The year 2020 begins for Blizzard with a lot of trouble. Warcraft 3 Reforged, the Overwatch League, and the new WoW-patch are blowing up in their faces. Our author Schuhmann says: Apparently, Blizzard’s priorities are somewhere else right now. That’s not a good sign, though.
This is currently the criticism of Blizzard: 2020 could hardly start worse for Blizzard. Wherever you look, there’s trouble in the so revered game studio:
Warcraft 3 Reforged has faced the wrath of fans. The game is being torn apart. The strategy game has obviously gone live months too early and has construction sites and gaps. On Metacritic, the game currently stands at 0.5 out of 10 points. The shitstorm has been raging for days.
The current WoW patch 8.3 seems unpolished and brings a lot of bugs, which is unusual for Blizzard and angers the fans. The Mythic Raiders are furious, because the bosses still need to be fixed while they are live, ruining their race for the World First Kill.
The Overwatch League is facing its probably most important season and almost all of the important casters have gone missing, partly because Blizzard allegedly does not want to pay enough. Moreover, major upheavals are on the horizon: The league is moving from Twitch to YouTube, and Blizzard is also introducing new banning rules for Overwatch. It’s a shame that the league’s visionary left in 2019, and that was right to Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite.
Unusually much stress for a company that usually operates calmly and decently.
Finance and Marketing people are said to be in charge at Blizzard
Where is this unrest coming from? According to several sources, a new, rough wind has been blowing at Blizzard for about 2 years.
Since Blizzard has not released a new game since 2016 (Overwatch) but incurs high costs, Activision Blizzard has gradually tightened the reins. Blizzard is said to be focusing more on efficiency, earning more money, and spending less, it is said.
As the “new strong man” within Blizzard, Armin Zerza, the Chief Operating Officer, is said to have been leading since October 2017. He is said to have brought many “marketing and finance people” to Blizzard and given them decision-making power, as Kotaku reported.
After the departure of Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, Activision’s influence over Blizzard is said to have increased. Their CEO Bobby Kotick is known as someone who wants to see a new Call of Duty every year, and not as someone who allows his developer enough time to finish games, “when it’s done.”
These are the consequences of the new course: As one of the first visible measures, the eSports of Heroes of the Storm has practically been eliminated. Apparently, this was necessary to ensure that BlizzCon 2019 could be a success: Only with additional staff could Diablo 4 be shown there.
There have been many layoffs in areas that do not directly concern game development, such as in quality assurance.
Some of the top people have left Blizzard, including chief Mike Morhaime, the main eSports people like Nate Nanzer, the head of the Overwatch League, and some top developers who have left more or less secretly. Particularly missed is the Hearthstone powerhouse Ben Brode.
Even though these layoffs and departures do not always directly affect the developer teams, the overall situation seems to have affected the morale of the workforce, as an insider report on Blizzard states.
This is important for Blizzard in 2020
What is important for Blizzard in 2020? Even if the year starts off rocky, the real directions for Blizzard will occur later in the year:
The WoW expansion Shadowlands is expected in autumn 2020: it needs to be really good. Because with an expansion, players return to the cyclically running MMORPG or they don’t. Here it needs to show whether WoW can still retain players besides Classic. After the weak 2018 expansion Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands must deliver.
The launch of Diablo Immortal is immensely important. The smartphone MMO is supposed to work in the “new growth markets” of China, India, and Brazil and open up new markets for Activision Blizzard, preferably bringing in millions of new players. Moreover, it is supposed to bring the existing core gamers in Europe and North America to mobile. Ultimately, Diablo Immortal should open the door for further mobile games from Blizzard, such as a WoW Mobile. That is supposed to be a game that was booed at BlizzCon 2018 – good luck.
And the Overwatch League must function in 2020, grow and send positive signals. High-profile investors have poured in double-digit million sums. Blizzard needs to ensure that the league runs and that Overwatch becomes a more attractive eSports game than it has been in recent years, where a boring meta and overloaded schedule hampered the league.
How are the problems and goals connected? When considering where the real priorities lie, it is easier to understand why something like “Warcraft 3 Reforged” has apparently been sidelined in Blizzard’s plans.
It seems that Blizzard’s focus and the attention of decision-makers are currently on things other than the remake of a beloved real-time strategy game from 2002.
This is not pleasant for fans who were looking forward to a nostalgia boost. Just as it is no consolation for WoW players that the WoW team’s focus seems to be fully on Shadowlands.
The only one of the three problems that Blizzard seems to be addressing sustainably is the Overwatch League with the new YouTube deal and a shift to “hero pools” to improve eSports. For WoW patch 8.3 and Reforged, Blizzard is in “fire-fighting” mode. This raises the question of why both went live the way they did.
With WoW Classic and the introduction of Diablo 4, 2019 actually ended on a good note for Blizzard that overshadowed events like the “Hong Kong” incident. It will remain to be seen whether these priorities will stand out later in the year and whether Blizzard has set its priorities right.
