Oh no acquisition strategy stopped working. Wait until they realize if they won't make enough new good games their subscriptions will start to fade out because game industry is not the same as video or music.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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They should do the typical thing and shut down Activision.
All that Modern Warfare 2019 talent can finally go do something worthwhile again, and not just pump out slop.
Plus the Blizzard name has cashed in all of its previous good reputation, at least from my point of view.
Most fond things I see said about them are from people still playing their older games, other than a friend that is still playing wow classic.
I almost bought Diablo 4 a few times but remembered who the company was. The Overwatch 2 fiasco made me avoid joining in. WC3 Remake was a disaster ...
After hearing about Bobby Kotick (sp?) the prick CEO who destroyed the company to completely enrich himself and hearing stories from Thor (PirateSoftware) about Blizzard it makes me never want to support them ever.
Makes me sad because I remember a time where I was such a champion of Blizzard. I just knew any game they had was solid back then.
Oh yeah, 90s and 00s Blizzard was great. I had fallen in love with RTS after playing a demo for Dune 2000 (I think it was) and after mentioning it to a friend, he loaned me his copy of Warcraft II. From there, my top games were Blizzard games for over a decade. WC2, SC, found out that cool Diablo game another friend had shown me was also Blizzard as they were marketing D2, then WC3, then WoW was my peak Blizzard obsession. But they still had some more good ones: SC2, Hearthstone, HotS, then the first Overwatch.
I think all that WoW money ruined them. Line must go up, even if they were on a massive mountain that would naturally eventually wane as people grew bored of the game and the niche it fit in grew more crowded. They started chasing dollars instead of chasing great games and making dollars in the process.
That Diablo phone app game being announced as if their audience gave a fuck about mobile games showed how out of touch they were with what used to make them great. And the follow up "don't you all have phones?" just cemented how blind they were, not even considering that the people making mobile games so much money didn't have much overlap with their current fan base, most of whom built a relatively expensive gaming PC to game on despite how much cheaper phones already were.
And there were other questionable things, like that WC3 remaster that no one asked for replacing the more capable original.
The D3 auction house, though to be fair to that one, I liked the idea going in and it was only after experiencing it that I understood it was a bad idea that would make most runs boring because most drops couldn't compare to items I could get cheap on the AH.
Then the China thing and trying to defraud a tournament winner out of their prize because he said something in support of Hong Kong. Then finding out that it was a workplace dripping with toxic masculinity (which was the case even when they were doing great).
And then they did a WC3 remaster on Overwatch, replacing the game that was originally purchased at AAA price with a free to play one that also wasn't finished, with features promised to make the replacement easier to swallow just dropped.
By the time Microsoft came to buy them, I didn't care what happened to them anymore. Activision had already been business major enough, with their only credit being that they didn't immediately enshitify Blizzard when they acquired them.
Plz free Raven from the CoD mines, they deserve so much better.
Activision has prevented Game Pass from being seen as "not worth it" by many. It is helping Microsoft retain value.
Yeah, I have a sub atm while I work through some games. It's in a good place right now (compared to a couple of years ago), but I'll probably drop it in a month or two.
Game Pass' revenue grew by 5.7% in the year to June, which is below the internal target of 11%. Following the service's declining growth rate, it was dropped as a metric contributing to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's pay in 2023.
Rules for thee, not for me.
Maybe they should actually bother adding all their games. I'd love to play the old zombies maps or games like Prototype from gamepass.
I bet no devs are left to fix bugs and compile those old games to new platform, so those are abandonwares.
The games are already on PC, it can't be too difficult to add them to another store, can it?
I bet they have some internal policy to install some kind of drm / spyware so you don't keep games when your game pass expires or something and that requires development work. Corporate legal things.
From what I have seen the gamepass DRM often goes haywire with new games on PC. Can't imagine it being easy to integrate into nearly 20 year old games.
I would buy a new Prototype game. I love both games to pieces.
...and neither have gamepass and other game streaming services helped grow the industry gaming and propel it into the future.
This is an encircling manuever by massive corporations attempting to en-spotify the gaming industry and blow the bottom out of independent game developers being able to do anything of note without paying a toll to microsoft or google or some other corporation trying to induce centralization, collapse and catastrophic loss of revenue for the rest of the industry.
No shade at people who use and love gaming streaming services, the idea isn't bad, its just the strategic role these services are being used for is to carpet bomb the gaming industry until it is forced to play by whatever terms these massive corporations demand.
That is precisely why I don't subscribe to any of them. I like to own my games. That is also why I buy from gog most of the time, nowadays.
For game streaming itself, there's always going to be the latency issue that will keep a bunch of gamers away from ever using it. I never bothered even looking at the streaming options when I had game pass because of that.
GPU drivers have low latency modes for when the timing of a frame update means your current input will come a frame or two later, and a difference of 10ms in frame delivery time can be enough to call something a stuttery mess.
Now add network latency that is an order of magnitude higher. Streaming video and/or audio is fine because it can buffer enough to absorb typical latency jumps, but games can't buffer more than the upper bound of input latency, so that brief 1 second network hiccup is a horrible stutter where you can't even move.
Though at least game pass works more like Netflix in that you can just pick a game available and try it out if you have a sub. I don't get the appeal of the ones where you not only subscribe to the service but also need to buy the games you play at full price.
Add a free sub to wow with game pass and I might consider renewing
Seriously. Id sub immediately.
They won't, of course, because that'd cost them too much money.
But, still, it's a nice thought.
WoW is a subscription service now?
Not sure if this is a joke or not… WoW was always a subscription game-as-a-service.
Not a joke. Never played it. Didn't realize there were subscription games outside of iracing.
Oh that’s understandable. Most MMO games, at least in the past before the rise of F2P, had monthly subscriptions (often in addition to needing to buy the base game).
The base game and the extension once a year + the sub were the ticket. Pricy, but when you consider how many hours the typical player spends in game it's not that crazy.
Because the kinda of people that sub to GamePass aren’t the kinda of people that play CoD every year.
God damn corporations are gross.
Thank god people don't fall for this trap. Its so clear that once they have lured in enough fools, they gonna start raising prices.
I've had game pass ultimate since day 1. I love it. I have last time I checked played 127 games and 2k hours on Gamepass games last year.
Works for me.