement happens and the announcement is that they have a new Diablo game that's a cell phone app. The game is reportedly a pretty thinly-veiled reskin of an existing "pay-to-win" cell phone game and people boo the announcement mercilessly, AS THEY SHOULD, for various reasons. Apparently the Blizzard guy's reaction to the booes was "What, don't you people have cell phones?"

I'm not denigrating the hard work that people put into games at Blizzard. I play Overwatch now and I enjoy it for what it is. But this was an epic failure on the part of their marketing and upper management in terms of what the announcement was and when it was made, and frankly the game itself is low-hanging-fruit garbage, from what people who looked at it have said. This was not some Herculean labor of love effort on the part of the hard-working programmers and creative people to make a brand new game, it was closer to a reskin of an existing game with a Diablo theme, or so I'm told. I'm not going to tell people to cheer a terrible pay-to-win game just to be polite. The head honchos that green-lit that game project and made the decision to market it as such made a major miscalculation there and they should listen to the booes and manage things differently in the future or be replaced with people who will, in my opinion.

And look, this is me talking here, I'm the guy that wanted to monetize TFs, if you recall. I'm not AGAINST making money. I don't hate Blizzard for being the 900lb gorilla of the PC game industry. I don't begrudge anyone wanting to make a successful product and sell it for money to people who enjoy it. But when the business people in charge cut too many corners and try to many cash-grabs, people have a right to express their disappointment in the new game they were excitedly awaiting when it falls flat.

Of course, they (Blizzard) should have seen this reaction coming. There's known precedent for this sort of thing happening throughout entertainment history.

Jack Black (actor and leader of the band Tenacious D) once told a story about the worst time he ever got anything thrown at him while he was playing music on stage doing a concert. He said that the organizers of the event realized that they could get more ticket sales money if they told the customers that the band was a surprise with teasers that it contained famous people, was well known, had a hit single, etc than they would if they just told people who the bad was. People want to find out who the mystery band is, etc. It builds hype for the event. So the gig was advertized as such. The event happens, the curtain is raised and it's...... Tenacious D!!! .... and over half the people start booing and throwing stuff at the band, because they thought it was going to "be a band I actually like/have heard of" Jack Black's telling of the story was like "so they apparently bought the tickets to this mystery band show thing believing 'It's totally going to be the Stones, or somebody, like it's probably ZEPPELIN with a new drummer, right?!?!" and then Tenacious D was a HUGE let down from what they had imagined they were going to get.

A year or two ago, I made a post about how storytelling in WoW had gone away and the game just catered to the raiding crowd anymore. I mentioned how Kevin Siembieda of Palladium Books had once gone to Blizzard for a lecture on storytelling a long long time ago before they had given up on storytelling I must sit here and go on record as being wrong. By all accounts, the storytelling of their latest expansion Battle for Azeroth is some of their best yet.

I left WoW about 7 years ago because I thought it was on its way out. It looks like I was wrong about that as well.

Huckleberry wrote:

I mentioned how Kevin Siembieda of Palladium Books had once gone to Blizzard for a lecture on storytelling.

Huh I didn't know that - that's kind of cool.

Interdictor wrote:

Blizzard made a [I]slight[/I] miscalculation in my humble opinion. Your big Diablo-related announcement at Blizzcon, made in front of a crowd of hardcore PC gamers, is for a mobile game? I'm really not surprised at the reaction (though the death threats are completely out of line). One of the presenters saying something along the lines of "what you guys have phones don't you?" didn't really help matters. They really misjudged their audience.

If they had announced that they are working on an actual next installment in the Diablo franchise I think it would have gone over a bit better - kind of like "hey, while you are waiting for Diablo 4 to be released, we have this little mobile game we are doing on the side."

It might turn out to be a fun game, and successful for them too. I have no intention of playing it (I'd sooner replay Diablo 1-3 or Path of Exile), but it might be a big hit with the mobile gaming crowd.

I think many could agree that may have been the better way to go with it.