Diablo Immortal

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Which is borderline click bait I suppose.

This is an interesting one to me, where Wyatt Chang’s infamous “do you guys not have phones?!” in that the game is exactly what was expected.

It is a well-polished action rpg, built specifically for smartphones with an underlying gatcha mechanic. There are hundreds of these games available, have been for years. I’ve played a fair chunk and always uninstalled when I hit the pay wall. And further, as with the genre, it’s primarily a reskin of an existing game and re-use of assets from the Diablo franchise. There is nothing special about this game, if you look at it from the context of mobile games in the genre before it.

Where people seem to be taking issue is that this is against everything that the Diablo franchise stood for, as a shining pinnacle of the genre with a 1 time purchase and hundreds of hours of content. Agreed, but that was in 2013. The last Starcraft 2 DLC was 2015. Everything launched since has been either with lootboxes or a monthly fee or game-store supported. Blizzard barely held the line with some level of integrity while Morhaime and Metzen were around and it all died when Kaplan left. In that regard, Diablo Immortal is again, exactly what Blizzard was going to launch and certainly makes you question their next Warcraft mobile game model.

Blizzard is a company being still being sued for harassments, with some insane allegations. They banned someone for supporting Hong Kong and fired everyone involved. They hired a woman to co-lead only to pay her less than her equal partner, in part leading her to quit in 3 months. They pulled every union-busting trick in the book against Raven. Hell, we’re not even at the 1 year mark of J Allen Brack quitting because of the non-stop rollercoaster.

I am not quite sure what people were expecting here. Diablo Immortal is exactly what I thought it was going to be. What did others?

Psychopathy Rewards

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Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.  ref.

There was a time where we didn’t like psychopaths. The neurological disorder was tightly bound to serial killers and the outer edges of society. And then we reached the 80s, where “Greed is good” and we actively started rewarding people with this trait. When the almighty dollar is king, then that’s what people cherish. The CEOs that most people know have these traits, and the most egregious of them all get rewarded handsomely for it. These people are generally quite intelligent and leverage this lack of empathy towards “success”.

I won’t hard on it for long, but Trump is clearly a psychopath. Boris Johnson. They’re not alone, there are a slew of elected officials who require this trait in order to twist the truth to meet their agenda. The gap between the neurological state and learned behaviors is an interesting one, which is why we have the adage the power tends to corrupt, and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. In 2022, this often manifests in a cult-like worship (think about how far that spans for a minute…)

Elon Musk offered to but out Twitter, and staked a $1b minimum transaction on the deal. Elon Musk doesn’t actually have a salary or income, he has Tesla shares. Shares he needs to sell/leverage to have money. He has so many shares, he needs to declare he will sell them to the SEC so that he doesn’t “tank” their value. If he wanted to see in a month, he says so now, then in a month it goes through. He only gets value based on the stock in a month, so it’s in his best interests to make that number go up.

Tangent – When Musk announced a return to work for 40hrs/week for salaried employees, it was clear he needed to cut operational costs, which he announced the next day. When you force a change like this, a company loses the “top quality” talent, as they generally have a better ability to find somewhere else to work and the flexibility to afford time without pay. It’s a fascinatingly bad management decision.

Unfortunately for almost everyone involved, Mush has poor behavioral controls and has managed to cut the value of Tesla by nearly 50% (aware that stocks in general have taken a beating, but that’s closer to 20%). His ability to buy Twitter is based on the value of Tesla stocks, which are now worth half of what it was before. And now he wants to back out of the Twitter deal. Which is simply fascinating to watch, just like a slow motion car crash.

The general idea is that Musk over-extended the offer, on an artificial value of his own stock boosted by his love for Twitter. The deal made very little sense to start. Since that time, Musk has continued to stay in the spotlight, relishing the ability to share his thoughts with the public. The more he did, the more time was allowed for the market to correct itself. He was overpaying then, and even more so now, with half the funds available to pay it. He’s going to do everything in his power to back out of the deal.

Is this enough for society to get a wake up call that the people we reward are the ones with the least useful traits for our survival? Quite unlikely. We’ll go for the person who takes advantage of people who are not us. There’s a term for that…

Love, Death & Robots – Season 3

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Not quite sure if spoilers apply to this or not, but hey, it’s back. It’s as short as Season 2, but the stories themselves are much more focused. I do get that Season 1 was pretty much Heavy Metal in visual form, but this particular season has much less fantasy and more sci-fi, which I consider an improvement. I think the season overall is the best of the bunch, and that more than a few episodes really make you question the ending/moral. That’s the beauty of sci-fi shorts after all.

