Activision-Blizzard Megathread (now with more Microsoft Xbox )

Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
The vast majority of Blizzard's fans are PC gamers (as they had to be painfully reminded at Blizzcon 2018). Overwatch had the beginnings of a decent console audience... 6 years ago, they did. Blizzard has terribly managed the OW franchise. It would take years of consistently releasing good console games for Blizzard to build up a significant console fandom. Blizzard struggles to release anything, with nearly all of their games either stuck in maintenance mode or in development hell. I don't see Blizzard contributing to the Xbox console's userbase unless Microsoft starts intervening in how Blizzard is managed.
"Don't you guys have phones?" he asked as he ran the proverbial knife over his throat.
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
It would take years of consistently releasing good console games for Blizzard to build up a significant console fandom.

Not with the money Microsoft could through at them or the level of power Microsoft has over the XBox platform.

Microsoft could just decide that every person is gonna see Blizzards new shooter on their front page for like a month after it comes out. They could bundle it with the Series X. They could put a budget into it that no one could match.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
Based Diablo Immortal Social Media Manager.



Diablo Immortals' Weibou (A Chinese Social Media Application) Account Apparently Made a Reference to Winnie the Pooh and thus offended China's Glorious Dear Leader, Xi Jingping.

THE GAME IS NOW BANNED IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM! (or its release is temporarily delayed)
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
Blizzard devs love shitting on their customers on twitter and in interviews. Wouldn't surprise me if posting such a comment on their weibo account was deliberate and they thought they could actually get away with it.

We're talking about the company that banned a Hearthstone player for making a pro-Hong Kong statement.

Also, you can bet good $$$ that no Middle Eastern Activision Blizzard marketing channels made any pro-LGBT statements during pride month....

They usually know better than that.

Honestly? I'd almost bet on this being intentional. Not on the part of AB, on the part of the employee. Maybe it was a disgruntled marketing worker who didn't like AB and decided they were going to have a bad day. Maybe they got paid off by a competitor who offered them hundreds of thousands in untraceable bitcoin to take out AB as a competitor in China for a little bit. Maybe they just wanted to make the world burn, in a minor (but significant) way within their power.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
A bit of a funny.

Apparently Activision successfully fended off a lawsuit because the Plaintiffs Counsel didn't play enough Call of Duty.

Charlie Intel said:
The lawsuit involved a Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare character who primarily appeared in the game’s campaign by the name of Sean Brooks. Brooks Entertainment alleged the likeness between Sean Brooks and their character Shon Brooks went beyond just similarly sounding names.

They claimed that “Shon Brooks and Sean Brooks both had unlimited resources and missiles; they bring thieves to justice; they traveled to Mars, and both games had scripted game battle scenes take place in a high fashion couture shopping center mall.”

The Activision lawyers demonstrated, through the gameplay, that several of these claims were apparently factually misrepresented and the Judge stated the Plaintiffs counsel could've verified these facts by playing the actual game.


Then again that would've resulted in having to play more Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
 

Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
Well, there is a precedence for both players and NPC characters...

The Warrior, retroactively renamed as Prince Aidan (King Leoric's eldest and Prince Albrecht's older brother) made the dumbass decision of shoving Diablo's soulstone into his head, and he became possessed/the Dark Wanderer. He was eventually given a funeral by the Diablo II heroes in the Chaos Sanctuary by having his post-possession corpse thrown into the fires of Hell, after Diablo was defeated.

The Rogue, Moreina, came back unstable and full of mental anguish, and that resulted in her going "Yes, turning into an evil, blue-skinned necormantic babe under you, Mistress Andariel, sounds like a grand ol' idea!", corrupting her fellow rogues, and taking up the moniker of Blood Raven. She took an arrow to the knee head and died in the Monastery Graveyard, and she's likely in Hell right now.

The Sorcerer, Jazreth, went mad and either came to the conclusion he was Horazon reborn or was possessed by said Horazon, calling himself the Summoner. In the Arcane Sanctuary, he was killed by the Diablo II heroes and his soul/Horazon's soul was pulled down to Hell.

Adria was retroactively made evil in Diablo III (leading a cult pre-Tristram with Maghda), despite being just a curious, Gothic-looking witch in the first game. She pledged allegiance to Diablo, got knocked up by Possessed Aidan, and eventually gave birth to and betrayed her daughter, Leah. She ascended to demonhood before being killed.

Gillian was "saved" by Adria -- she went east with her, and ended up raising Leah. The pretty barmaid went nuts over time, ending up prematurely aging and in a mental asylum.

Wirt was killed. You steal his leg and gold. Little shit.

Griswold was turned into a zombie.

The rest of the Tristram villagefolk were murdered by demons. You find their corpses.

Cain survived 1 and 2 until dying in 3.

The Diablo II heroes and NPCs got better endings. Mostly.

Warriv ended up with constant bad-luck for over two two decades. On his desperate return to Tristram/New Tristram, he was killed by the Goatmen ravaging the countryside. You find his corpse and journal as a random encounter in Diablo 3.

Cassia, the Amazon, became the paranoid, new Amazon captain of her home islands: she has relentlessly trained every Amazon under her watch for a future demon invasion.

Nothing known about the Assassin.

The Barbarian was from Harrogath, which was destroyed when the Worldstone went kaboom and after it suffered from Baal's invasion, which likely killed a lot of his friends and family. Originally, the Barbarian in Diablo 3 was supposed to be the same as he in Diablo II, but this was dropped after they introduced male/female character options (because having the female character being the same as the male in 2 would've caused a little issue or two.