On a per episode aspect:

Three Robots: Exist Strategy

This was the original short in season 1 and the robots are back with pretty much the same format as before. Slightly different take on what society is doing with regards to the climate crisis and how “castes” of society are trying to address it. I found it the weakest of the bunch.

Bad Travelling

This is pretty much a horror story set on a ship on the high seas. It’s more or less a continual set of bad events that people simply try to survive through, somewhat similar to the zombie/pirate story in Watchmen. The claustrophobia of a single ship really helps sell the horror aspect. There’s no sci-fi here, but the short is still quite good.

The Very Pulse of the Machine

This is pure sci-fi and could only work in this medium. Without spoiling much, the gradual decline (is it?) of the protagonist mental space makes you question if what you’re seeing is real or not. This one is a true highlight of the season.

Night of the Mini Dead

Zombie apocalypse filmed so that it looks like miniatures. The only point that seemed to matter to me what that this was but a speck of dust in the galactic scale. It looks cool mind you.

Kill Team Kill

This is a very violent take on a CIA robotics program gone rogue. I immediately shouted “that’s Shardik!” but sadly it wasn’t. Every season seems to have some set of soldiers fighting impossible odds, and then a horrible twist at the end. This is that episode.

Swarm

This one turned out way better than I expected. I find that the best sci-fi are the ones that make you question the context and imagine the world-building around the story. This is like a kid with their toes in the surf of an infinite ocean. I’d rank this higher if there wasn’t an absolutely useless sex scene.

Mason’s Rats

A comic short and a military organization of rats and a farmer’s attempts to get rid of them. This is a weak story overall because the ending isn’t earned. Looks cool and talks about the excess of AI robots, but it could have used another 5 minutes.

In Vaulted Halls Entombed

This is a weird one since it’s quite similar to Kill Team Kill… a solider squad it tasked with finding a thing, and that thing is killing them. The big bad here is an eldritch horror, and the ending is unnecessarily ambiguous. Cabin in the Woods did this story line better.

Jibaro

This is a stunning take on infatuation and obsession which lead to horrible loss. The main character is deaf, which means that the sounds shut off completely when he’s the focus, making for a really amazing sensory experience. This one is a real highlight of the season, and plays out like a fable of old.

Return to Worksite

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Without going into too much detail, I am involved in this particular topic at a rather large scale. For the past (now that I really think about it) 11 years, I’ve been trying to find a way to remove barriers to working remotely. This stemmed from a work stoppage incident when I was younger, where there was a picket line we could not cross and a rather substantial emergency that needed to be addressed. I got through the line, but lost so much time it was dumb. I figured if I could be a webmaster for a bunch of websites across North America, why couldn’t I do the same thing with my “real” job?

Security is the first, second, and third answer to that question. That issue has gotten worse over the years, and you all see it on smart phones that start showing you ads for things you’re talking about, clearly listening to you. But a Fort Knox defense can’t mean 10minutes of hoops to get access, it needs to find the right balance of user experience and on-going monitoring, with privacy controls. They need to securely connect with ease, and I need to make sure that it’s really them and that the connection itself “is clean”. Heck of a dance.

Fourth is scale. Remote access solutions are just like a security checkpoint at an airport. They need to let a TON of people through a key points of the day, and then have less use in other times. Peak load starts at 8AM and tapers off near 3PM, time zone specific. While there are plenty of solutions on the planet, few of them can operate at the scale I need and the security criteria as well.

Fifth is performance. This one is complicated because of “old stuff”. In the older “on-site” model, you were inside the perimeter and could generally move about with ease. If you wanted to get a box of paper from one office to your desk, not too bad. In a remote world, you’re trying to get that same box of paper from the same office, to your home desk. It needs to pass the security gates and then ship. What was a 2 minute job may take an hour now. And you can’t use any paper but that. For remote work to be useful, the boxes of paper need to be as close to the door as possible, to make it as fast as possible. Now imagine there are millions of offices with boxes. Hah!

Concerns

I’ve had an uphill battle against a culture that was adamant that people would not work without direct supervision, or that face to face meetings was the only way to manage people. While this may seem like it’s a challenge for the team under a manager, it’s actually the manager who is the problem. If that manager is spending their day looking over people’s shoulders, then the company is paying them to babysit.

Don’t get me wrong, there are people who need the daily human contact in the office to stay sane. I’ve met more than a few that need to have those 3 coffees a day break in order to be productive. There are people who simply cannot work remotely for physical reasons (like a tiny apartment, bad internet, noise, or the actual work is physical). Then there’s the serendipitous aspect of work, where conversations in the elevator/hall can trigger something new (the nature of this aspect makes it random).

Are teams more or less productive in or out of the office? The entire pandemic proved that the world can be extremely productive, if given the appropriate toolset.

Costs

Directly, it costs much less to have a remote workforce than an on-site one. The real property costs for office space are numbers you don’t want to imagine. You could give every employee $5,000 a year and it still would be a drop in the bucket.

And yet, there are costs to the company, especially if they own the building. Apple’s new HQ cost $5 billion dollars. That’s a lot, until you realize Apple profits per quarter are like $20 billion (they paid it off in 3 weeks). Corporate needs to be accountable, and the math on bad real property investments has not been sorted out yet.

Then there are the indirect costs to the community. Coffee and lunch shops all but closed up completely on my city’s downtown core. More of them opened in the suburbs where people now work. The people that were working in those locations now can’t, and need to travel to a new one. And tax revenues are higher in a downtown core, so the municipality is actually losing money. Heating/cooling/power/water costs are shifted as well, where peak demand is now spread to a larger area. We’ve still got a ways to go to figure this all out.

Benefits

All that to get here. Remote work has multiple benefits.

  • Working from anywhere at anytime means flexibility for the employee. Dentist appointment? Much easier to do that in the middle of the day and still get work done. Want to work from a patio, or next to a pool? Be in a scent-full zone? Avoid nosy cubicle neighbours? All of it works.
  • Ability to hire a more diverse workforce. I could hire folks only in my city, or I could hire people across the country/globe. Why have someone work til 8pm here when I can have someone work til 5pm on the West Coast and cover the same time? Assuming the person has a viable internet connection (not guaranteed for all, certainly), they are a candidate
  • It forces adoption of digital tools. I still remember my boss asking me to print out a wiki, and 2 weeks before the pandemic hit, someone was hired to print daily binders. The idea of HR taking a piece of paper in the mail and shipping it around for 3 months is dead. They get a digital signature and can process within a few minutes. Digital tools simply remove “wait times”. Those folks sitting in a chair 8 hours but doing 15 minutes of work are all but gone.
  • It doesn’t prevent people from meeting face to face or socializing, if they are geographically close. They can have a big team planning meeting and then head out to lunch.
  • It is a tool to attract talent. I’ll be super up front on this, the best talent doesn’t need to be sitting in a desk in an office building. The brightest folks are “on” 24/7 inside their head and giving them the tools to be creative is fundamental. They are in high demand, and while pay is a primary incentive, flexibility is the next one. Apple lost their AI exec because of this, and he found a job the next day. It’s an employee’s market… anyone who thinks otherwise is going to go out of business.

We’re in a cultural shift, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable as we’ve been in a “worksite” mindset for nearly 100 years. But it’s the future.

Just About Enough

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These last few years have felt like a non-stop dumpster fire. Just a barrage of events, some within control, others outside, that have been draining my sanity.

My city (and others) just got walloped by a massive storm this weekend, knocking out power to seemingly half the population, and efforts are still underway to restore it for quite a lot of people. Farms destroyed, roofs ripped off, it’s something that frankly should not happen in our area. We’ve had two 100-year-floods in the past 5 years. It’s a special type of person who isn’t concerned that things are getting worse and what we should do about it.

There’s a months-long war in Ukraine, held aloft through nearly 2 decades of enabling a dictator because of our global dependence on gas/oil. Decades of wars for oil, and it took Ukraine to be the proverbial straw here.

And for some reason abortion is a big deal in the States, yet it’s not a big deal that school shootings continue. The factory of dumb that comes from the US in general is just mind-numbing, where people are proud of their stupidity instead of ashamed of it. I mean, I can understand why folks are looking to the fringes when their elected officials don’t care about them, and their CEOs are bleeding them dry. The inmates are about to run the prison.

The whole Musk-Twitter-Tesla debacle is a really great popcorn show of billionaires gambling and thousands of people crossing their fingers as to where it lands. If that isn’t proof enough that billionaires should not exist, I don’t know what else would show it.

Can we maybe go through the summer months without a new level of emergency going on? Let people catch their breath and just hug a neighbor? I could certainly use some bits of good news.