So, bitter, homeless, and a wanderer.

Nothing known about the Druid, but 4 and Immortal might expand on things.

The Necromancer, Xul, apparently took two apprentices: one of them, a male, is the one you mean in the desert of Act 2 in Diablo 3. He became a highly-revered master after II.

The other apprentice was a spoiled brat called Lethes: he and the heroes in Diablo Immortal kill her, after the crazy bitch wants to reshape the world with a shard of the Worldstone.

Nothing on the Paladin, but with numerous Orders being either corrupted, killed, or twisted into other forms (like the Templars and Crusaders), it's likely all his friends and family are gone or crazy.

Isendria, the Sorceress, was killed after she tried to help people with a drought. Her spell went awry, and it ended up killing a lot of people. An Assassin, tasked with keeping an eye on her because her superiors were paranoid old men, promptly struck. They fought, and she was eventually killed after a neck-and-neck battle. Given this is Diablo, it wouldn't surprise me if her killer was her comrade Assassin, from above.

She trained the (female) Wizard, Li Ming, who suspected something like this happened to her mentor.

Her ghost can be found in the Pandemonium Fortress in Reaper of Souls. She's basically begging for death at this point, as Malthael is... well, a complete dick who upturned the natural order of life and death.

And this all isn't counting everyone who was killed, possessed, risen from the dead as puppets, corrupted, or just outright damned through the series' quests and stories.

Sanctuary is a place that pretty much punishes the heroes as a last laugh, after they "win". Blizzard can be dicks like that. ;)
Adding onto this, more info has come to light:

The original Diablo developers expanded on Moreina: basically, she brought all these artifacts back from Tristram, and she wanted her fellow Rogues to know how to use them to protect themselves and Sanctuary.

Her Order was all for it, but they disagreed on the speed on which they were doing it. Some wanted to be cautious and research, while others wanted to go full on "let's use everything and anything", which Moreina was part of (due to her trauma in the Labyrinth).

Unfortunately, the whole "road to hell is paved with good intentions" thing came into play, and it was through this that Anadriel got a foothold in the Rogues, drove Moreina insane/corrupted her and the "expedient" faction via the artifacts, and allowed her to cause a civil war.

By the end of it, she became a puppet to the very powers she wanted to fight against/protect her fellow Rogues from.

The Assassin that killed the Sorceress is implied to be Natalya, seen in Diablo II act III, as an item set describes her leaving the Assassins and becoming a Demon Hunter for "redemption".

There's a lot of flavour lore that has her "moving North" after the party defeat Mephisto (presumably for Lord of Destruction), so knowing Blizzard being Blizzard, it's likely she's been retconned into being the Assassin Player Character (like how they mucked around with the canonical player commanders in Starcraft in Starcraft 2's lore, with Selendis being the Executor in Brood War and Artanis being the Executor in the original game canonically).

If there's any more canon info from Immortal, I don't know it.
 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
Activision makes more then half of its sales from mobile phone gaming according to financial data from its last quarter, thus meaning mobile gaming is making them more money then PC and Console gaming sales combined.

Part of the reason seems to be that while mobile revenue is steadily rising thanks to the acquisition of mobile gaming companies and the release of Diablo Immortal console sales have been halved from last year as well. Diablo Immortal has also helped staunch the once steady drop of active monthly Blizzard users.

 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
It also doesn't help that they don't release many new games anymore. The last new Blizzard was Overwatch in 2016. Otherwise, you're looking at rereleases of old games that many Blizzard fans already had, like Starcraft 1, and don't hold much appeal with the kids of today. And the D2 and WC3 rereleases had bad word of mouth. And for Activision, they have Call of Duty, which has been a known quantity for over a decade at this point. You're either into it or you're not.

This does seem to be an overall trend with big gaming companies. Square Enix puts out less and less actual games and is kept afloat more and more by mobile games. Same with SEGA and Konami.
 
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Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
In an ongoing Brazilian Court Case where Microsoft is attempting to justify its acquisition of Blizzactivision isn't a monopoly, they shamefully were compelled to admit what everyone pretty much already knew, that the Sony Playstation 4 outsold the XBone about twice over.

 

Val the Moofia Boss

Well-known member
Are the console wars still a thing? It feels like people have just accepted that Microsoft has a general ecosystem of games that you can access either on PC, a console, or through some service. Sony has moviegame exclusives and downgraded ports of whatever new AAA game is coming out. And Switch lets you play quirky Japanese games.
 

Zachowon

The Army Life for me! The POG life for me!
Founder
Yes because Microsoft has the better business model and Playstation fans complain when Microsoft does something good
 

TheRejectionist

TheRejectionist
Are the console wars still a thing? It feels like people have just accepted that Microsoft has a general ecosystem of games that you can access either on PC, a console, or through some service. Sony has moviegame exclusives and downgraded ports of whatever new AAA game is coming out. And Switch lets you play quirky Japanese games.

PS5 has shit selection and barely sells since the China coof because they made the consoles there.

By the way :



The new employee seems to use that shitstain of "work" as an Instagram-Twitter substitute or...whatever other alternatives there are.

 

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
By the way :



The new employee seems to use that shitstain of "work" as an Instagram-Twitter substitute or...whatever other alternatives there are.



She looks to be doubly qualified for the job.
 

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