Games as an Escape

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The news often sucks, and it’s a self-feeding depression cycle about how things are getting worse. In many respects they are, and in many others they are improving. r/mademesmile is a decent dose of good news on a daily basis, and I try to make efforts to avoid any 24 hour news channel.

Games are one of my escapes. There’s a slew of them, many of them season dependent, but gaming is the type of thing that seems to work in nearly any circumstance. Escapes may be the wrong wording though… Sure it has me focus on something other than my daily toils, which is a sort of evasion, but it also allows me to set and accomplish goals, which is full of that lovely dopamine kick we all need.

Over time my gaming habits have changed. I still do have the need to binge from time to time, but the larger commitments in my life prevent that from being any actual habit. Instead it feels more like there are burst of gaming, followed by lulls. Picking the right game, for the right time is the kicker. I’m not a monogamous gamer by any stretch… I need to try different things and experiences. I may have a few firm call backs that are a sort of comfort food (FF14, DSP are in that bucket), but there’s always that drive for something a bit different. Vampire Survivors came out of nowhere, and can scratch that 15 minute itch without much planning. Valheim certainly sucked all the air in the room for over a month. Lego Star Wars is right up there with about 50 hours played trying to get as many bricks as I can. Looking at my various game libraries, there’s still plenty to work my way through.

I will say that the games that are more experimental are the ones that seem to stick the most – puzzlers in particular. Return of the Obra Dinn, What Remains of Edith Finch, Disco Elysium, 12 Minutes … they are less (if at all) about a score, and more about a particular journey. Games that encourage experimentation, in the space that you effectively have no “wrong” answers, just different perspectives.

I do still enjoy the more braindead activities in games, where it’s just cruise control. Not much different than most stuff on TV I guess, or any MCU movie. There are times where I simply want to be entertained, and you’ll get something more like Lost Ark, Hollow Knight, or Hades. They may have a technical requirements, but once you get the rhythm down, the rest is just following through.

Which I suppose cycles back to the title itself and the desire for a game to have some sort of conclusion, an actual escape from its confines. I am not in the Achiever Bartle-type.. I could care less about trophies, or world rankings. I define a set of goals, work towards them, and then when they are attained, move on. With hundreds of quality games coming out all the time, it makes little sense to focus on one for a super long tail when I could just take on another awesome experience.\

Give me a problem and the tools to solve it. I’ll be a happy man.

Inflation vs. Scams

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These are rough numbers as the tax structures vary wildly.

Inflation in North America is at crazy highs right now, near the 7% mark. This has a massive impact on people with limited disposable income (read: middle class and lower), as they are now faced with making much harder decisions. They are likely making the same income, but the value of their dollar is much less… fuel in particular. Odds are if you live outside an urban centre, a truck is in the driveway. At $300 per tank, that really limits options. There are only a few possible counters to inflation that actually work at a larger scale and unfortunately, pay raises is not one of them (it is an outcome though!) The primary tool to manage inflation, in a neoliberal market, is borrowing rates.

Why? It’s because inflation is not caused by the bottom, but the top. Inflation is a market correction for an overvalued economy, which is grown from speculation. Speculation is funded through easy access to credit. Let me rephrase this a bit. Let’s say you took a $10k loan from the bank… you’d probably pay 5-7% interest because it isn’t backed and isn’t large enough. Let’s say you take a 2nd mortgage and get $500k instead, that rate is likely to be closer to 1.5%. You can do the same with other forms of equity, such as other investments. These lower rates were seen as stimulus after the crash of 2008.

So let’s pretend you borrow $500k at 1.5% in 2010 and invest it in the stock market. By 2020 you would have made a ~160% return. Invest in real estate, and the returns are similar (2020 – current you would have gained an additional 50%). Depending on where you are, you are taxed at a different rate on your gains… over here you pay on only 50% of those gains at a nominal rate – which effectively means you are taxed at ~20% on all the gains. To break even on the 1.5% borrowing rate, you need to make ~1.7% return. This is a machine to print money. And once you made that money, you can leverage it to make more money. The problem here is that access to the seed funding to invest at these levels is next to impossible to acquire for people without assets to leverage. It’s not possible for someone making minimum wage, trying to put food on the table, to get approved for any meaningful loan without crazy interest rates.

The mean wage during this same period increased by about 40%. If you worked and were not able to invest, then you were making less money than someone who didn’t work and solely invested. If you worked and started at 500K, you’d have gained ~600k (pre-tax) by the end. If you didn’t work and solely invested, you would have started with 500K and gained 1.3m (pre-tax) by the end. By investing once and never touching it, you would have gained twice as much as a worker. By doing nothing. That’s our version of capitalism.

Crypto is like this, except access is much easier to acquire. 1 stock of Apple is $145 today. You can buy any amount of crypto you want, it’s all broken into smaller pieces. Have 5$, you can buy crypto. Bitcoin only hit $1 in 2011. In 2020 it was worth nearly $30k. If somehow you had invested $500k (not technically possible, but the argument is the point) in 2010, buy 2020 you would have $15b dollars (Sep 2020 to Feb 2021 Bitcoin went from 8k to 55k). For a lot of people who have no concept of what investing is, and simply focus on the % returns, crypto seems like the simplest thing in the world.. it just prints money. Except the value of crypto is not linked to anything but the value of crypto… and therefore almost exclusively inflated and therefore extremely volatile to trends.

If by chance, you had 5k invested in crypto and you needed that money suddenly because of inflation pressures, then you would take that out to spend it. If enough people do this, then it deflates the value in the currency. In the stock market, the % of trades required to impact the market are massive, and there are balances to reduce the impacts (generally). It is really hard to have a run on the market. In crypto, a totally unregulated market, there are no such controls and runs are extremely common. Enough that the market has dropped ~40% value since Jan 2022 (hell, Luna lost 99% value in 24 hours). The stock market as comparison is down ~10%.

The larger problem space is that it may appear that people are playing the same game, the truth is simply that the rules are different. The value of crypto in particular is based on the last person who invested, making it effectively a giant ponzi scheme (as evident multiple times). The stock market is certainly bad, but there is something on the other end of it that is tangible.

Back to the original point… if you want to tackle inflation it’s not about pumping more money to people at the bottom… they don’t have disposable income in the first place. It’s about removing the amount of easy money entering the top, who are made up entirely of disposable income and are frankly gambling against a house that has been paying out at a crazy rate for nearly 40 years. They don’t care an ounce that gas costs triple… it could cost $2000 a tank and they wouldn’t know (they would from a profit perspective if they are running a business). The outcome of inflation being controlled is that the non-stop increased in costs are reigned in, which would then allow for incomes themselves to catch up.

There is no model that fixes this without changing the way the people who manage the majority of wealth are taxed. (Top 1% own ~40% of income, bottom 50% are 20% of the income. Top 1% = assets >$5m, annual income of >$500k). If you were in a hockey stadium with 20,000 people, 1% of those people would fit on a single articulated bus.

There are larger reforms that can help here… but the people who have benefited the most from the broken system are the ones running the system. Crypto was a great option to say “here’s an option for the plebs” (Poilievre in Canada said “...it can also let Canadians opt out of inflation, with the ability to opt in to cryptocurrencies.”) If you’re voting, and finances are of any interest, dig a bit. Soundbites are fun and all, but the actual decisions that make a difference… been a long time since that’s happened.

When the Parents Leave the Room

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Not gaming related, at all.

I love my kids, truly. They can drive me crazy at times, and I am more impressed than much else when that happens. Both are wildly curious and get an absolute joy of testing boundaries. Frankly, I wouldn’t expect less from them if they want to have a “successful” life – folks aren’t just going to hand them things after all. Their reaction to those boundaries is certainly different, in that one will find the sneakiest way around them, while the other will try to brute force their way through. As parents, we need to apply a different response to both approaches, which can be quite exhausting. But ultimately fulfilling (that’s the plan at least!)

If we are not present, then they have a sort of lord of the flies approach to getting things done, which effectively spirals down to baser instincts and emotional outbursts. It’s a bit like a game of one-upmanship, where one crazy stunt enables the next one to be a little bit crazier. It always ends poorly, and then we adults pick up the pieces. It’s arguably better now, as they’ve gotten older and have more tools available to them, but neither are teens yet, so there’s truckloads of maturity to go.

Why does this matter? Well, there’s a need of enablement for childish behaviour. We’ve all been at a restaurant with a kid acting up to a crazy degree. Normally we just brush it off, part of the age bit. There are times where you might speak up, either trying to help the (likely exhausted) parent, or just to set some additional boundaries. It’s ok to act out, it’s an emotional reaction to something. The response to that event is the important part, so that there’s some learning afterwards.

Where the wheels of the bus fall off is when adults are doing this, and the adults in charge encourage that behavior. In no sane place on this planet would people storming the capital, breaking doors, be considered “normal”. It shouldn’t be acceptable to scream obscenities at someone like Westboro Baptist Church does. Or to threaten/bomb/kill people. There are “rules” to ensure society works and we respect each other. That only works if everyone agrees and supports those rules. If a group decides those rules only apply to others and not themselves, then thankfully society has a term for that.

In the more moderate spaces, those folk get shipped into corners and ignored or excluded. That is a challenge with 24/7 propaganda news channels, and near impossible with our current iterations of social media. This can happen to the most sane person too, if you brainwash / gaslight them enough. We’ve all got enough stories of people stuck in some sort of conspiracy theory rabbit hole.

The US is likely to revert a 50 year old decision to enable support for abortions at the national level, and instead move it to the state level. (I have my views.) Some people don’t agree with this and have opted to protest outside the judges’ homes. In an orderly society this would be seen poorly and folks would be admonished and told to return home. But not in the US, where even killing people you disagree with is somehow acceptable if you can prove (now this is an interesting word) you feel threatened (to the broadest sense). It’s really quite spectacular from the outside, as there are certainly ripple effects across the globe. The US prime export is culture after all.

It’s a sad space, where even those trying to apply some level of sanity to events are simply shouted down. Further when folks are elected solely on their ability to make a scene. I get the frustration and the boiling point. Things are objectively worse for my kids generation than they are for my parents – across nearly every single imaginable metric. I’m not following how having more yelling somehow accomplishes anything to fix that problem, other than inciting more yelling and worse.

Perhaps there’s a chance that the adults have not all left the room and that there are people that actually want to help others. It’ll be an interesting ride until the adults come back into the room.

AAA Game Dev Math is Bonkers

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Somehow, Outriders hit 3.5m players at launch and has didn’t turn a profit in by Dec 31st…

I’m piling on the Square Enix mystery math tour here, but it’s frankly astounding at how poorly finances are managed in that company if millions of games are sold and it isn’t enough. A brand new IP… clearly competing against its own games (Marvel Avengers) in a looter/shooter genre is beyond baffling. It sheds some further light on why Square Enix sold off so many IPs last week… their financials are a mess.

I’ve been on the wrong side of a contract in the past, and in most of those cases its the small print that gets you in the end. There’s no word of lawyers in public, but one would have to assume that there are some interesting conversations being held in the backrooms. Not much different that Fallout: New Vegas missing the bonus payment by about 1% on Metacritic.

Stories like these make you wonder why anyone would want to be at a large dev studio, or try to “make a deal with the devil” to get over the hump. Maybe it’s just a parachute to get out of the grind? Some crazy hope that you are going to be that exception? Blind faith? Perhaps it’s simply the lesser of evils.

Games are a weird microcosm of other pieces. They are a massive entertainment industry, nearly $120b worldwide. Money makes for some interesting choices…

Acti-Blizz Numbers

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I’m on nearly 4 months since my last Blizzard post (the MSFT buyout), and I’m certainly not missing it! While I’m certainly on record for armchair designing WoW, the business portion is equally fascinating.

We’re at the saturation point of the pandemic, where the large spike of “hermits” has ended. People are going outside and spending less time in front of screens. This is a challenge as the pandemic itself stretched out the pipeline on any development. So there were more consumers eating away at products that were taking longer to generate material. Eventually, something has to give.

Blizzard in particular here has had troubles launching much during this timeframe… and obviously struggling as a company as a result. Between the last results and this one, WoW saw Eternity’s End come about, the announcement for the next expansion Dragonflight, and attempts to drive interest in Diablo Immortal beta in June (simultaneous PC launch, and ~4 years since it was announced).

The financials this quarter were not good. 2m less monthly users. 43% less revenue. And that’s compared to Q4 where nothing launched. Those are painful numbers. In the aggregate, they’ve managed to lose nearly 20% of their userbase this year alone, and about 40% across the last 4 years.

The future isn’t looking so bright either. Overwatch 2 was delayed, and what people have seen so far is very “meh” in terms of being more of an expansion than a sequel (which is a mountain in itself). Diablo 4 is nowhere to be seen (hopefully they are paying attention to what Lost Ark did well). Dragonflight doesn’t have a release date or pre-orders (typically, you can buy it 1yr ahead). I have a lot of fundamental design questions on that expansion…but others are better equipped at that.

Perhaps we’re nearing that turning point where AAA game development is simply no longer sustainable. Where development for the sake of numbers has run the course. Where the indie scene can show that passion and smaller teams can have more success – and that there’s the potential for a sustainable market.